Wildcard namespaces in lxml

Question

How to query using xpath ignoring the xml namespace? I am using python lxml library. I tried the solution from this question but doesn't seem to work.

In [151]: e.find("./*[local-name()='Buckets']")
  File "<string>", line unknown
SyntaxError: invalid predicate

Answer 1

Use e.xpath, not e.find:

---

import lxml.etree as ET

content = '''\
<Envelope xmlns="http://www.example.com/zzz/yyy">
  <Header>
    <Version>1</Version>
  </Header>
  <Buckets>
    some stuff
  </Buckets>
</Envelope>
'''
root = ET.fromstring(content)
print(root.xpath("./*[local-name()='Buckets']"))
# [<Element {http://www.example.com/zzz/yyy}Buckets at 0xb73a62ac>]