lxml/lxml

Health v2 · maintenance only

Adoption not part of the score

3067 stars · 657 forks observed · 2026-10-21

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-30, confidence not recorded

lxml is a fast, feature-rich Python library for processing XML and HTML, built on the C libraries libxml2 and libxslt. It provides an ElementTree-compatible API plus XPath, XSLT, schema validation (DTD, RelaxNG, XMLSchema, Schematron), CSS selectors, and HTML parsing utilities.

Use cases

• parse xml files in python
• scrape html pages with xpath
• validate xml against an xsd schema
• transform xml with xslt
• extract data from html using css selectors
• generate xml documents programmatically
• parse malformed html with a lenient parser

When to choose

• you need fast, memory-efficient XML/HTML parsing in Python
• you need XPath, XSLT, or schema validation support
• you want an ElementTree-compatible API with more features
• you are scraping or cleaning real-world HTML

When to avoid

• you only need simple XML parsing and want zero C dependencies (use stdlib ElementTree)
• you are parsing JSON or non-markup data formats
• you need a pure-Python solution for restricted environments

Facets

library · maturity stable

parser serialization web-scraping developer-tools parsers web-development developer-tools files python cross-platform xml html xpath xslt libxml2 cssselect schema-validation

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