Carl Banks wrote: >> Why isn't et.parse the only way to do this? Why have XML or fromstring >> at all? > > Because Fredrick Lundh wanted it that way. Unlike most Python > libraries ElementTree is under the control of one person, which means > it was not designed or vetted by the community, which means it would > tend to have some interface quirks.
Just for the record: Fredrik doesn't actually consider it a design "quirk". He argues that it's designed for different use cases. While parse() parses a file, which normally contains a complete document (represented in ET as an ElementTree object), fromstring() and especially the 'literal wrapper' XML() are made for parsing strings, which (most?) often only contain XML fragments. With a fragment, you normally want to continue doing things like inserting it into another tree, so you need the top-level element in almost all cases. Stefan -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
