Since upgrading to python 3.3 the tostring method fails when the output method is requested as text. Code like this:

with open(fp, mode='rt') as f:
    data = f.read()
tree, idmap = ET.XMLID(data)
print(ET.tostring(tree, method='text', encoding='unicode'))

Generates the following error:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/home/john/Desktop/docs/Pear/pear.py", line 64, in pass_four
    print(ET.tostring(tree, method='text', encoding='unicode'))
  File "/usr/lib/python3.3/xml/etree/ElementTree.py", line 1171, in tostring
    ElementTree(element).write(stream, encoding, method=method)
  File "/usr/lib/python3.3/xml/etree/ElementTree.py", line 824, in write
    _serialize_text(write, self._root)
  File "/usr/lib/python3.3/xml/etree/ElementTree.py", line 1057, in _serialize_text
    write(part)
TypeError: string argument expected, got 'list'

Whereas it used to return plain text with formatting tags stripped from the root element on prior versions of python.