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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-11T16:34:56+00:00

I am trying to use Python’s xml.etree.ElementTree.parse() function to parse an XML file I

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I am trying to use Python’s xml.etree.ElementTree.parse() function to parse an XML file I created by exporting all of the content from a WordPress blog. However, when I try like so:

import xml.etree.ElementTree as xml
tree = xml.parse('/path/to/file.xml')

I get the following error:

  File "/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/xml/etree/ElementTree.py", line 1183, in parse
tree.parse(source, parser)
  File "/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/xml/etree/ElementTree.py", line 656, in parse
parser.feed(data)
  File "/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/xml/etree/ElementTree.py", line 1643, in feed
self._raiseerror(v)
  File "/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/xml/etree/ElementTree.py", line 1507, in _raiseerror
raise err
ParseError: unbound prefix: line 189, column 1

Here’s what’s on line 189 of my XML file:

<atom:link rel="search" type="application/opensearchdescription+xml" href="http://blogname.wordpress.com/osd.xml" title="blog name" />

I’ve seen many questions about this error coming up with Android development, but I can’t tell if and how that applies to my situation. Can anyone help with this?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Apologies to everyone for whom this was stupidly obvious, but it turns out I simply didn’t have a namespace definition for “atom” in the document. I’m guessing that “unbound prefix” means that the prefix “atom” wasn’t “bound” to a namespace definition?

    Anyway, adding said definition has solved the problem. Although it makes me wonder why WordPress exports XML files without proper definitions for all of the namespaces they use…

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