I’ve been bashing my head tonight against XML namespaces tonight. It looks like I have to qualify my XPATH statements with the namespace at each level. e.g… (where j is a namespace label mapped to a URI)

“j:chassis-inventory/j:chassis/j:serial-number/text()”

This is unwieldy. I started poking around the Juniper/ncclient github repo because I didn’t remember having to qualify the hell out of everything with Python and I found that there is a proc that does an XSLT to strip namespaces from the RPC reply. There is probably some drawback that I haven’t yet considered. But so far it seems like it will declutter my XPATH statements considerably if I do so.