Pylint Error Message: "E1101: Module 'lxml.etree' has no 'strip_tags' member'"

Question

I am experimenting with lxml and python for the first time for a personal project, and I am attempting to strip tags from a bit of source code using etree.strip_tags().

For some reason, I keep getting the error message: "E1101: Module 'lxml.etree' has no 'strip_tags' member'".

I'm not sure why this is happening.

Here's the relevant portion of my code:

from lxml import etree

...

DOC = etree.strip_tags(DOC_URL, 'html')
print DOC

Any ideas?

Thanks.

Answer 1

The reason for this is that pylint by default only trusts C extensions from the standard library and will ignore those that aren't.

As lxml isn't part of stdlib, you have to whitelist it manually. To do this, navigate to the directory of your project in a terminal, and generate an rcfile for pylint:

$ pylint --generate-rcfile > .pylintrc

Then, open that file and add lxml to the whitelist like so:

extension-pkg-whitelist=lxml

After that, all E1101 errors regarding lxml should vanish.

More details in this answer.