I've been building a scaffolding library for sqlalchemy using lxml and formalchemy, and I'm having a hard time getting them to play nicely. specifically, formalchemy.FieldSet.render() returns a fragment of html with no root tag, and I cannot seem to figure out how to get lxml to parse it into something that can be included into an element tree:
what I get:
>>> lxml.etree.fromstring(formalchemy.FieldSet(toyschema.User(), session).render())
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
File "lxml.etree.pyx", line 2743, in lxml.etree.fromstring (src/lxml/lxml.etree.c:52665)
File "parser.pxi", line 1573, in lxml.etree._parseMemoryDocument (src/lxml/lxml.etree.c:79932)
File "parser.pxi", line 1445, in lxml.etree._parseDoc (src/lxml/lxml.etree.c:78709)
File "parser.pxi", line 920, in lxml.etree._BaseParser._parseUnicodeDoc (src/lxml/lxml.etree.c:75083)
File "parser.pxi", line 564, in lxml.etree._ParserContext._handleParseResultDoc (src/lxml/lxml.etree.c:71739)
File "parser.pxi", line 645, in lxml.etree._handleParseResult (src/lxml/lxml.etree.c:72614)
File "parser.pxi", line 585, in lxml.etree._raiseParseError (src/lxml/lxml.etree.c:71955)
lxml.etree.XMLSyntaxError: Extra content at the end of the document, line 8, column 1
what I Want:
>>> ?????(formalchemy.FieldSet(toyschema.User(), session).render())
[<Element div at 0x1e48e10>, <Element script at 0x1e48cd0>, <Element div at 0x1e48730>, <Element div at 0x1ea1e60>]
My Crude work-around:
>>> lxml.etree.fromstring('<root>%s</root>' % formalchemy.FieldSet(toyschema.User(), session).render()).getchildren()
[<Element div at 0x1e48e10>, <Element script at 0x1e48cd0>, <Element div at 0x1e48730>, <Element div at 0x1ea1e60>]
For parsing HTML you want to use lxml.html, not lxml.etree.
If you want a list of fragments instead of wrapping them in a div you can use fragments_fromstring(string) as described here.