I like Python, but I don't want to write 10 lines just to get an attribute from an element. Maybe it's just me, but minidom isn't that mini. The code I have to write in order to parse something using it looks a lot like Java code.
Is there something that is more user-friendly ? Something with overloaded operators, and which maps elements to objects?
I'd like to be able to access this :
<root>
<node value="30">text</node>
</root>
as something like this :
obj = parse(xml_string)
print obj.node.value
and not using getChildren or some other methods like that.
You should take a look at ElementTree. It's not doing exactly what you want but it's a lot better then minidom. If I remember correctly, starting from python 2.4, it's included in the standard libraries. For more speed use cElementTree. For more more speed (and more features) you can use lxml (check the objectify API for your needs/approach).
I should add that BeautifulSoup do partly what you want. There's also Amara that have this approach.