Extracting Namespaces from XML in Python

Question

I have something similar to the following XML document, called sample.xml

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<package xmlns:test='www.test.com' xmlns:test2='www.test2.com'>
    <test:items>
        <test2:item>Some information</test2:item>
    </test:items>
</package>

I would like to use Python (2.7) to extract a dictionary of the namespaces as below:

>>> import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET
>>> tree = ET.parse('sample.xml')
>>> namespaces = {} # This is the dictionary I want to populate

Required output of code:

>>> namespaces 
{'test':'www.test.com', 'test2':'www.test2.com'}

I have read the documentation for ElementTree but haven't got anywhere yet. Any help much appreciated

Answer 1

If you swap the standard library's xml for the near-identical but more powerful lxml, then it's as simple as

import lxml.etree as ET
tree = ET.parse('sample.xml')
namespaces = tree.nsmap