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; 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.
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