In somewhat similar fashion, it's easy to parse an XML document to a DOM tree in Jython with Java SDK's libraries:

 from java.io import FileInputStream
 from javax.xml.transform.stream import StreamSource
 from javax.xml.transform.stream import StreamResult
 

 from javax.xml.parsers import DocumentBuilderFactory
 

 factory = DocumentBuilderFactory.newInstance()
 builder = factory.newDocumentBuilder()
 

 input = FileInputStream("myfile.xml")
 document = builder.parse(input)
 document.getDocumentElement()
 # etc.
 

There's no specific need for this, because you can do DOM stuff in recent Python implementations too, but with my naive benchmarks the above Jython snippet clocked at roughly 2 seconds with a 3 megabyte XML file and a Python 2.3 minidom parsing [1] clocked at 26 seconds. (I am not saying that the stock Python 2.3 minidom parser is representative for Python XML parsers, but to give some reference for the speed.)

I am not, of course, suggesting that you should switch to Jython, but I wish I did demonstrate the usefulness of Jython as a scripting tool for various XML tasks.

[1]

 from xml.dom.minidom import parse
 dom1 = parse('myfile.xml')