How can I access namespaced XML elements using BeautifulSoup?

by

BeautifulSoup isn’t a DOM library per se (it doesn’t implement the DOM APIs). To make matters more complicated, you’re using namespaces in that xml fragment. To parse that specific piece of XML, you’d use BeautifulSoup as follows:

from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup

xml = """<xml>
  <web:Web>
    <web:Total>4000</web:Total>
    <web:Offset>0</web:Offset>
  </web:Web>
</xml>"""

doc = BeautifulSoup( xml )
print doc.find( 'web:total' ).string
print doc.find( 'web:offset' ).string

If you weren’t using namespaces, the code could look like this:

from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup

xml = """<xml>
  <Web>
    <Total>4000</Total>
    <Offset>0</Offset>
  </Web>
</xml>"""

doc = BeautifulSoup( xml )
print doc.xml.web.total.string
print doc.xml.web.offset.string

The key here is that BeautifulSoup doesn’t know (or care) anything about namespaces. Thus web:Web is treated like a web:web tag instead of as a Web tag belonging to th eweb namespace. While BeautifulSoup adds web:web to the xml element dictionary, python syntax doesn’t recognize web:web as a single identifier.

You can learn more about it by reading the documentation.

More Related Contents:

  1. Parsing XML with namespace in Python via ‘ElementTree’
  2. Difference between “findAll” and “find_all” in BeautifulSoup
  3. Python BeautifulSoup XML Parsing
  4. Reading XML file and fetching its attributes value in Python
  5. Extracting an attribute value with beautifulsoup
  6. How to find elements by class
  7. How to remove \xa0 from string in Python?
  8. Creating a simple XML file using python
  9. Using BeautifulSoup to extract text without tags
  10. Beautiful Soup findAll doesn’t find them all
  11. BeautifulSoup – search by text inside a tag
  12. BeautifulSoup findAll() given multiple classes?
  13. How can I create a Word document using Python? [closed]
  14. Beautiful Soup Can’t Find Tags
  15. How to update/modify an XML file in python?
  16. Understand the Find() function in Beautiful Soup
  17. Using XPath in ElementTree
  18. How to use CSS selectors to retrieve specific links lying in some class using BeautifulSoup?
  19. Compare XML snippets?
  20. How to write XML declaration using xml.etree.ElementTree
  21. BeautifulSoup – extracting attribute values
  22. Faithfully Preserve Comments in Parsed XML
  23. BeautifulSoup: Get the contents of a specific table
  24. Get document DOCTYPE with BeautifulSoup
  25. Why does this xpath fail using lxml in python?
  26. How to download a full webpage with a Python script?
  27. BeautifulSoup returns None even though the element exists
  28. Why is lxml.etree.iterparse() eating up all my memory?
  29. Use xml.etree.ElementTree to print nicely formatted xml files [duplicate]
  30. Extract content within a tag with BeautifulSoup

Leave a Comment