In the example there are two namespaces in one document, but it is impossible to search all elements only in one namespace:

>>> import xml.etree.ElementTree as etree
>>>
>>> s = '<feed xmlns="http://def" xmlns:x="http://x"><a/><x:b/></feed>'
>>>
>>> root = etree.fromstring(s)
>>>
>>> root.findall('*')
[<Element '{http://def}a' at 0xb73961bc>, <Element '{http://x}b' at 0xb7396c34>]
>>>
>>> root.findall('{http://def}*')
[]
>>>

And same try with site package lxml works fine:

>>> import lxml.etree as etree
>>>
>>> s = '<feed xmlns="http://def" xmlns:x="http://x"><a/><x:b/></feed>'
>>>
>>> root = etree.fromstring(s)
>>>
>>> root.findall('*')
[<Element {http://def}a at 0xb70ab11c>, <Element {http://x}b at 0xb70ab144>]
>>>
>>> root.findall('{http://def}*')
[<Element {http://def}a at 0xb70ab11c>]
>>>

lxml has a couple of nice features here:

• all tags in a namespace: "{namespace}*"
• a local name 'tag' in any (or no) namespace: "{*}tag"
• a tag without namespace: "{}tag"
• all tags without namespace: "{}*"

"{}" is also accepted but is the same as "*". Note that "*" is actually allowed as an XML tag name by the spec, but rare enough to hijack it for this purpose. I've actually never seen it used anywhere in the wild.

lxml's implementation isn't applicable to ElementTree (searching has been subject to excessive optimisation), but it shouldn't be hard to extend the one in ET's ElementPath.py module, as well as Element.iter() in ElementTree.py, to support this kind of tag comparison.

PR welcome.

lxml's tests are here (and in the following test methods):

https://github.com/lxml/lxml/blob/359f693b972c2e6b0d83d26a329d2d20b7581c48/src/lxml/tests/test_etree.py#L2911

Note that they actually test the deprecated .getiterator() method for historical reasons. They should probably call .iter() instead these days. lxml's ElementPath implementation is under src/lxml/_elementpath.py, but the tag comparison itself is done elsewhere in Cython code (here, in case it matters:)

https://github.com/lxml/lxml/blob/359f693b972c2e6b0d83d26a329d2d20b7581c48/src/lxml/apihelpers.pxi#L921-L1048

PR submitted, feedback welcome.

BTW, I found that lxml and ET differ in their behaviour when searching for '*'. ET takes it as meaning "any tree node", whereas lxml interprets it as "any Element". Since ET's parser does not create comments and processing instructions by default, this does not make a difference in most cases, but when the tree contains comments or PIs, then they will be found by '*' in ET but not in lxml.

At least for "{}", they now both return only Elements. Changing either behaviour for '*' is probably not a good idea at this point.

New changeset 4754168 by Stefan Behnel in branch 'master':
bpo-28238: Implement "{}tag" and "{ns}" wildcard tag selection support for ElementPath, and extend the surrounding tests and docs. (GH-12997)
4754168

Is this an issue with Python's xml module or something specific to CPython? I am having this with the xml module right now

Is this an issue with Python's xml module or something specific to CPython? I am having this with the xml module right now

This feature was added to the xml.etree package in the standard library of Python 3.8. It's not specific to CPython, all Python implementations that use the same standard library (3.8) module here should have the same features.