<s>[INST] How do I parse XML in Python? I have many rows in a database that contains xml and I'm trying to write a Python script that will go through those rows and count how many instances of a particular node attribute show up. For instance, my tree looks like:
<foo>
   <bar>
      <type foobar="1"/>
      <type foobar="2"/>
   </bar>
</foo>

How can I access the attributes 1 and 2 in the XML using Python?
 [/INST] 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
import xml.etree.ElementTree
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.
 </s>