Lxml element equality with namespaces

Question

I am attempting to use Lxml to parse the contents of a .docx document. I understand that lxml replaces namespace prefixes with the actual namespace, however this makes it a real pain to check what kind of element tag I am working with. I would like to be able to do something like

if (someElement.tag == "w:p"):

but since lxml insists on prepending te ful namespace I'd either have to do something like

if (someElemenet.tag == "{http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/wordprocessingml/2006/main}p'):

or perform a lookup of the full namespace name from the element's nsmap attribute like this

targetTag = "{%s}p" % someElement.nsmap['w']
if (someElement.tag == targetTag):

If there were was an easier way to convince lxml to either

1. Give me the tag string without the namespace appended to it, I can use the prefix attribute along with this information to check which tag I'm working with OR
2. Just give me the tag string using the prefix

This would save a lot of keystrokes when writing this parser. Is this possible? Am I missing something in the documentation?

Answer 1

Perhaps use local-name():

import lxml.etree as ET
tree = ET.fromstring('<root xmlns:f="foo"><f:test/></root>')
elt=tree[0]
print(elt.xpath('local-name()'))
# test