List can not be serialized error when using Xpath with lxml etree

Question

I am trying to search for a string within an XML document, and then print out the entire element, or elements, that contain that string. This is my code so far: ``` post = open('postf.txt', 'r') postf = str(post.read()) root = etree.fromstring(postf) e = root.xpath('//article[contains(text(), "stuff")]') print etree.tostring(e, pretty_print=True) ``` This is the XML that is being searched from postf.txt ```

More testing debug [done] Hello and stuff

``` And finally, this is my error: ``` File "cliassis-1.2.py", line 107, in command print etree.tostring(e, pretty_print=True) File "lxml.etree.pyx", line 3165, in lxml.etree.tostring (src\lxml\lxml.etree.c:69414) TypeError: Type 'list' cannot be serialized. ``` What I want this to do, is search for all elements containing the string I searched for, and then print out the tags. So if I have test and stuff, and I search for 'test', I want it to pr…

Accepted Answer

```
articles = root.xpath('//article[contains(text(), "stuff")]')

for article in articles:
    print etree.tostring(article, pretty_print=True)
```

`root.xpath` returns a Python list. So `e` is a list. `etree.tostring` converts lxml `_Elements` to strings; it does not convert lists of `_Elements` to strings. So use a `for-loop` to print the `_Elements` inside the list as strings.

List can not be serialized error when using Xpath with lxml etree

Solution

Problem