Parsing XML with namespace in Python via 'ElementTree'

Question

I have the following XML which I want to parse using Python\'s ElementTree:

Answer 1

ElementTree is not too smart about namespaces. You need to give the .find(), findall() and iterfind() methods an explicit namespace dictionary. This is not documented very well:

namespaces = {'owl': 'http://www.w3.org/2002/07/owl#'} # add more as needed

root.findall('owl:Class', namespaces)

Prefixes are only looked up in the namespaces parameter you pass in. This means you can use any namespace prefix you like; the API splits off the owl: part, looks up the corresponding namespace URL in the namespaces dictionary, then changes the search to look for the XPath expression {http://www.w3.org/2002/07/owl}Class instead. You can use the same syntax yourself too of course:

root.findall('{http://www.w3.org/2002/07/owl#}Class')

If you can switch to the lxml library things are better; that library supports the same ElementTree API, but collects namespaces for you in a .nsmap attribute on elements.