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Asked: 2026-05-30T23:08:44+00:00

I’m trying to find some nodes in an element tree, but this seems to

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I’m trying to find some nodes in an element tree, but this seems to work differently depending on which implementation I use for parsing. That doesn’t seem to be consistent with the documentation. Am I missing something?

In [52]: ElementTree.fromstring('<html><x /></html>').find('.//x')
Out[52]: <Element 'x' at 0x3008c10>

but:

In [59]: type(html5lib.parse('<html><x /></html>', treebuilder='lxml').find('.//x'))
Out[59]: <type 'NoneType'>

I’ve tried also html5lib with ElementTree, but that doesn’t even seem to run parsing that would comply with documentation:

In [72]: parser = html5lib.HTMLParser(tree=html5lib.treebuilders.getTreeBuilder('etree', cElementTree))

In [73]: type(parser.parse('<html><x /></html>'))
Out[73]: <type 'NoneType'>

So how do I solve this? I can’t continue using ElementTree directly since it doesn’t parse some broken html.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    xpath() seems to work:

    >>> doc = html5lib.parse('<!doctype html><html><x /></html>', treebuilder='lxml')

>>> doc.xpath('.//*')
    [<Element {http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml}head at 0x102c04a50>,
 <Element {http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml}body at 0x102c04aa0>,
 <Element {http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml}x at 0x102c04af0>]

>>> doc.xpath('.//html:x', namespaces={'html':'http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml'})
    [<Element {http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml}x at 0x102c04af0>]

    It’s rather strange, however, that html5lib assignes XHTML namespace to plain HTML.

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