CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pythonxmlelementtree
Edward Falk
Edward Falk

Reputation: 10143

Suppress namespace in ElementTree

Given an xml file that looks like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="windows-1252"?>
<Message xmlns="http://example.com/ns" xmlns:myns="urn:us:gov:dot:faa:aim:saa">
  <foo id="stuffid"/>
  <myns:bar/>
</Message>

When I parse it with ElementTree, the element tags look like:

{http://example.com/ns}Message
  {http://example.com/ns}foo
  {urn:us:gov:dot:faa:aim:saa}bar

But I'd rather just have

Message
  foo
  bar

and more importantly, I'd rather just pass "Message", "foo", and "bar" into the find() and findall() methods.

I've tried using substitutions to censor all xmlns: attributes as suggested in https://stackoverflow.com/a/15641319/338479 (and this is probably what I'll have to do if I can't find something more elegant), and I've tried calling ElementTree.register_namespace('', "http://example.com/ns") but that seems to only help with ElementTree.tostring(), which isn't what I wanted.

Isn't there just some way to get ElementTree to pretend it never heard of xmlns?

Let's assume that my element tags are globally unique even without the namespace qualifiers. In this case, the namespaces just get in the way.

Addressing some of the comments in detail:

Joe linked to Python ElementTree module: How to ignore the namespace of XML files to locate matching element when using the method "find", "findall" which is close enough to my question that I guess mine is a duplicate. However, that question was not answered either. The suggestions given there were:

Upvotes: 9

Views: 8103

Answers (1)

Edward Falk
Edward Falk

Reputation: 10143

OK, thanks for the links to the other question. I've decided to borrow (and improve on) one of the solutions given there:

def stripNs(el):
  '''Recursively search this element tree, removing namespaces.'''
  if el.tag.startswith("{"):
    el.tag = el.tag.split('}', 1)[1]  # strip namespace
  for k in el.attrib.keys():
    if k.startswith("{"):
      k2 = k.split('}', 1)[1]
      el.attrib[k2] = el.attrib[k]
      del el.attrib[k]
  for child in el:
    stripNs(child)

Upvotes: 7

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