Question

I’m trying to create an in-memory xml document such that the root’s child nodes all require a name space.

The final document should look something like this:

<Feed>            
<FeedEntity Id="0000" 
      xmlns="http://schemas.example.com/search/query/2010/5/revision">

    <FeedRequest locale="en-US" title="<some value>"/>
</FeedEntity>
... another FeedEntity element ...
</Feed>            

However, when I print out the document I’ve created with ElementTree lib, it looks more like this:

<Feed>
    <ns0:FeedEntity Id="0000"
      xmlns:ns0="http://schemas.example.com/search/query/2010/5/revision">

        <FeedRequest locale="en-US" title="<some value>"/>
    </ns0:FeedEntity>
</Feed>

Here’s how I’m creating the document:

counter = 0
namespace = "http://schemas.example.com/search/query/2010/5/revision"

root = Element("Feed")        

node_name = "{%s}FeedEntity" % (namespace, );                
feed_entity_element = Element(node_name)        

feed_entity_element["Id"] = "%04d" % (counter,);

feed_request_element = Element("FeedRequest");
feed_request_element["Culture"] = self.culture;
feed_request_element["Query"] = address;        

# append each of the elements to the xml document 
feed_entity_element.append(feed_request_element);

root.append(feed_entity_element);

str_data = ET.tostring(root)
print str_data

How do I get rid of the “ns0” parts in the final XML so it looks more like the first example noted above?

Answer 1

With xml.etree, you cannot get the exact output as in the first example, but you can use the (global) register_namespace() function to use a “better” prefix than “ns0”. For example: ET.register_namespace('rev', 'http://schemas.example.com/search/query/2010/5/revision') will make sure the output will look like rev:FeedEntity.

The (compatible) lxml library, however, is more flexible with regard to namespace prefixes, and allows you to provide a prefix mapping when creating an element.