etree

Using lxml's etree to iteratively parse an XML document and I wanted to drop a specific element from the stream...

        for event, element in etree.iterparse(self.rfile, events=("end",)):
            if (event == 'end') and (element.tag == 'row'):
                self.wfile.write(etree.tostring(element))
            elif (event == 'end') and (element.tag == name_of_element_to_drop):
                element.getparent().remove(element) # drop element

The secret sauce is: element.getparent().remove(element)