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Lxml: cssselect (): AttributeError: object 'lxml.etree._Element' does not have the attribute 'cssselect'

Can someone explain why the first call works root.cssselect()and the second one fails?

from lxml.html import fromstring
from lxml import etree

html='<html><a href="http://example.com">example</a></html'
root = fromstring(html)
print 'via fromstring', repr(root) # via fromstring <Element html at 0x...>
print root.cssselect("a")

root2 = etree.HTML(html)
print 'via etree.HTML()', repr(root2) # via etree.HTML() <Element html at 0x...>
root2.cssselect("a") # --> Exception

I get:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/home/foo_eins_d/src/foo.py", line 11, in <module>
    root2.cssselect("a")
AttributeError: 'lxml.etree._Element' object has no attribute 'cssselect'

Version: lxml==3.4.4

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1 answer

The difference is in the type of item. Example -

In [12]: root = etree.HTML(html)

In [13]: root = fromstring(html)

In [14]: root2 = etree.HTML(html)

In [15]: type(root)
Out[15]: lxml.html.HtmlElement

In [16]: type(root2)
Out[16]: lxml.etree._Element

lxml.html.HTMLElementhas a method cssselect(). It is also HTMLElementa subclass etree._Element.

But lxml.etree._Elementdoes not have this method.

If you want to parse html you should use lxml.html.

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