This is fine, I guess, and it's clearly something people want to do based on how often it gets asked on Stackoverflow, but there's a reason XML zealots get snarky when people ask how to do this. Some questions you might want to ask yourself:

- Why are the namespaces there in the first place?

- Do I really not care if the element is found in a namespace other than the one expected?

- Does my host environment have a way to specify the namespace of the element I want to find (hint: it probably does)?

- Is the reason that I want to remove the namespace that it's actually something I need to do or is it that I am ignorant of the method for specifying namespaces in my host environment?

The question is usually "is the author of this XML actually using namespaces in a reasonable manner?"

And the answer is usually "no".

I have seen SOAP responses with 20+ namespaces, all of them being essentially implementation details -- every different section of their internal API getting its own namespace. Inevitably, the elements are also prefixed in a way that makes them distinct, or wrapped in a distinguishing element (i.e. Contact/NameInfo/FirstName rather than FirstName xmlns="contact-name").

In situations like that, your best case scenario is that you do the grunt work of setting up aliases for all the namespaces, putting them into your XPaths, and you're done. The worst case scenario (which I've encountered) is when a version update of the API changes the URIs for half the namespaces, even though the structure of the data hasn't changed. In a case like that, you're actually penalized for doing the 'right' thing and not just stripping the damn things off.