On 10/01/2010 12:19 PM, Stanley, Jon [Tech] wrote: I don't know of a solution off hand, but googling 'python xml to dictionary' brings up a few people asking the same question, and some possible solutions. That said, just parsing the xml by hand isn't too bad, it only takes a few minutes to learn how to contruct xpaths for lookup. Here's how to get the target dev for the first interface device using libxml2 (and as I understand it, the native python xml libraries are even simpler): import libxml2 xmlstr = file("myxml.xml").read() doc = libxml2.parseDoc(xmlstr) ctx = doc.xpathNewContext() nodelist = ctx.xpathEval("/domain/devices/interface[1]/target/@dev") val = nodelist and nodelist[0].content or None print val - Cole