The type of the Expat parser is referred everywhere as xmlparser, although no anchor for this reference is defined. But this type is actually exposed in the pyexpat (public API is xml.parsers.expat) module as XMLParserType since 2000 (4ba298c). The class name is xmlparser.

>>> import xml.parsers.expat
>>> xml.parsers.expat.__name__
'xml.parsers.expat'
>>> xml.parsers.expat.XMLParserType
<class 'pyexpat.xmlparser'>
>>> xml.parsers.expat.XMLParserType.__name__
'xmlparser'
>>> xml.parsers.expat.XMLParserType.__qualname__
'xmlparser'
>>> xml.parsers.expat.XMLParserType.__module__
'pyexpat'

I was planned to add an anchor for the xmlparser class, but since it is available as XMLParserType, should not we simply change its name and all references in the documentation to XMLParserType? Or add an alias xmlparser? (the question is why it was not used from the beginning.)

Linked PRs

• gh-140771: Add class directive for xmlparser in pyexpat docs #144456