pythonxmlelementtreexml-namespacesxml-attribute

Remove XML element attribute with namespace

I want to remove an attribute of a specific element, which includes a namespace.

In the following element: <CountryCode xsi:nil="true"></CountryCode> I want to remove xsi:nil="true" in order to add a value to the element, Country Code in later processing (I cannot share the entire xml because its for work).

Here is what I've tried so far:

import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET

#path to xml files
xml_path = 'path'
for c in (Path(xml_path).glob('*')):
    file = (str(c))
    if file.endswith(".xml"):
        ns = {'d': 'http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance'}
        tree = ET.parse(file)
        root = tree.getroot()

    #Get specific element
    for e in list(root.findall('ImageSegment', ns)):
        elm = root.find(".//CountryCode")
        **#Remove 'nil' attribute?????**
        elm.attrib.pop('nil', ns)
        ET.dump(elm)

The line , elm.attrib.pop('nil', ns) does not seem to have any effect when I check the element with ET.dump(elm) , which returns <CountryCode xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:nil="true" />.I expect it to return an empty dict.

I would like the element in the xml to be <CountryCode></CountryCode>

I would appreciate any suggestions. Thank you

Solution

  • To delete an attribute bound to a namespace, use the full namespace URI delimited by curly braces. Like this:

    elm.attrib.pop("{http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance}nil")

    This also works:

    del elm.attrib["{http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance}nil"]