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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-25T00:46:20+00:00

I am trying to use lxml.html for writing a cleanup routine to remove empty

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I am trying to use lxml.html for writing a cleanup routine to remove
empty DIV elements having no content. During the debugging I noticed that
a standard tostring() -> fromstring() iteration modifies my HTML.
Firstly it removes the outer body tag and secondly it changes the DIV structure.

Why?

(Pdb) from lxml.html import fromstring, tostring
(Pdb) print html

<body>
<div></div>
<p>hello world</p>
<div>   </div>
<p><div> </div></p>
</body>

(Pdb) print tostring(fromstring(html))
<div>
<div></div>
<p>hello world</p>
<div>   </div>
<p></p><div> </div>
</div>
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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    That’s correct. While your example is well-formed, it is not valid html so lxml tries to correct it to the best of its ability. In particular the div element can’t be nested inside p elements and the root tag cannot be body. Use the etree module instead:

    from lxml.etree import fromstring, tostring
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