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

Etree won't find namespaced elements if there are no xmlns definitions in the XML file. For instance:

import lxml.etree as etree

xml_doc = ''

tree = etree.fromstring(xml_doc)

# finds nothing:
tree.find('.//ns:root', {'ns': 'foo'})
tree.find('.//{foo}root', {'ns': 'foo'})
tree.find('.//ns:root')
tree.find('.//ns:root')

Sometimes that is the data you are given. So, what can you do when there is no namespace?

My solution: add one.

import lxml.etree as etree

xml_doc = ''
xml_doc_with_ns = '%s' % xml_doc

tree = etree.fromstring(xml_doc_with_ns)

# finds what you're looking for:
tree.find('.//{foo}root')