Remove namespace and prefix from xml in python using lxml

We can get the desired output document in two steps:

1. Remove namespace URIs from element names
2. Remove unused namespace declarations from the XML tree

Example code

from lxml import etreeinput_xml = """<package xmlns="http://apple.com/itunes/importer">  <provider>some data</provider>  <language>en-GB</language>  <!-- some comment -->  <?xml-some-processing-instruction ?></package>"""root = etree.fromstring(input_xml)# Iterate through all XML elementsfor elem in root.getiterator():    # Skip comments and processing instructions,    # because they do not have names    if not (        isinstance(elem, etree._Comment)        or isinstance(elem, etree._ProcessingInstruction)    ):        # Remove a namespace URI in the element's name        elem.tag = etree.QName(elem).localname# Remove unused namespace declarationsetree.cleanup_namespaces(root)print(etree.tostring(root).decode())

Output XML

<package>  <provider>some data</provider>  <language>en-GB</language>  <!-- some comment -->  <?xml-some-processing-instruction ?></package>

Details explaining the code

As described in the documentation, we use lxml.etree.QName.localname to get local names of elements, that is names without namespace URIs. Then we replace the fully qualified names of the elements by their local names.

Some XML elements, such as comments and processing instructions do not have names. So, we have to skip these elements while replacing element names, otherwise a ValueError will be raised.

Finally, we use lxml.etree.cleanup_namespaces() to remove unused namespace declarations from the XML tree.

Replace tag as Uku Loskit suggests. In addition to that, use lxml.objectify.deannotate.

from lxml import etree, objectifymetadata = '/Users/user1/Desktop/Python/metadata.xml'parser = etree.XMLParser(remove_blank_text=True)tree = etree.parse(metadata, parser)root = tree.getroot()####    for elem in root.getiterator():    if not hasattr(elem.tag, 'find'): continue  # (1)    i = elem.tag.find('}')    if i >= 0:        elem.tag = elem.tag[i+1:]objectify.deannotate(root, cleanup_namespaces=True)####tree.write('/Users/user1/Desktop/Python/done.xml',           pretty_print=True, xml_declaration=True, encoding='UTF-8')

UPDATE

Some tags like Comment return a function when accessing tag attribute. added a guard for that. (1)

import xml.etree.ElementTree as ETdef remove_namespace(doc, namespace):    """Remove namespace in the passed document in place."""    ns = u'{%s}' % namespace    nsl = len(ns)    for elem in doc.getiterator():        if elem.tag.startswith(ns):            elem.tag = elem.tag[nsl:]metadata = '/Users/user1/Desktop/Python/metadata.xml'tree = ET.parse(metadata)root = tree.getroot()remove_namespace(root, u'http://apple.com/itunes/importer')tree.write('/Users/user1/Desktop/Python/done.xml',       pretty_print=True, xml_declaration=True, encoding='UTF-8')

Used a snippet of code from hereThis method could be easily extended to delete any namespace attributes by searching for tags that begin with "xmlns"