Remove an XML Declaration with BeautifulSoup in Python

October 2025

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

input = """
  <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
  <svg></svg>
"""

soup = BeautifulSoup(input, 'xml')
output = soup.find("svg")
print(output)

Output:

<svg/>

Head's up

The lxml package must be installed for BeautifulSoupt to use. It doesn't need to be imported directly, but has to be on the system.

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