Changes

Every time I thought I’d got it made

It seemed the taste was not so sweet

The listed updates resemble rather a Best Of than a full record of changes. Intentionally.

0.5 (2025-01-01)

This iteration took quiet long to complete as it presumably solved the hardest problem on the way to shed off the essential dependency on lxml, also resulting in human-friendly serializations that achieve unprecedented clarity. The library’s robustness is now proven with integration tests that are verified against eleven diverse TEI encoded corpora that sum up to more than 360k documents with a total volume of 3.33 GB.

News

  • delb is now autonomously serializing contents, the Serialization chapter details current capabilities and interfaces.

  • The HTML documentation received a big revision for pleasant discovery and reading.

  • Methods that add nodes to a tree now return the added concrete nodes.

  • The new delb.compare_trees() is available to compare nested contents.

  • ⚠️ To align with Python standard behaviour, accessing a non-existing attribute with subscript notation now raises a KeyError.

  • ⚠️ The use of namespace declarations (to prefixes) that were used in a parsed source stream is deprecated. Notably queries will not use them as fallback when invoked without the namespaces argument. Instead they will likely use the called-on node’s namespace as default namespace.

  • ⚠️ delb.ParserOptions.collapse_whitespace was renamed to delb.ParserOptions.reduce_whitespace, as there is now delb.Document.reduce_whitespace() to reflect that they also trim excessive whitespace.

  • ⚠️ The Xpath evaluation expressions of absolute paths on the child axis in the first location step is fixed. Consider to double check your usages.

  • Comparing TagNode instances is now de facto an identity check. The previous behaviour can be achieved by comparing TagNode.universal_name and TagNode.attributes.

  • ⚠️ delb.Document.head_nodes was renamed to delb.Document.prologue, delb.Document.tail_nodes to delb.Document.epilogue.

  • ⚠️ delb.get_traverser() now only accepts keyword arguments.

  • ⚠️ Support for Python 3.7 was removed.

  • Support for Python 3.12 and 3.13 was added.

  • ⚠️ The _delb.plugins.core_loaders.etree_loader() is marked as deprecated.

Previously deprecated contents have been removed.

0.4 (2022-11-02)

News

  • delb now uses its own XPath implementation, please investigate _delb.xpath for details.

  • ⚠️ Many of the nodes’ methods that relate to relative nodes have been renamed. Watch out for DeprecationWarnings!

  • ⚠️ The method delb.NodeBase.iterate_descendants() is added as a replacement for the former delb.NodeBase.child_nodes() invoked with the now deprecated argument recurse.

  • ⚠️ The https-loader extension is now required for loading documents via plain and secured HTTP connections.

  • Under the hood httpx is now employed as HTTP/S client.

  • ⚠️ The contributed loader for FTP connections is marked as deprecated.

  • ⚠️ The parser argument to delb.Document and delb.TagNode.parse() is deprecated and replaced by parser_options.

  • ⚠️ delb.Document.xslt() is marked as deprecated.

  • ⚠️ Evoked exceptions changed in various places.

  • ⚠️ Document mixin extensions are now facilitated by subclassing _delb.plugins.DocumentMixinBase. It replaces _delb.plugins.DocumentExtensionHooks and _delb.plugins.PluginManager.register_document_mixin() without a backward-compatible mechanic.

  • Support for the very good Python 3.10 and the even better 3.11 is added.

  • The code repository is now part of an umbrella namespace for related projects: https://github.com/delb-xml/

  • A CITATION.cff is available in the repository and shipped with source distributions for researchers that are citing their employed software.

0.3 (2022-01-31)

News

  • Adds the delb.TagNode.fetch_or_create_by_xpath() method.

    • ⚠️Because of that a pre-mature parser of XPath expressions has been implemented and you can expect some expressions to cause failures, e.g. with functions that take more than one argument.

  • Subclasses of delb.Document can claim to be the default class based on the evaluation of a document’s content and configuration by implementing __class_test__.

  • ⚠️ _delb.plugins.PluginManager._register_document_extension() is renamed to _delb.plugins.PluginManager._register_document_mixin().

  • ⚠️ _delb.plugins.DocumentExtensionHooks() is renamed to _delb.plugins.DocumentMixinHooks().

  • ⚠️ _delb.plugins.DocumentMixinHooks._init_config() is now a classmethod() and now also takes the config namespace as first argument.

  • Adds delb.Document.collapse_whitespace() and the initialization option for delb.Document instances with the same name.

  • Adds the retain_child_nodes argument to delb.NodeBase.detach().

  • Adds the delb.NodeBase.last_descendant property.

  • Adds the delb.TagNode.id property.

  • Adds the delb.TagNode.parse() method.

  • ⚠️ TagNode.qualified_name() is marked deprecated and the same property is now available as TagNode.universal_name().

  • Adds support for Python 3.9 & 3.10.

  • ⚠️ Drops support for Python 3.6

  • Uses GitHub actions for CI checks.

Fixes

0.2 (2020-07-26)

News

  • Adds a logo. Gracious thanks to sm!

  • Adds plugin mechanics. Graciae ad infinitum, TC!

  • CSS and XPath query results are wrapped in delb.QueryResults.

  • Adds delb.Document.head_nodes and delb.Document.tail_nodes that allow access to the siblings of a root node.

  • Adds the delb.Document.source_url property.

  • Adds delb.get_traverser() and two traverser implementations that yield nodes related to a root node according to their defined order.

  • Document loaders report back the reason why they would or could not load a document from the given object.

  • Various documentation improvements, including table of contents for class members.

0.1.2 (2019-09-14)

There’s nothing super-exciting to report here. It’s just getting better.

0.1.1 (2019-08-15)

This was quiet boring, it serves updated dependencies for what it’s worth.

0.1 (2019-05-26)

The initial release with a set and sound data model and API.