untangle is a simple library which takes an XML document and returns a Python object which mirrors the nodes and attributes in its structure.

For example, an xml file like this:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<root>
    <child name="child1">
</root>

can be loaded like this:

import untangle
obj = untangle.parse('path/to/file.xml')

and then you can get the child elements name like this:

obj.root.child['name']

untangle also supports loading XML from a string or an URL.