Parsing XML with unknown namespaces in Oracle SQL

Question

I\'m having trouble with Oracle SQL and XMLs.

I\'ll be getting loads of clobs of well-formed XML data from an external system to parse, interpret and fill some tables wi

Answer 1

I know this is pretty old, but I spotted it today and remembered the pain I experienced trying to deal with namespaced XML. My solution was to strip out the namespaces with an XSLT transform and process it as plain old XML. The function I used to do this is:

function remove_namespace( i_xml in xmltype )
  return xmltype
is
  v_xml xmltype default i_xml;
  v_xsl varchar2(32767);
begin
  v_xsl := '<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
        <xsl:stylesheet version="1.0"
         xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
        <xsl:output method="xml" version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" indent="yes"/>
        <xsl:template match="*">
          <!-- remove element prefix (if any) -->
          <xsl:element name="{local-name()}">
          <!-- process attributes -->
          <xsl:for-each select="@*">
            <!-- remove attribute prefix (if any) -->
            <!-- this if filters out any xmlns="" atts that have no
                 namespace prefix in the xml -->
            <xsl:if test="(local-name() != ''xmlns'')">
              <xsl:attribute name="{local-name()}">
                <xsl:value-of select="."/>
              </xsl:attribute>
            </xsl:if>
          </xsl:for-each>
         <xsl:apply-templates/>
         </xsl:element>
         </xsl:template>
         </xsl:stylesheet>';
  return v_xml.transform(xmltype(v_xsl));
end;