Python ElementTree module: How to ignore the namespace of XML files to locate matching element when using the method “find”, “findall”

Instead of modifying the XML document itself, it’s best to parse it and then modify the tags in the result. This way you can handle multiple namespaces and namespace aliases:

from io import StringIO  # for Python 2 import from StringIO instead
import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET

# instead of ET.fromstring(xml)
it = ET.iterparse(StringIO(xml))
for _, el in it:
    _, _, el.tag = el.tag.rpartition('}') # strip ns
root = it.root

This is based on the discussion here.