I'm trying to do some Schematron validation with lxml. For the specific application I'm working at, it's important that any tests that failed the validation are reported back. The lxml documentation mentions the presence of the validation_report property object. I think this should contain the info I'm looking for, but I just can't figure out how work with it. Here's some example code that demonstrates my problem (adapted from http://lxml.de/validation.html#id2; tested with Python 2.7.4): import StringIO from lxml import isoschematron from lxml import etree def main(): # Schema f = StringIO.StringIO('''\ <schema xmlns="http://purl.oclc.org/dsdl/schematron" > <pattern id="sum_equals_100_percent"> <title>Sum equals 100%.</title> <rule context="Total"> <assert test="sum(//Percent)=100">Sum is not 100%.</assert> </rule> </pattern> </schema> ''') # Parse schema sct_doc = etree.parse(f) schematron = isoschematron.Schematron(sct_doc, store_report = True) # XML to validate - validation will fail because sum of numbers # not equal to 100 notValid = StringIO.StringIO('''\ <Total> <Percent>30</Percent> <Percent>30</Percent> <Percent>50</Percent> </Total> ''') # Parse xml doc = etree.parse(notValid) # Validate against schema validationResult = schematron.validate(doc) # Validation report (assuming here this is where reason # for validation failure is stored, but perhaps I'm wrong?) report = isoschematron.Schematron.validation_report print("is valid: " + str(validationResult)) print(dir(report.__doc__)) main() Now, from the value of validationResult I can see that the validation failed (as expected), so next I would like to know why. The result of the second print statement gives me: ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__doc__', '__eq__', '__ format__', '__ge__', '__getattribute__', '__getitem__', '__getnewargs__', '__get slice__', '__gt__', '__hash__', '__init__', '__le__', '__len__', '__lt__', '__mo d__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__reduce__', '__reduce_ex__', '__repr__', '__rmod__', '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__sizeof__', '__str__', '__subclasshook __', '_formatter_field_name_split', '_formatter_parser', 'capitalize', 'center', 'count', 'decode', 'encode', 'endswith', 'expandtabs', 'find', 'format', 'index ', 'isalnum', 'isalpha', 'isdigit', 'islower', 'isspace', 'istitle', 'isupper', 'join', 'ljust', 'lower', 'lstrip', 'partition', 'replace', 'rfind', 'rindex', ' rjust', 'rpartition', 'rsplit', 'rstrip', 'split', 'splitlines', 'startswith', ' strip', 'swapcase', 'title', 'translate', 'upper', 'zfill'] Which is about as far as I'm getting, based on the documentation and this related question. Could well be something really obvious I'm overlooking? Continue reading...