> > I assumed that the full tag name {http://www.tei-c.org/ns/1.0}
might work:
Clark's notation is valid in ETPath (find/findall/iterfind), but it's
not part of XPath's syntax. XPath only understands namespace prefixes
(ns:nodename) so you need to provide xpath with a `namespaces` mapping,
as documented in https://lxml.de/xpathxslt.html#namespaces-and-prefixes
Alternatively you can bail on the nametest by using a wildcard (`//*`),
and then use `local-name()` and `namespace-uri()` in the node test in
order to select the nodes you're interested in e.g.
tree.xpath('//*[namespace-uri() = "http://www.tei-c.org/ns/1.0"; and
local-name() = "w"]')
On 10/03/2026 21:41, Martin Mueller 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.
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