# Lxml

The [lxml](http://lxml.de/) XML toolkit is a Pythonic binding for the
C libraries libxml2 and libxslt. It is used by any of our Python tools
that either digest or output xml or html data. It is recommended that
you install lxml prior to using any of our Python tools or else
unexpected behavior may occur.

## Installing lxml 

There are two big obstacles to installing lxml on a Mac. First, the Mac
standard libxml2 is often woefully out of date (at least up to 10.7;
10.8 is far better.) Therefore, in order to get a good version of
libxml2, the creators of lxml built in a way to build a static library
of libxml2 into your compilation. Unfortunately, the latest version of
libxml2 at this time of writing (2.9.0) has a bug, preventing usual
tools like \"pip\" from working. (If 2.9.1 is ever released, then
`STATIC_DEPS=true pip install lxml` will work. If you need `sudo`,
remember to put it between `sudo` and `pip`).

1.  Download The latest version of lxml from PyPi:
    <http://pypi.python.org/pypi/lxml>
2.  Untar it, `cd` to the new folder, and execute
    `python setup.py build --static-deps --libxml2-version=2.8.0`. You
    may need `sudo` permissions, depending on your setup.