On Sun, 2010-05-16 at 02:37 +0200, Martin v. Loewis wrote: > > ??? The namespaces are embedded in the document. Personally I find it > > odd I have to tell xpath about the namespace of the document it is a > > $*&@(*& method of. > How so? Why do you say it's a "method", and why do you say "of"? > Usually, xpath expressions are *not* part of the document they operate > on, but part of the code that performs the operation.
from lxml import etree doc = etree.parse(data) doc.xpath(....) > Consequentially, > the namespace prefixes in the xpath expression do *not* occur in the > document (other than by chance), but are defined by whoever writes the > xpath expression. That is typically somebody different from the one > writing the document Maybe true technically, but false in practice. If I receive XML data from source XYZ or service XYZ the use of namespaces and their prefixes is extremely consistent [in practice] and very customary (for example: I've never seen the DSML namespace abbreviated as anything other than "dsml" and I rarely see WebDAV propfind XML use a namespace prefix other than "D"). The odds that a customer or vendors ERP will generate different namespaces and abbreviations between requests is ludicrously remote [I don't recall ever seeing it happen]. And if the xpath fails to produce normal [or any] output the workflow with either do nothing or abend which will draw the attention of an administrator. > - if you would always write them together, you > wouldn't need xpath in the first place, but could produce the selection > result right away. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
