Element

This class represents a structured document element consisting of a name, a sorted list of attributes, and a collection of child nodes. It provides functionality for appending content with automatic whitespace normalization, finalizing the element tree, and performing deep equality comparisons. Additionally, the class supports containment checks and occurrence counting for both text content and nested element structures.

Attributes

Attribute	Type	Description
name	string	The tag name of the element used for identification and string representation.
attributes	list	A sorted list of key-value pairs representing the element's HTML or XML attributes.
children	list = []	A list containing nested Element objects or strings representing the inner content of the element.

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Constructor

Signature

def Element(
    name: string,
    attributes: iterable
)

Parameters

Name	Type	Description
name	string	The name of the element.
attributes	iterable	A collection of attribute key-value pairs to be sorted and stored.

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Methods

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append()

@classmethod
def append(
    element: [Union](../../contrib/gis/db/models/functions/union.md?sid=django_contrib_gis_db_models_functions_union)[[Element](element.md?sid=django_test_html_element), str]
) - > null

Adds a child element or text string to this element, normalizing whitespace and merging adjacent text nodes.

Parameters

Name	Type	Description
element	[Union](../../contrib/gis/db/models/functions/union.md?sid=django_contrib_gis_db_models_functions_union)[[Element](element.md?sid=django_test_html_element), str]	The child element or text content to be added to the internal children list.

Returns

Type	Description
null	Nothing

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finalize()

@classmethod
def finalize() - > null

Recursively cleans up the element tree by stripping trailing whitespace from text nodes and removing empty text children.

Returns

Type	Description
null	Nothing

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count()

@classmethod
def count(
    element: [Union](../../contrib/gis/db/models/functions/union.md?sid=django_contrib_gis_db_models_functions_union)[[Element](element.md?sid=django_test_html_element), str]
) - > int

Calculates the total number of times a specific element or text string appears within this element's hierarchy.

Parameters

Name	Type	Description
element	[Union](../../contrib/gis/db/models/functions/union.md?sid=django_contrib_gis_db_models_functions_union)[[Element](element.md?sid=django_test_html_element), str]	The target element or text string to be counted.

Returns

Type	Description
int	The total count of matching elements or text occurrences.

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