A Survey of XML tools for Python

The first two installments of Charming Python by David Mertz provided an overview of working with XML in Python. In the year since those initial writings, however, the state of XML tools for Python has advanced significantly. Unfortunately, most of these advances have not been backwards compatible. This special installment article revisits the author's previous discussion of XML tools, and provides up-to-date code samples.

Python is, in many ways, an ideal language for working with XML documents. Like Perl, REBOL, REXX, and TCL, it's a flexible scripting language with powerful text manipulation capabilities. Moreover, more than most types of text files (or streams), XML documents typically encode rich and complex data structures.