Fast and capable XML parser?

[Larry Bates]

Magnus Lycka wrote:
> I'm looking for some library to parse XML code
> much faster than the libs built into Python 2.4
> (I'm stuck with 2.4 for quite a while) and I
> also need XML Schema validation, and would
> appreciate support for e.g. XPath and XInclude.
> I also want an API which is more Pythonic than
> e.g. a thin wrapper over a C or C++ API.
> 
> It should be available on at least Linux,
> Solaris and AIX.
> 
> Some uses involve parsing lots of (often small)
> XML files at reasonable speed, i.e. several
> hundred files per second. That means that we
> can't use anything like an os.system call to
> xmllint for XML Schema validation--it gets too
> slow. I also suspect that the standard Python
> libs (in Python 2.4 at least) are slower than
> we'd like them to be. (Not that it matters if
> they don't support XML Schema validation.)
> 
> Any suggestions?

I don't know if it meets ALL of your requirements but this might
help:

http://www.reportlab.org/pyrxp.html

-Larry