Beginner question: lxml's findall in an xml namespace

[aecklers]

Hi all,

I just learned the python basics and so I'm pretty sure that I have overseen something pretty obvious. Due to the fact that I'm trying to find a solution for hours now, I'm writing this post.

TL;DR: When I add an xmlns attribute to my xml file, the root.findall function doesn't work anymore. '{namespace}condition' shows me a no attribute error.

It's my very first project where I try to read data from an xml file. For getting a deeper understanding, I'm using the XML examlple from docs.python.org which looks like that:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<data>
    <country name="Liechtenstein">
        <rank updated="yes">2</rank>
        <year>2008</year>
        <gdppc>141100</gdppc>
        <neighbor name="Austria" direction="E"/>
        <neighbor name="Switzerland" direction="W"/>
    </country>
...
</data>

By following the documentation, the following for loop shows the expected results:

for country in root.findall('country'):
    rank = country.find('rank').text
    print(rank)

But when I add an xmlns Attribute to the first line of my XML file (==> <data xmlns="http://foo.com">), there are no search results anymore.

Reading the documentation, I saw that I need to put the namespace into my for loop:

for country in root.findall('{http://foo.com}country'):
    rank = country.find('rank').text
    ...

But doing so I recive an AttributeError from line 2 of our example, saying "AttributeError: 'NoneType' object has no attribute 'text'

I searched the internet for hours now, found several threads, tried the same with lxml, etc but somehow I don't get the point here. Could anyone explain what I'm doing wrong here?

Regards,
Toni