Python: ElementTree, get the namespace string of an Element

Question

This XML file is named example.xml:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<project xmlns="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:schemaLocation="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0 http://maven.apache.org/maven-v4_0_0.xsd">

  <modelVersion>14.0.0</modelVersion>
  <groupId>.com.foobar.flubber</groupId>
  <artifactId>uberportalconf</artifactId>
  <version>13-SNAPSHOT</version>
  <packaging>pom</packaging>
  <name>Environment for UberPortalConf</name>
  <description>This is the description</description>    
  <properties>
      <birduberportal.version>11</birduberportal.version>
      <promotiondevice.version>9</promotiondevice.version>
      <foobarportal.version>6</foobarportal.version>
      <eventuberdevice.version>2</eventuberdevice.version>
  </properties>
  <!-- A lot more here, but as it is irrelevant for the problem I have removed it -->
</project>

If I load example.xml and parse it with ElementTree I can see its namespace is http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0.

>>> from xml.etree import ElementTree
>>> tree = ElementTree.parse('example.xml')
>>> print tree.getroot()
<Element '{http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0}project' at 0x26ee0f0>

I have not found a method to call to get just the namespace from an Element without resorting to parsing the str(an_element) of an Element. It seems like there got to be a better way.

Answer 1

The namespace should be in Element.tag right before the "actual" tag:

>>> root = tree.getroot()
>>> root.tag
'{http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0}project'

To know more about namespaces, take a look at ElementTree: Working with Namespaces and Qualified Names.