Re: [xml] Xpath issues with libxml2

[Ross Reedstrom <reedstrm rice edu>]

Alex -
With out examples of what you've tried, it's hard to diagnose the problem.
However, seeing 'namespaces' and 'never returns anything' makes me think you're
having issues with the default namespace concept. While XML documents have a
default namespace, XPaths do not. Once you use namespaces in an xml document,
all your xpaths will need to use namespace declarations for all the path parts,
even for tags that are defaulted in the document. So, you'll need to declare
a namespace prefix that matches the default namespace in the doc. Give us
a small example that you've tried that doesn't work, we'll fix it.

Ross

On Fri, Jan 30, 2015 at 08:44:15AM -0500, Alex Boese wrote:
> Forgive me if this is a deprecated approach (as I am not fully aware), but I was utilizing "default" 
> libxml2 bindings (not lxml) in Python to retrieve xml fragments via xpath functions. Normally this seems to 
> work fine, but with namespace declarations this seems especially problematic as nothing ever returns and 
> nothing errors. Would it be possible to confirm what correct functions and order of operations would be for 
> this? Even if the example is C, I can translate that to Python.

-- 
Ross Reedstrom, Ph.D.                                 reedstrm rice edu
Systems Engineer & Admin, Research Scientist        phone: 713-348-6166
Connexions                  http://cnx.org            fax: 713-348-3665
Rice University MS-375, Houston, TX 77005
GPG Key fingerprint = F023 82C8 9B0E 2CC6 0D8E  F888 D3AE 810E 88F0 BEDE