lxml

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)

Maybe this should be obvious, but it wasn't to me. I've got an XML document and an XSLT stylesheet. But that stylesheet just produces text, not XML; it is essentially a template for an e-mail. So I was extending OIE's transformAction for performing XSLT transforms that produce other than XML... but the documentation is a bit thin and every example is XML results. The trick is pretty simple, just

unicode(result)

and make sure [of course] that you have