lxml namespace as an attribute

[Skip Montanaro]

Ack. Of course I meant the subject to be "XML namespace as an
attribute". I happen to be using lxml.etree. (Long day, I guess...)

S
On Wed, Aug 15, 2018 at 4:25 PM Skip Montanaro <skip.montanaro at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Much of XML makes no sense to me. Namespaces are one thing. If I'm
> parsing a document where namespaces are defined at the top level, then
> adding namespaces=root.nsmap works when calling the xpath method. I
> more-or-less get that.
>
> What I don't understand is how I'm supposed to search for a tag when
> the namespace appears to be defined as an attribute of the tag itself.
> I have some SOAP XML I'm trying to parse. It looks roughly like this:
>
> <s: Envelope xmlns:a="..." xmlns:s="...">
>   <s:Header>
>      ...
>   </s:Header>
>   <s:Body>
>     <Tag xmlns="http://some/new/path">
>     ...
>     </Tag>
>   </s:Body>
>
> If the document is "doc", I can find the body like so:
>
> body = doc.xpath(".//Body" namespaces=doc.nsmap)
>
> I don't understand how to find Tag, however. When I iterate over the
> body's children, printing them out, I see that Tag's name is actually:
>
>     {http://some/new/path}Tag
>
> yet that namespace is unknown to me until I find Tag. It seems I'm
> stuck in a chicken-and-egg situation. Without knowing that
> http://some/new/path namespace, is there a way to cleanly find all
> instances of Tag?
>
> Thx,
>
> Skip