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Extract xlink:href attribute from XML [duplicate]

I have the following XML which I want to parse using Python's ElementTree:
<rdf:RDF xml:base="http://dbpedia.org/ontology/"
xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#"
xmlns:owl="http://www.w3.org/2002/07/owl#"
xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#"
xmlns:rdfs="http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#"
xmlns="http://dbpedia.org/ontology/">
<owl:Class rdf:about="http://dbpedia.org/ontology/BasketballLeague">
<rdfs:label xml:lang="en">basketball league</rdfs:label>
<rdfs:comment xml:lang="en">
a group of sports teams that compete against each other
in Basketball
</rdfs:comment>
</owl:Class>
</rdf:RDF>
I want to find all owl:Class tags and then extract the value of all rdfs:label instances inside them. I am using the following code:
tree = ET.parse("filename")
root = tree.getroot()
root.findall('owl:Class')
Because of the namespace, I am getting the following error.
SyntaxError: prefix 'owl' not found in prefix map
I tried reading the document at http://effbot.org/zone/element-namespaces.htm but I am still not able to get this working since the above XML has multiple nested namespaces.
Kindly let me know how to change the code to find all the owl:Class tags.

You need to give the .find(), findall() and iterfind() methods an explicit namespace dictionary:
namespaces = {'owl': 'http://www.w3.org/2002/07/owl#'} # add more as needed
root.findall('owl:Class', namespaces)
Prefixes are only looked up in the namespaces parameter you pass in. This means you can use any namespace prefix you like; the API splits off the owl: part, looks up the corresponding namespace URL in the namespaces dictionary, then changes the search to look for the XPath expression {http://www.w3.org/2002/07/owl}Class instead. You can use the same syntax yourself too of course:
root.findall('{http://www.w3.org/2002/07/owl#}Class')
Also see the Parsing XML with Namespaces section of the ElementTree documentation.
If you can switch to the lxml library things are better; that library supports the same ElementTree API, but collects namespaces for you in .nsmap attribute on elements and generally has superior namespaces support.

Here's how to do this with lxml without having to hard-code the namespaces or scan the text for them (as Martijn Pieters mentions):
from lxml import etree
tree = etree.parse("filename")
root = tree.getroot()
root.findall('owl:Class', root.nsmap)
UPDATE:
5 years later I'm still running into variations of this issue. lxml helps as I showed above, but not in every case. The commenters may have a valid point regarding this technique when it comes merging documents, but I think most people are having difficulty simply searching documents.
Here's another case and how I handled it:
<?xml version="1.0" ?><Tag1 xmlns="http://www.mynamespace.com/prefix">
<Tag2>content</Tag2></Tag1>
xmlns without a prefix means that unprefixed tags get this default namespace. This means when you search for Tag2, you need to include the namespace to find it. However, lxml creates an nsmap entry with None as the key, and I couldn't find a way to search for it. So, I created a new namespace dictionary like this
namespaces = {}
# response uses a default namespace, and tags don't mention it
# create a new ns map using an identifier of our choice
for k,v in root.nsmap.iteritems():
if not k:
namespaces['myprefix'] = v
e = root.find('myprefix:Tag2', namespaces)

Note: This is an answer useful for Python's ElementTree standard library without using hardcoded namespaces.
To extract namespace's prefixes and URI from XML data you can use ElementTree.iterparse function, parsing only namespace start events (start-ns):
>>> from io import StringIO
>>> from xml.etree import ElementTree
>>> my_schema = u'''<rdf:RDF xml:base="http://dbpedia.org/ontology/"
... xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#"
... xmlns:owl="http://www.w3.org/2002/07/owl#"
... xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#"
... xmlns:rdfs="http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#"
... xmlns="http://dbpedia.org/ontology/">
...
... <owl:Class rdf:about="http://dbpedia.org/ontology/BasketballLeague">
... <rdfs:label xml:lang="en">basketball league</rdfs:label>
... <rdfs:comment xml:lang="en">
... a group of sports teams that compete against each other
... in Basketball
... </rdfs:comment>
... </owl:Class>
...
... </rdf:RDF>'''
>>> my_namespaces = dict([
... node for _, node in ElementTree.iterparse(
... StringIO(my_schema), events=['start-ns']
... )
... ])
>>> from pprint import pprint
>>> pprint(my_namespaces)
{'': 'http://dbpedia.org/ontology/',
'owl': 'http://www.w3.org/2002/07/owl#',
'rdf': 'http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#',
'rdfs': 'http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#',
'xsd': 'http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#'}
Then the dictionary can be passed as argument to the search functions:
root.findall('owl:Class', my_namespaces)

I've been using similar code to this and have found it's always worth reading the documentation... as usual!
findall() will only find elements which are direct children of the current tag. So, not really ALL.
It might be worth your while trying to get your code working with the following, especially if you're dealing with big and complex xml files so that that sub-sub-elements (etc.) are also included.
If you know yourself where elements are in your xml, then I suppose it'll be fine! Just thought this was worth remembering.
root.iter()
ref: https://docs.python.org/3/library/xml.etree.elementtree.html#finding-interesting-elements
"Element.findall() finds only elements with a tag which are direct children of the current element. Element.find() finds the first child with a particular tag, and Element.text accesses the element’s text content. Element.get() accesses the element’s attributes:"

To get the namespace in its namespace format, e.g. {myNameSpace}, you can do the following:
root = tree.getroot()
ns = re.match(r'{.*}', root.tag).group(0)
This way, you can use it later on in your code to find nodes, e.g using string interpolation (Python 3).
link = root.find(f"{ns}link")

This is basically Davide Brunato's answer however I found out that his answer had serious problems the default namespace being the empty string, at least on my python 3.6 installation. The function I distilled from his code and that worked for me is the following:
from io import StringIO
from xml.etree import ElementTree
def get_namespaces(xml_string):
namespaces = dict([
node for _, node in ElementTree.iterparse(
StringIO(xml_string), events=['start-ns']
)
])
namespaces["ns0"] = namespaces[""]
return namespaces
where ns0 is just a placeholder for the empty namespace and you can replace it by any random string you like.
If I then do:
my_namespaces = get_namespaces(my_schema)
root.findall('ns0:SomeTagWithDefaultNamespace', my_namespaces)
It also produces the correct answer for tags using the default namespace as well.

My solution is based on #Martijn Pieters' comment:
register_namespace only influences serialisation, not search.
So the trick here is to use different dictionaries for serialization and for searching.
namespaces = {
'': 'http://www.example.com/default-schema',
'spec': 'http://www.example.com/specialized-schema',
}
Now, register all namespaces for parsing and writing:
for name, value in namespaces.iteritems():
ET.register_namespace(name, value)
For searching (find(), findall(), iterfind()) we need a non-empty prefix. Pass these functions a modified dictionary (here I modify the original dictionary, but this must be made only after the namespaces are registered).
self.namespaces['default'] = self.namespaces['']
Now, the functions from the find() family can be used with the default prefix:
print root.find('default:myelem', namespaces)
but
tree.write(destination)
does not use any prefixes for elements in the default namespace.

Parsing XML with namespace in Python via 'ElementTree'

I have the following XML which I want to parse using Python's ElementTree:
<rdf:RDF xml:base="http://dbpedia.org/ontology/"
xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#"
xmlns:owl="http://www.w3.org/2002/07/owl#"
xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#"
xmlns:rdfs="http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#"
xmlns="http://dbpedia.org/ontology/">
<owl:Class rdf:about="http://dbpedia.org/ontology/BasketballLeague">
<rdfs:label xml:lang="en">basketball league</rdfs:label>
<rdfs:comment xml:lang="en">
a group of sports teams that compete against each other
in Basketball
</rdfs:comment>
</owl:Class>
</rdf:RDF>
I want to find all owl:Class tags and then extract the value of all rdfs:label instances inside them. I am using the following code:
tree = ET.parse("filename")
root = tree.getroot()
root.findall('owl:Class')
Because of the namespace, I am getting the following error.
SyntaxError: prefix 'owl' not found in prefix map
I tried reading the document at http://effbot.org/zone/element-namespaces.htm but I am still not able to get this working since the above XML has multiple nested namespaces.
Kindly let me know how to change the code to find all the owl:Class tags.

You need to give the .find(), findall() and iterfind() methods an explicit namespace dictionary:
namespaces = {'owl': 'http://www.w3.org/2002/07/owl#'} # add more as needed
root.findall('owl:Class', namespaces)
Prefixes are only looked up in the namespaces parameter you pass in. This means you can use any namespace prefix you like; the API splits off the owl: part, looks up the corresponding namespace URL in the namespaces dictionary, then changes the search to look for the XPath expression {http://www.w3.org/2002/07/owl}Class instead. You can use the same syntax yourself too of course:
root.findall('{http://www.w3.org/2002/07/owl#}Class')
Also see the Parsing XML with Namespaces section of the ElementTree documentation.
If you can switch to the lxml library things are better; that library supports the same ElementTree API, but collects namespaces for you in .nsmap attribute on elements and generally has superior namespaces support.

Here's how to do this with lxml without having to hard-code the namespaces or scan the text for them (as Martijn Pieters mentions):
from lxml import etree
tree = etree.parse("filename")
root = tree.getroot()
root.findall('owl:Class', root.nsmap)
UPDATE:
5 years later I'm still running into variations of this issue. lxml helps as I showed above, but not in every case. The commenters may have a valid point regarding this technique when it comes merging documents, but I think most people are having difficulty simply searching documents.
Here's another case and how I handled it:
<?xml version="1.0" ?><Tag1 xmlns="http://www.mynamespace.com/prefix">
<Tag2>content</Tag2></Tag1>
xmlns without a prefix means that unprefixed tags get this default namespace. This means when you search for Tag2, you need to include the namespace to find it. However, lxml creates an nsmap entry with None as the key, and I couldn't find a way to search for it. So, I created a new namespace dictionary like this
namespaces = {}
# response uses a default namespace, and tags don't mention it
# create a new ns map using an identifier of our choice
for k,v in root.nsmap.iteritems():
if not k:
namespaces['myprefix'] = v
e = root.find('myprefix:Tag2', namespaces)

Note: This is an answer useful for Python's ElementTree standard library without using hardcoded namespaces.
To extract namespace's prefixes and URI from XML data you can use ElementTree.iterparse function, parsing only namespace start events (start-ns):
>>> from io import StringIO
>>> from xml.etree import ElementTree
>>> my_schema = u'''<rdf:RDF xml:base="http://dbpedia.org/ontology/"
... xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#"
... xmlns:owl="http://www.w3.org/2002/07/owl#"
... xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#"
... xmlns:rdfs="http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#"
... xmlns="http://dbpedia.org/ontology/">
...
... <owl:Class rdf:about="http://dbpedia.org/ontology/BasketballLeague">
... <rdfs:label xml:lang="en">basketball league</rdfs:label>
... <rdfs:comment xml:lang="en">
... a group of sports teams that compete against each other
... in Basketball
... </rdfs:comment>
... </owl:Class>
...
... </rdf:RDF>'''
>>> my_namespaces = dict([
... node for _, node in ElementTree.iterparse(
... StringIO(my_schema), events=['start-ns']
... )
... ])
>>> from pprint import pprint
>>> pprint(my_namespaces)
{'': 'http://dbpedia.org/ontology/',
'owl': 'http://www.w3.org/2002/07/owl#',
'rdf': 'http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#',
'rdfs': 'http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#',
'xsd': 'http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#'}
Then the dictionary can be passed as argument to the search functions:
root.findall('owl:Class', my_namespaces)

I've been using similar code to this and have found it's always worth reading the documentation... as usual!
findall() will only find elements which are direct children of the current tag. So, not really ALL.
It might be worth your while trying to get your code working with the following, especially if you're dealing with big and complex xml files so that that sub-sub-elements (etc.) are also included.
If you know yourself where elements are in your xml, then I suppose it'll be fine! Just thought this was worth remembering.
root.iter()
ref: https://docs.python.org/3/library/xml.etree.elementtree.html#finding-interesting-elements
"Element.findall() finds only elements with a tag which are direct children of the current element. Element.find() finds the first child with a particular tag, and Element.text accesses the element’s text content. Element.get() accesses the element’s attributes:"

To get the namespace in its namespace format, e.g. {myNameSpace}, you can do the following:
root = tree.getroot()
ns = re.match(r'{.*}', root.tag).group(0)
This way, you can use it later on in your code to find nodes, e.g using string interpolation (Python 3).
link = root.find(f"{ns}link")

This is basically Davide Brunato's answer however I found out that his answer had serious problems the default namespace being the empty string, at least on my python 3.6 installation. The function I distilled from his code and that worked for me is the following:
from io import StringIO
from xml.etree import ElementTree
def get_namespaces(xml_string):
namespaces = dict([
node for _, node in ElementTree.iterparse(
StringIO(xml_string), events=['start-ns']
)
])
namespaces["ns0"] = namespaces[""]
return namespaces
where ns0 is just a placeholder for the empty namespace and you can replace it by any random string you like.
If I then do:
my_namespaces = get_namespaces(my_schema)
root.findall('ns0:SomeTagWithDefaultNamespace', my_namespaces)
It also produces the correct answer for tags using the default namespace as well.

My solution is based on #Martijn Pieters' comment:
register_namespace only influences serialisation, not search.
So the trick here is to use different dictionaries for serialization and for searching.
namespaces = {
'': 'http://www.example.com/default-schema',
'spec': 'http://www.example.com/specialized-schema',
}
Now, register all namespaces for parsing and writing:
for name, value in namespaces.iteritems():
ET.register_namespace(name, value)
For searching (find(), findall(), iterfind()) we need a non-empty prefix. Pass these functions a modified dictionary (here I modify the original dictionary, but this must be made only after the namespaces are registered).
self.namespaces['default'] = self.namespaces['']
Now, the functions from the find() family can be used with the default prefix:
print root.find('default:myelem', namespaces)
but
tree.write(destination)
does not use any prefixes for elements in the default namespace.

Retrieve content of element with unknown namespace using python

I am attempting to parse a maven project definition using python to extract a version.
The project definition looks like:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="no"?>
<project xmlns="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0"
xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
xsi:schemaLocation="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0
http://maven.apache.org/maven-v4_0_0.xsd">
<modelVersion>4.0.0</modelVersion>
<groupId>...</groupId>
<artifactId>...</artifactId>
<version>1.6.0-SNAPSHOT</version>
...
</project>
I can extract the version using:
root = ET.fromstring(xml)
version = root.find('./p:version', { 'p': 'http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0' })
print(version.text)
prints: 1.6.0-SNAPSHOT
However, the namespace used may change, and I don't want to depend on this. Is there a way to extract the namespace to use in my subsequent xpath expression?
I tried the following, to see if xmlns was itself exposed, but no luck:
root = ET.fromstring(xml)
for k in root.attrib:
print('%s => %s' % (k, root.attrib[k]))
prints: {http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance}schemaLocation => http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0 http://maven.apache.org/maven-v4_0_0.xsd

However, the namespace used may change, and I don't want to depend on this.
Are you saying that the namespace uri might change, or that the prefix might? If it's just the prefix, then that's not an issue, because what matters is that the prefixes in your XPath match the prefixes you supply to the XPath evaluator. And in either case, auto-detecting the namespaces is probably a bad call. Suppose someone decides to start generating that XML like this:
<proj:project xmlns:proj="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0"
xmlns:other="http://maven.apache.org/POM/5.0.0"
xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
xsi:schemaLocation="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0
http://maven.apache.org/maven-v4_0_0.xsd">
which is still perfectly representing the XML in the same namespace as your example, but you have no idea that the proj prefix is the namespace prefix you're looking for.
I think it's unlikely that Apache would suddenly change the namespace for one of their official XML formats, but if you are genuinely worried about it, there should always be the option of using local-name() to namespace-agnostically find a node you're looking for:
version = root.find('./*[local-name() = "version"]')
Also, I'm not familiar with the elementTree library, but you could try this to try to get information about the XML document's namespaces, just to see if you can:
namespaces = root.findall('//namespace::*')

Unfortunately, ElementTree namespace support is rather patchy.
You'll need to use an internal method from the xml.etree.ElementTree module to get a namespace map out:
_, namespaces = ET._namespaces(root, 'utf8')
namespaces is now a dict with URIs as keys, and prefixes as values.
You could switch to lxml instead. That library implements the same ElementTree API, but has augmented that API considerably.
For example, each node includes a .nsmap attribute which maps prefixes to URIs, including the default namespace under the key None.

How do I use ":" in XML element names using lxml?

How do I generate and parse XML like the following using lxml?
<s:Envelope xmlns:s="a" xmlns:a="http_//www.w3.org/2005/08/addressing">
....
</s:Envelope>
I currently swap : with _ in the element names when I parse and generate XML, but it seems stupid.

It's not clear exactly what you're asking, but maybe this will help:
An element such as <s:Envelope> is using a XML namespace prefix. This is used to indicate that the s:Envelope attribute in this document is defined in the a namespace.
LXML represents XML namespaces using a namespace prefix in braces, for example: {a}Envelope. Your example document is sort of confusing, because you also defined the a: namespace prefix, so:
a:Element is equivalent to {http://www.w3.org/2005/08/addressing}Element, and
s:Element is equivalent to {a}Element.
Many of the LXML commands let you provide a namespace prefix mapping. For example, to find the Envelope element in your document using XPATH, you could do this:
import lxml.etree as etree
doc = etree.parse('mydocument.xml')
envelope = doc.xpath('//s:Envelope',
namespaces={'s': 'a'})
Note that this is exactly equivalent to:
envelope = doc.xpath('//x:Envelope',
namespaces={'x': 'a'})
That is, the namespace prefix doesn't have to match what is used in the source XML document; only the the absolute namespace matters.
You can read more about LXML and namespaces here.

Python: ElementTree, get the namespace string of an Element

This XML file is named example.xml:
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<project xmlns="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:schemaLocation="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0 http://maven.apache.org/maven-v4_0_0.xsd">
<modelVersion>14.0.0</modelVersion>
<groupId>.com.foobar.flubber</groupId>
<artifactId>uberportalconf</artifactId>
<version>13-SNAPSHOT</version>
<packaging>pom</packaging>
<name>Environment for UberPortalConf</name>
<description>This is the description</description>
<properties>
<birduberportal.version>11</birduberportal.version>
<promotiondevice.version>9</promotiondevice.version>
<foobarportal.version>6</foobarportal.version>
<eventuberdevice.version>2</eventuberdevice.version>
</properties>
<!-- A lot more here, but as it is irrelevant for the problem I have removed it -->
</project>
If I load example.xml and parse it with ElementTree I can see its namespace is http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0.
>>> from xml.etree import ElementTree
>>> tree = ElementTree.parse('example.xml')
>>> print tree.getroot()
<Element '{http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0}project' at 0x26ee0f0>
I have not found a method to call to get just the namespace from an Element without resorting to parsing the str(an_element) of an Element. It seems like there got to be a better way.

This is a perfect task for a regular expression.
import re
def namespace(element):
m = re.match(r'\{.*\}', element.tag)
return m.group(0) if m else ''

The namespace should be in Element.tag right before the "actual" tag:
>>> root = tree.getroot()
>>> root.tag
'{http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0}project'
To know more about namespaces, take a look at ElementTree: Working with Namespaces and Qualified Names.

I am not sure if this is possible with xml.etree, but here is how you could do it with lxml.etree:
>>> from lxml import etree
>>> tree = etree.parse('example.xml')
>>> tree.xpath('namespace-uri(.)')
'http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0'

Without using regular expressions:
>>> root
<Element '{http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap/0.84}urlset' at 0x2f7cc10>
>>> root.tag.split('}')[0].strip('{')
'http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap/0.84'

The lxml.xtree library's element has a dictionary called nsmap, which shows all the namespace that are in use in the current tag scope.
>>> item = tree.getroot().iter().next()
>>> item.nsmap
{'md': 'urn:oasis:names:tc:SAML:2.0:metadata'}

I think it will be easier to take a look at the attributes:
>>> root.attrib
{'{http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance}schemaLocation':
'http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0 http://maven.apache.org/maven-v4_0_0.xsd'}

The short answer is:
ElementTree._namspace_map[ElementTree._namspace_map.values().index('')]
but only if you have been calling
ElementTree.register_namespace(prefix,uri)
in response to every event=="start-ns" received while iterating through the result of
ET.iterparse(...)
and you registered for "start-ns"
The answer the question "what is the default namespace?", it is necessary to clarify two points:
(1) XML specifications say that the default namespace is not necessarily global throughout the tree, rather the default namespace can be re-declared at any element under root, and inherits downwards until meeting another default namespace re-declaration.
(2) The ElementTree module can (de facto) handle XML-like documents which have no root default namespace, -if- they have no namespace use anywhere in the document. (* there may be less strict conditions, e.g., that is "if" and not necessarily "iff").
It's probably also worth considering "what do you want it for?" Consider that XML files can be semantically equivalent, but syntactically very different. E.g., the following three files are semantically equivalent, but A.xml has one default namespace declaration, B.xml has three, and C.xml has none.
A.xml:
<a xlmns="http://A" xlmns:nsB0="http://B0" xlmns:nsB1="http://B1">
<nsB0:b/>
<nsB1:b/>
</a>
B.xml:
<a xlmns="http://A">
<b xlmns="http://B0"/>
<b xlmns="http://B1"/>
</a>
C.xml:
<{http://A}a>
<{http://B0}b/>
<{http://B1}b/>
</a>
The file C.xml is the canonical expanded syntactical representation presented to the ElementTree search functions.
If you are certain a priori that there will be no namespace collisions, you can modify the element tags while parsing as discussed here: Python ElementTree module: How to ignore the namespace of XML files to locate matching element when using the method "find", "findall"

combining some of the answers above, I think the shortest code is
theroot = tree.getroot()
theroot.attrib[theroot.keys()[0]]

Here is my solution on ElementTree 3.9+,
def get_element_namespaces(filename, element):
namespace = []
for key, value in ET.iterparse(filename, events=['start', 'start-ns']):
print(key, value)
if key == 'start-ns':
namespace.append(value)
else:
if ET.tostring(element) == ET.tostring(value):
return namespace
namespace = []
return namespaces
This would return an array of [prefix:URL] tuples like this:
[('android', 'http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android'), ('tools', 'http://schemas.android.com/tools')]