Accessing XMLNS attribute with Python Elementree?

Question

How can one access NS attributes through using ElementTree?

With the following:

<data xmlns="http://www.foo.net/a" xmlns:a="http://www.foo.net/a" book="1" category="ABS" date="2009-12-22">

When I try to root.get('xmlns') I get back None, Category and Date are fine, Any help appreciated..

Answer 1

I think element.tag is what you're looking for. Note that your example is missing a trailing slash, so it's unbalanced and won't parse. I've added one in my example.

>>> from xml.etree import ElementTree as ET
>>> data = '''<data xmlns="http://www.foo.net/a"
...                 xmlns:a="http://www.foo.net/a"
...                 book="1" category="ABS" date="2009-12-22"/>'''
>>> element = ET.fromstring(data)
>>> element
<Element {http://www.foo.net/a}data at 1013b74d0>
>>> element.tag
'{http://www.foo.net/a}data'
>>> element.attrib
{'category': 'ABS', 'date': '2009-12-22', 'book': '1'}

If you just want to know the xmlns URI, you can split it out with a function like:

def tag_uri_and_name(elem):
    if elem.tag[0] == "{":
        uri, ignore, tag = elem.tag[1:].partition("}")
    else:
        uri = None
        tag = elem.tag
    return uri, tag

For much more on namespaces and qualified names in ElementTree, see effbot's examples.