How to deal with xmlns values while parsing an XML file?

Question

I have the following toy example of an XML file. I have thousands of these. I have difficulty parsing this file.

Look at the text in second line. All my original fi

Answer 1

The confusion was caused by the following default namespace (namespace declared without prefix) :

xmlns="http://schemas.datacontract.org/Storage"

Note that descendants elements without prefix inherit default namespace from ancestor, implicitly. Now, to reference element in namespace, you need to map a prefix to the namespace URI, and use that prefix in your XPath :

ns = {'d': 'http://schemas.datacontract.org/Storage' }
val_of_interest = root.findall('./d:Values/d:SensorValue', ns)

for sensor_val in val_of_interest:
    print sensor_val.find('d:accelx', ns).text
    print sensor_val.find('d:accely', ns).text