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Asked: 2026-05-16T20:01:46+00:00

I just learned Prototype for Javascript. It’s super convenient: using the $ shortcut, accessing

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I just learned Prototype for Javascript. It’s super convenient: using the $ shortcut, accessing xml elements is not painful any more!

The question: is there a Prototype-like extension for Python?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Python has lxml which has the xpath method wherein you could use xpath expressions to select elements. As I understand it, $ in prototype searches and returns an element that has a particular id, in which case could be translated in xpath to *[@id=<someid>] like so:

    >>> import lxml.etree
>>> tree = lxml.etree.XML("<root><a id='1'/><b id='2'/></root>")
>>> tree.xpath("*[@id=1]")
[<Element a at c3bc30>]
>>> lxml.etree.tostring(tree.xpath("*[@id=1]")[0])
'<a id="1"/>'

    I think the Python standard library includes support for a subset of xpath in ElementTree too so you might be able to implement that there somehow if you do not wish to install lxml (which isn’t included in stdlib)…

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