How do I use xml namespaces with find/findall in lxml?

Question

I\'m trying to parse content in an OpenOffice ODS spreadsheet. The ods format is essentially just a zipfile with a number of documents. The content of the spreadsheet is sto

Answer 1

Here's a way to get all the namespaces in the XML document (and supposing there's no prefix conflict).

I use this when parsing XML documents where I do know in advance what the namespace URLs are, and only the prefix.

        doc = etree.XML(XML_string)

        # Getting all the name spaces.
        nsmap = {}
        for ns in doc.xpath('//namespace::*'):
            if ns[0]: # Removes the None namespace, neither needed nor supported.
                nsmap[ns[0]] = ns[1]
        doc.xpath('//prefix:element', namespaces=nsmap)