Universal Feed Parser attempts to expose all possible data in feeds, including elements in extension namespaces.

Some common namespaced elements are mapped to core elements. For further information about these mappings, see Reference.

Other namespaced elements are available as prefixelement.

The namespaces defined in the feed are available in the parsed results as namespaces, a dictionary of {prefix: namespaceURI}. If the feed defines a default namespace, it is listed as namespaces[''].

Accessing namespaced elements

>>> import feedparser
>>> d = feedparser.parse('http://feedparser.org/docs/examples/prism.rdf')
>>> d.feed.prism_issn
u'0028-0836'
>>> d.namespaces
{'': u'http://purl.org/rss/1.0/',
'prism': u'http://prismstandard.org/namespaces/1.2/basic/',
'rdf': u'http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#'}

The prefix used to construct the variable name is not guaranteed to be the same as the prefix of the namespaced element in the original feed. If Universal Feed Parser recognizes the namespace, it will use the namespace’s preferred prefix to construct the variable name. It will also list the namespace in the namespaces dictionary using the namespace’s preferred prefix.

In the previous example, the namespace (http://prismstandard.org/namespaces/1.2/basic/) was defined with the namespace’s preferred prefix (prism), so the prism:issn element was accessible as the variable d.feed.prism_issn. However, if the namespace is defined with a non-standard prefix, Universal Feed Parser will still construct the variable name using the preferred prefix, not the actual prefix that is used in the feed.

This will become clear with an example.