Remove namespace in an XML document (using ElementTree) ¶

def remove_namespace(doc, namespace):
    """Remove namespace in the passed document in place."""
    ns = u'{%s}' % namespace
    nsl = len(ns)
    for elem in doc.getiterator():
        if elem.tag.startswith(ns):
            elem.tag = elem.tag[nsl:]


# example (import ElementTree as ET)
elem = ET.fromstring(some_xml_string)
remove_namespace(elem, u'http://earth.google.com/kml/2.0')