ElementTree should parse string and file in the same way

[Stefan Behnel]

Peter Pei wrote:
> One bad design about elementtree is that it has different ways parsing a
> string and a file, even worse they return different objects:
> 1) When you parse a file, you can simply call parse, which returns a
> elementtree, on which you can then apply xpath;

ElementTree doesn't support XPath. In case you mean the simpler ElementPath
language that is supported by the find*() methods, I do not see a reason why
you can't use it on elements.


> 2) To parse a string (xml section), you can call XML or fromstring, but
> both return element instead of elementtree. This alone is bad. To make
> it worse, you have to create an elementtree from this element before you
> can utilize xpath.

a) how hard is it to write a wrapper function around fromstring() that wraps
the result Element in an ElementTree object and returns it?

b) the same as above applies: I can't see the problem you are talking about.

Stefan