Python Library Reference
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13.7.1 DOM objects

The definition of the DOM API for Python is given as part of the xml.dom module documentation. This section lists the differences between the API and xml.dom.minidom.

unlink()

Break internal references within the DOM so that it will be garbage collected on versions of Python without cyclic GC. Even when cyclic GC is available, using this can make large amounts of memory available sooner, so calling this on DOM objects as soon as they are no longer needed is good practice. This only needs to be called on the Document object, but may be called on child nodes to discard children of that node.

writexml(writer)

Write XML to the writer object. The writer should have a write() method which matches that of the file object interface.

toxml()

Return the XML that the DOM represents as a string.

The following standard DOM methods have special considerations with xml.dom.minidom:

cloneNode(deep)

Although this method was present in the version of xml.dom.minidom packaged with Python 2.0, it was seriously broken. This has been corrected for subsequent releases.