Parsing xml with empty namespace

Question

I use lxml to parse well-formatted xml:

<search-results xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"
                xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom" 
                xmlns:prism="http://prismstandard.org/namespaces/basic/2.0/"
                xmlns:opensearch="http://a9.com/-/spec/opensearch/1.1/"
                xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/">
    <opensearch:totalResults>0</opensearch:totalResults>
    <opensearch:startIndex>0</opensearch:startIndex>
    <opensearch:itemsPerPage>0</opensearch:itemsPerPage>
    <entry>
        <error>Result set was empty</error>
    </entry>
</search-results>

I am interested in the text inside error.

I was using the following code:

from lxml import etree

doc = etree.fromstring(xml) # xml is above xml

ns = {'opensearch': "http://a9.com/-/spec/opensearch/1.1/"}
print doc.xpath('//opensearch:totalResults', namespaces=ns)[0].text

which works fine to get a 0, but what should I do for <entry>, which doesn't seem to be in a namespace? I tried adding the empty namespace, which I think is associated with "http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom":

ns = {'opensearch': "http://a9.com/-/spec/opensearch/1.1/", 'empty': "http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"}
print doc.xpath('//entry/error', namespaces=ns)[0].text

But this results in an IndexError, because there is no list.

alecxe · Accepted Answer · 2016-02-11 21:12:58Z

1

You need to use that empty alias you gave to the empty namespace inside the expression:

ns = {'opensearch': "http://a9.com/-/spec/opensearch/1.1/", 'empty': "http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"}
print doc.xpath('//empty:entry/empty:error', namespaces=ns)[0].text

answered Feb 11, 2016 at 21:12

alecxe

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