etree, lxml unexpected behaviour

[Emanuele D'Arrigo]

Hi everybody, I just tried the following:

import xml.etree.ElementTree as etree
e = etree.fromstring('<aRoot xmlns="aNamespace" xmlns:ans="anotherNamespace"><aChild anAttr="1" ans:anotherAttr="2"/></aRoot>')
e.getchildren()[0].attrib

{'anAttr': '1', '{anotherNamespace}anotherAttr': '2'}

Notice the lack of namespace before the attribute "anAttr". I find
this unexpected because as you can see I did set the default namespace
with xmlns="aNamespace" and the elements (rather than the attributes)
are correctly associated with it, i.e.:
<Element {aNamespace}aRoot at 2326cb0>

Is there a way to change this behaviour so that attributes without
namespace are correctly associated with the default namespace, just
like the elements? lxml exhibit the exact same behaviour.

Manu

 

[Stefan Behnel]

Hi everybody, I just tried the following:

import xml.etree.ElementTree as etree
e = etree.fromstring('<aRoot xmlns="aNamespace" xmlns:ans="anotherNamespace"><aChild anAttr="1" ans:anotherAttr="2"/></aRoot>')
e.getchildren()[0].attrib

{'anAttr': '1', '{anotherNamespace}anotherAttr': '2'}

Notice the lack of namespace before the attribute "anAttr". I find
this unexpected because as you can see I did set the default namespace
with xmlns="aNamespace" and the elements (rather than the attributes)
are correctly associated with it, i.e.:
<Element {aNamespace}aRoot at 2326cb0>

Is there a way to change this behaviour so that attributes without
namespace are correctly associated with the default namespace, just
like the elements?

There isn't, because this is the correct behaviour according to the spec.

http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml-names/#defaulting

"""
A default namespace declaration applies to all unprefixed element names
within its scope. Default namespace declarations do not apply directly to
attribute names; the interpretation of unprefixed attributes is determined
by the element on which they appear.
"""

Stefan

 

[Emanuele D'Arrigo]

Thank you for the clarification Stefan, I understand.