I want to use the method of “findall” to locate some elements of the source xml file in the ElementTree module.

However, the source xml file (test.xml) has namespace. I truncate part of xml file as sample:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1"?>
<XML_HEADER xmlns="http://www.test.com">
    <TYPE>Updates</TYPE>
    <DATE>9/26/2012 10:30:34 AM</DATE>
    <COPYRIGHT_NOTICE>All Rights Reserved.</COPYRIGHT_NOTICE>
    <LICENSE>newlicense.htm</LICENSE>
    <DEAL_LEVEL>
        <PAID_OFF>N</PAID_OFF>
        </DEAL_LEVEL>
</XML_HEADER>

The sample python code is below:

from xml.etree import ElementTree as ET
tree = ET.parse(r"test.xml")
el1 = tree.findall("DEAL_LEVEL/PAID_OFF") # Return None
el2 = tree.findall("{http://www.test.com}DEAL_LEVEL/{http://www.test.com}PAID_OFF") # Return <Element '{http://www.test.com}DEAL_LEVEL/PAID_OFF' at 0xb78b90>

Although it can works, because there is a namespace “{http://www.test.com}”, it’s very inconvenient to add a namespace in front of each tag.

How can I ignore the namespace when using the method of “find”, “findall” and so on?

Instead of modifying the XML document itself, it’s best to parse it and then modify the tags in the result. This way you can handle multiple namespaces and namespace aliases:

from io import StringIO  # for Python 2 import from StringIO instead
import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET

# instead of ET.fromstring(xml)
it = ET.iterparse(StringIO(xml))
for _, el in it:
    prefix, has_namespace, postfix = el.tag.partition('}')
    if has_namespace:
        el.tag = postfix  # strip all namespaces
root = it.root

This is based on the discussion here: http://bugs.python.org/issue18304

Update: rpartition instead of partition makes sure you get the tag name in postfix even if there is no namespace. Thus you could condense it:

for _, el in it:
    _, _, el.tag = el.tag.rpartition('}') # strip ns

If you remove the xmlns attribute from the xml before parsing it then there won’t be a namespace prepended to each tag in the tree.

import re

xmlstring = re.sub(' xmlns="[^"]+"', '', xmlstring, count=1)

The answers so far explicitely put the namespace value in the script. For a more generic solution, I would rather extract the namespace from the xml:

import re
def get_namespace(element):
  m = re.match('\{.*\}', element.tag)
  return m.group(0) if m else ''

And use it in find method:

namespace = get_namespace(tree.getroot())
print tree.find('./{0}parent/{0}version'.format(namespace)).text

Here’s an extension to nonagon’s answer, which also strips namespaces off attributes:

from StringIO import StringIO
import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET

# instead of ET.fromstring(xml)
it = ET.iterparse(StringIO(xml))
for _, el in it:
    if '}' in el.tag:
        el.tag = el.tag.split('}', 1)[1]  # strip all namespaces
    for at in list(el.attrib.keys()): # strip namespaces of attributes too
        if '}' in at:
            newat = at.split('}', 1)[1]
            el.attrib[newat] = el.attrib[at]
            del el.attrib[at]
root = it.root

UPDATE: added list() so the iterator works (needed for Python 3)

Improving on the answer by ericspod:

Instead of changing the parse mode globally we can wrap this in an object supporting the with construct.

from xml.parsers import expat

class DisableXmlNamespaces:
    def __enter__(self):
            self.oldcreate = expat.ParserCreate
            expat.ParserCreate = lambda encoding, sep: self.oldcreate(encoding, None)
    def __exit__(self, type, value, traceback):
            expat.ParserCreate = self.oldcreate

This can then be used as follows

import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET
with DisableXmlNamespaces():
     tree = ET.parse("test.xml")

The beauty of this way is that it does not change any behaviour for unrelated code outside the with block. I ended up creating this after getting errors in unrelated libraries after using the version by ericspod which also happened to use expat.

You can use the elegant string formatting construct as well:

ns='http://www.test.com'
el2 = tree.findall("{%s}DEAL_LEVEL/{%s}PAID_OFF" %(ns,ns))

or, if you’re sure that PAID_OFF only appears in one level in tree:

el2 = tree.findall(".//{%s}PAID_OFF" % ns)

If you’re using ElementTree and not cElementTree you can force Expat to ignore namespace processing by replacing ParserCreate():

from xml.parsers import expat
oldcreate = expat.ParserCreate
expat.ParserCreate = lambda encoding, sep: oldcreate(encoding, None)

ElementTree tries to use Expat by calling ParserCreate() but provides no option to not provide a namespace separator string, the above code will cause it to be ignore but be warned this could break other things.

I might be late for this but I dont think re.sub is a good solution.

However the rewrite xml.parsers.expat does not work for Python 3.x versions,

The main culprit is the xml/etree/ElementTree.py see bottom of the source code

# Import the C accelerators
try:
    # Element is going to be shadowed by the C implementation. We need to keep
    # the Python version of it accessible for some "creative" by external code
    # (see tests)
    _Element_Py = Element

    # Element, SubElement, ParseError, TreeBuilder, XMLParser
    from _elementtree import *
except ImportError:
    pass

Which is kinda sad.

The solution is to get rid of it first.

import _elementtree
try:
    del _elementtree.XMLParser
except AttributeError:
    # in case deleted twice
    pass
else:
    from xml.parsers import expat  # NOQA: F811
    oldcreate = expat.ParserCreate
    expat.ParserCreate = lambda encoding, sep: oldcreate(encoding, None)

Tested on Python 3.6.

Try try statement is useful in case somewhere in your code you reload or import a module twice you get some strange errors like

• maximum recursion depth exceeded
• AttributeError: XMLParser

btw damn the etree source code looks really messy.

Let’s combine nonagon’s answer with mzjn’s answer to a related question:

def parse_xml(xml_path: Path) -> Tuple[ET.Element, Dict[str, str]]:
    xml_iter = ET.iterparse(xml_path, events=["start-ns"])
    xml_namespaces = dict(prefix_namespace_pair for _, prefix_namespace_pair in xml_iter)
    return xml_iter.root, xml_namespaces

Using this function we:

1. Create an iterator to get both namespaces and a parsed tree object.

2. Iterate over the created iterator to get the namespaces dict that we can later pass in each find() or findall() call as sugested by iMom0.

3. Return the parsed tree’s root element object and namespaces.

I think this is the best approach all around as there’s no manipulation either of a source XML or resulting parsed xml.etree.ElementTree output whatsoever involved.

I’d like also to credit barny’s answer with providing an essential piece of this puzzle (that you can get the parsed root from the iterator). Until that I actually traversed XML tree twice in my application (once to get namespaces, second for a root).