Hello Martin,
If your XML document declares the namespace
xmlns="http://www.tei-c.org/ns/1.0”
then you can use XPath in two ways to find the `w` element nodes:
>>> xml.xpath("//tei:w", namespaces={"tei": "http://www.tei-c.org/ns/1.0"})
or
>>> xml.xpath("//*[name() = 'w’]") # Any element node whose tag is ‘w’,
ignoring the ns
Hope this helps,
Jens
> On Mar 11, 2026, at 06:41, Martin Mueller <[email protected]>
> wrote:
>
> I am probably missing something trivial, but I am completely baffled by the
> use of namespaces when using xpath with lxml.
>
> I have a template that creates a tree from an XML document and passes it to a
> function for processing at the w level. If I change the root element of a TEI
> document into ABC (turning it into a generic XML document),the following code
> works:
>
> for w in tree.xpath('//w'):
> print(etree.tostring(w))
>
> This shouldn't work in a TEI document, because the xpath method requires a
> qualified name or namespace.
>
> I assumed that the full tag name {http://www.tei-c.org/ns/1.0} might work:
>
> for w in tree.xpath('http://www.tei-c.org/ns/1.0}w'):
> print(etree.tostring(w))
>
> But it doesn't work. Neither does a special xmlns:tei declaration.
>
> So I am totally baffled. For ordinary lxml processing the ordinary mapping
> of the URI to tei would work. But it fails for xpath. The rather terse lxml
> manual was no help.
>
> I'll be grateful for any help.
>
_______________________________________________
lxml - The Python XML Toolkit mailing list -- [email protected]
To unsubscribe send an email to [email protected]
https://mail.python.org/mailman3//lists/lxml.python.org
Member address: [email protected]
