How do I parse XML in Python?

I suggest ElementTree. There are other compatible implementations of the same API, such as lxml, and cElementTree in the Python standard library itself; but, in this context, what they chiefly add is even more speed -- the ease of programming part depends on the API, which ElementTree defines.

After building an Element instance e from the XML, e.g. with the XML function, or by parsing a file with something like

e = xml.etree.ElementTree.parse('thefile.xml').getroot()

or any of the many other ways shown at ElementTree, you just do something like:

for atype in e.findall('type'):print(atype.get('foobar'))

and similar, usually pretty simple, code patterns.