Newbie needs help extracting data from XML

[Rodney]

Hi,

Im a Python newbie and am trying to get the data out of a series of XML 
files.  So for example the xml is:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?><soap:Envelope 
xmlns:soap="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/" 
xmlns:soapenc="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/encoding/" 
xmlns:tns="http://www.ExchangeNetwork.net/schema/v1.0/node.wsdl" 
xmlns:types="http://www.ExchangeNetwork.net/schema/v1.0/node.wsdl" 
xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" 
xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema"><soap:Header><wsu:Timestamp 
xmlns:wsu="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/ws/2002/07/utility"><wsu:Created>2005-12-28T05:59:38Z</wsu:Created><wsu:Expires>2005-12-28T06:04:38Z</wsu:Expires></wsu:Timestamp></soap:Header><soap:Body 
soap:encodingStyle="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/encoding/"><q1:NodePingResponse 
xmlns:q1="http://www.ExchangeNetwork.net/schema/v1.0/node.xsd"><return 
xsi:type="xsd:string">Ready</return></q1:NodePingResponse></soap:Body></soap:Envelope>


and I want to get the value from the element "return" which currently has a 
value of "Ready".

Other XML files I want to work with may have several elements I want to pull 
data from.  This seem relatively easy but I have been reading and cruising 
google for hours and none of the examples make any sense.

I appreciate any code writing help with this.