My wife is a writer, which today means she uses a word processing program. It's a sophisticated, powerful program—OpenOffice.org Writer—but occasionally it won't do something that she wants it to do.

The nested namespace of xml.* violates Zen tenet #5 “Flat is better than nested”, and ConfigParser violates PEP 8 naming conventions. This is not news to long time Python programmers, but to newbies ...

3) This XML is actually fairly large, so I'd like to iterparse () instead of parse (), but I can't get that to work.

When parsing an XML document with DOM, the parser reads the entire document and creates a tree-like representation of it. The second method uses SAX and parses XML documents with events.