Parsing XML with namespaces using ElementTree in Python

Question

I have an xml, small part of it looks like this:

Answer 1

This snippet from your question,

for a in root.findall('{urn:com:xml:data}image'):
    print a.attrib

does not output anything because it only looks for direct {urn:com:xml:data}image children of the root of the tree.

This slightly modified code,

for a in root.findall('.//{urn:com:xml:data}image'):
    print a.attrib

will print {'imageId': '1'} because it uses .//, which selects matching subelements on all levels.

Reference: https://docs.python.org/2/library/xml.etree.elementtree.html#supported-xpath-syntax.

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It is a bit annoying that ElementTree does not just retain the original namespace prefixes by default, but keep in mind that it is not the prefixes that matter anyway. The register_namespace() function can be used to set the wanted prefix when serializing the XML. The function does not have any effect on parsing or searching.