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When it comes to generating XML data in Python, there are two libraries I often see recommended: lxml and ElementTree
From what I can tell, the two libraries are very similar to each other. They both seem to have similar module names, usage guidelines, and functionality. Even the import statements are fairly similar.
# Importing lxml and ElementTree import lxml.etree import xml.etree.ElementTree What are the differences between the lxml and ElementTree libraries for Python?
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lxml is a Python library which allows for easy handling of XML and HTML files, and can also be used for web scraping. There are a lot of off-the-shelf XML parsers out there, but for better results, developers sometimes prefer to write their own XML and HTML parsers. This is when the lxml library comes to play.
The cElementTree module is a C implementation of the ElementTree API, optimized for fast parsing and low memory use. On typical documents, cElementTree is 15-20 times faster than the Python version of ElementTree, and uses 2-5 times less memory.
In lxml. objectify, this directly translates to enforcing a specific object tree, i.e. expected object attributes are ensured to be there and to have the expected type. This can easily be achieved through XML Schema validation at parse time.
ElementTree comes built-in with the Python standard library which includes other data modules types such as json and csv. This means the module ships with each installation of Python. For most normal XML operations including building document trees and simple searching and parsing of element attributes and node values, even namespaces, ElementTree is a reliable handler.
Lxml is a third-party module that requires installation. In many ways lxml actually extends ElementTree as most operations in the built-in module are available. Chief among this extension is that lxml supports both XPath 1.0 and XSLT 1.0. Additionally, lxml can parse HTML documents that are not XML compliant and hence is used for web-scraping operations and even as the parser in BeautifulSoup and engine in Pandas, pandas.read_html(). Other useful, common features of lxml include pretty_print output, objectify, and sax support. Of course too as a third-party module, versions with additional features are readily accessible compared to the standard library.
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