Is there good documentation and community support available for lxml?

Yes, lxml has both good documentation and community support available.

Documentation

The primary source of lxml documentation is its official website:

• Official documentation: lxml.de

The official documentation of lxml is comprehensive and includes tutorials, API references, and FAQs. It covers both basic and advanced topics such as parsing XML/HTML, XPath and XSLT usage, namespace handling, and more. The documentation also provides examples and guidance on how to perform common tasks with lxml.

Community Support

• Stack Overflow: A large number of questions tagged with lxml can be found on Stack Overflow, making it a great place to seek help for specific issues or to learn from previously solved problems. The lxml community on this platform is quite active, and many experienced users provide helpful answers.

Link: Stack Overflow - lxml

• Mailing List: lxml has a mailing list that is used by its users and developers for discussions, questions, and community support.

Link: lxml Mailing List

• GitHub: The source code of lxml is hosted on GitHub, where you can report issues, contribute to the code, and view the change history.

Link: lxml on GitHub

• IRC: There used to be an IRC channel (#lxml on Freenode) for real-time chat and discussion. However, with the changes on the Freenode network, the community might have moved to other platforms like Libera Chat or Discord. Check the latest from the official sources or community forums for current details.

Other Resources

• PyPI: The Python Package Index (PyPI) page for lxml provides information about the package, including installation instructions, release history, and statistics.

Link: lxml on PyPI

• Conferences and Meetups: Presentations, tutorials, and workshops related to lxml are often part of Python and open-source conferences, as well as local meetups.

• Books and Online Courses: There are numerous books and online courses that cover Python's XML processing, which include sections on lxml.

Installation

lxml can be easily installed using pip, the package installer for Python:

pip install lxml

Basic Usage Example

Here is a simple example of how to use lxml in Python to parse an XML string:

from lxml import etree

xml_data = """
<root>
  <child1>Content 1</child1>
  <child2>Content 2</child2>
</root>
"""

tree = etree.fromstring(xml_data)
print(tree.find('child1').text)  # Output: Content 1

Keep in mind that while lxml is especially popular in the Python community, the principles of XML and HTML parsing are similar across many languages, and there are equivalent libraries in other languages with their own documentation and communities.