Remove all namespaces from xml

Question

Is there a way to remove namespaces from an xml (where I know there aren't any name collisions)? Currently I'm doing this for each known namespace:

s = re.sub(r'(<\/?)md:', r'\1', s)             # remove md:
s = re.sub(r'\s+xsi:', ' ', s)                 # remove xsi:

But I was wondering if there was something more generic that could be used. There are no CDATA allowed in the particular xml.

You never actually need that, when you use an xml parser you can always specify all the required namespaces. — Wiktor Stribiżew, May 13 '20 at 20:47
@WiktorStribiżew yes the issue is there are a lot of namespaces, not all of which I know (for example, there can be future namespace added in), so this is a bit more general-purpose for now. It's worked so far on production processing ~1M documents a day. — David542, May 13 '20 at 20:48
You can use XSLT processing to achieve this reliably. Just combine the _identity template_ with a template that transforms `name()`s to `local-name()`s. Then call the XSLT from Python. — zx485, May 13 '20 at 21:09
@zx485 that's an interesting approach, thanks for the feedback. Would you be able to add an answer that shows how you'd do that? — David542, May 13 '20 at 21:30
Here's an old answer which shows how to remove all namespaces from tags and attributes https://stackoverflow.com/a/33997423/2318649 — DisappointedByUnaccountableMod, Nov 30 '21 at 16:28

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered May 13 '20 at 23:40

You can use the XSLT approach by calling the following XSLT-1.0 template from Python. It combines the identity template with a template that transforms the (full) name()s of the elements to their local-name()s only. That means all <ns1:abc> elements are transformed to <abc>, for example. The namespaces are omitted.

However, how useful this is depends on your usecase. It reduces the amount of information, so handle with care.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
    <xsl:output method="xml" indent="yes"/>

    <xsl:template match="node()|@*">   <!-- Identity template copies all nodes (except for elements, which are handled by the other template) -->
        <xsl:copy>
            <xsl:apply-templates select="node()|@*" />
        </xsl:copy>
    </xsl:template>

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

</xsl:stylesheet>

Apply it with an XSLT-1.0 (or above) framework/processor.

Remove all namespaces from xml

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