TL;DR:

• Idiomatic XML processing in Clojure is possible and even easy, but under-documented;
• Namespace-XML support seems to be particularly hidden;
• It works naturally by mapping to namespaced keywords.

The Details

I still occasionally find myself writing XML processing code in Clojure, either for production or one-off data munging tasks. XML support is quite good, and quite idiomatic, but I’ve found that getting started is often confusing. Is data.xml all you need? Where does data.zip fit in?

The short explanation is that the first function you are likely to find returns a Clojure structure with maps representing elements, but then there’s a similar function that is lazy, and there’s also a zipper library with some awesome processing functions that is probably what you want, at least on the input side. The best overview I’ve found is this blog post.

My code usually starts off something like this:¹

(:require [clojure.data.xml :as xml]
            [clojure.data.zip.xml :as zx]
            [clojure.java.io :as io]
            [clojure.zip :as zip])

(-> filename io/resource slurp xml/parse-str zip/xml-zip)

which you can then process using the data.zip.xml utilities, generally starting with either xml-> or xml1-> (the latter just produces a single result), and using keywords to traverse down tag names:

(zx/xml-> zipped-xml :RootElement :SomeChild custom-processing-fn)

(where custom-processing-fn is probably returns a structure out of the <SomeChild> element)

The problem is: what if your document is namespaced, such as <myns:SomeChild>? Fortunately, it turns out that you can map these exactly to Clojure namespaced-keywords. The trick is the alias-uri function:

(xml/alias-uri 'sld "http://www.opengis.net/sld")

and then you can proceed exactly as before, but with namespaces:

(zx/xml-> zipped-xml ::sld/StyledLayerDescriptor ....)