👀 Views: 30 💬 Answers: 1 📅 Created: 2025-06-11

xml xpath elementtree python Python

I'm deploying to production and I'm writing unit tests and I'm relatively new to this, so bear with me. I'm stuck on something that should probably be simple. I'm working on a project and hit a roadblock. I'm working with XML data in Python using the ElementTree library (version 1.3.0) and I'm having issues with performing XPath queries that involve namespaces. My XML looks like this: ```xml <root xmlns:ns="http://example.com/ns"> <ns:item> <ns:name>Item1</ns:name> </ns:item> <ns:item> <ns:name>Item2</ns:name> </ns:item> </root> ``` I want to retrieve all `ns:item` elements, but when I try the following code, I get an empty list: ```python import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET # Load the XML xml_data = '''<root xmlns:ns="http://example.com/ns"> <ns:item> <ns:name>Item1</ns:name> </ns:item> <ns:item> <ns:name>Item2</ns:name> </ns:item> </root>''' root = ET.fromstring(xml_data) # Attempting to use XPath with namespace items = root.findall('.//ns:item') print(items) ``` This prints an empty list. I've also tried specifying the namespace explicitly in the `findall` method: ```python ns = {'ns': 'http://example.com/ns'} items = root.findall('.//ns:item', ns) print(items) ``` This still returns an empty list. I've checked that the namespace URI matches the one in the XML, but I'm not sure what I'm missing. Am I using the wrong syntax for namespaces in XPath queries with ElementTree? Is there a best practice for dealing with XML namespaces in this library? I'm working on a application that needs to handle this. Has anyone else encountered this? Am I missing something obvious? The stack includes Python and several other technologies. Cheers for any assistance! I'm developing on Debian with Python. Any advice would be much appreciated.