Good python XML parser to work with namespace heavy documents

Question

Python elementTree seems unusable with namespaces. What are my alternatives? BeautifulSoup is pretty rubbish with namespaces too. I don\'t want to strip them out.

Ex

Answer 1

lxml is namespace-aware.

>>> from lxml import etree
>>> et = etree.XML("""""")
>>> etree.tostring(et, encoding=str) # encoding=str only needed in Python 3, to avoid getting bytes
''
>>> et.xpath("f:bar", namespaces={"b":"bar", "f": "foo"})
[]

Edit: On your example:

from lxml import etree

# remove the b prefix in Python 2
# needed in python 3 because
# "Unicode strings with encoding declaration are not supported."
et = etree.XML(b"""...""")

ns = {
    'lom': 'http://ltsc.ieee.org/xsd/LOM',
    'zs': 'http://www.loc.gov/zing/srw/',
    'dc': 'http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/',
    'voc': 'http://www.schooletc.co.uk/vocabularies/',
    'srw_dc': 'info:srw/schema/1/dc-schema'
}

# according to docs, .xpath returns always lists when querying for elements
# .find returns one element, but only supports a subset of XPath
record = et.xpath("zs:records/zs:record", namespaces=ns)[0]
# in this example, we know there's only one record
# but else, you should apply the following to all elements the above returns

name = record.xpath("//voc:name", namespaces=ns)[0].text
print("name:", name)

lom_entry = record.xpath("zs:recordData/srw_dc:dc/"
                         "lom:metaMetadata/lom:identifier/"
                         "lom:entry",
                         namespaces=ns)[0].text

print('lom_entry:', lom_entry)

lom_ids = [id.text for id in
           record.xpath("zs:recordData/srw_dc:dc/"
                        "lom:classification/lom:taxonPath/"
                        "lom:taxon/lom:id",
                        namespaces=ns)]

print("lom_ids:", lom_ids)

Output:

name: Frank Malina
lom_entry: 2.6
lom_ids: ['PYTHON', 'XML', 'XML-NAMESPACES']