Python: Ignore xmlns in elementtree.ElementTree

Question

Is there a way to ignore the XML namespace in tage names in elementtree.ElementTree?

I try to print all technicalContact tags:

for item in root.getiterator(tag='{http://www.example.com}technicalContact'):
        print item.tag, item.text

And I get something like:

{http://www.example.com}technicalContact [email protected]

But what I really want is:

technicalContact [email protected]

Is there a way to display only the suffix (sans xmlns), or better - iterate over the elements without explicitly stating xmlns?

Answer 1

You can define a generator to recursively search through your element tree in order to find tags which end with the appropriate tag name. For example, something like this:

def get_element_by_tag(element, tag):
    if element.tag.endswith(tag):
        yield element
    for child in element:
        for g in get_element_by_tag(child, tag):
            yield g

This just checks for tags which end with tag, i.e. ignoring any leading namespace. You can then iterate over any tag you want as follows:

for item in get_element_by_tag(elemettree, 'technicalContact'):
    ...

This generator in action:

>>> xml_str = """<root xmlns="http://www.example.com">
... <technicalContact>Test1</technicalContact>
... <technicalContact>Test2</technicalContact>
... </root>
... """

xml_etree = etree.fromstring(xml_str)

>>> for item in get_element_by_tag(xml_etree, 'technicalContact')
...     print item.tag, item.text
... 
{http://www.example.com}technicalContact Test1
{http://www.example.com}technicalContact Test2