lxml etree xmlparser remove unwanted namespace

by 
import io
import lxml.etree as ET

content=""'\
<Envelope xmlns="http://www.example.com/zzz/yyy">
  <Header>
    <Version>1</Version>
  </Header>
  <Body>
    some stuff
  </Body>
</Envelope>
'''    
dom = ET.parse(io.BytesIO(content))

You can find namespace-aware nodes using the xpath method:

body=dom.xpath('//ns:Body',namespaces={'ns':'http://www.example.com/zzz/yyy'})
print(body)
# [<Element {http://www.example.com/zzz/yyy}Body at 90b2d4c>]

If you really want to remove namespaces, you could use an XSL transformation:

# http://wiki.tei-c.org/index.php/Remove-Namespaces.xsl
xslt=""'<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
<xsl:output method="xml" indent="no"/>

<xsl:template match="https://stackoverflow.com/"comment()|processing-instruction()">
    <xsl:copy>
      <xsl:apply-templates/>
    </xsl:copy>
</xsl:template>

<xsl:template match="*">
    <xsl:element name="{local-name()}">
      <xsl:apply-templates select="@*|node()"/>
    </xsl:element>
</xsl:template>

<xsl:template match="@*">
    <xsl:attribute name="{local-name()}">
      <xsl:value-of select="."/>
    </xsl:attribute>
</xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>
'''

xslt_doc=ET.parse(io.BytesIO(xslt))
transform=ET.XSLT(xslt_doc)
dom=transform(dom)

Here we see the namespace has been removed:

print(ET.tostring(dom))
# <Envelope>
#   <Header>
#     <Version>1</Version>
#   </Header>
#   <Body>
#     some stuff
#   </Body>
# </Envelope>

So you can now find the Body node this way:

print(dom.find("Body"))
# <Element Body at 8506cd4>

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