I just released version 1.1 of XMLFilter, which marks the first public standalone release. XMLFilter is an open-source Python module you can include with your programs to provide XML parsing even if the target system lacks a working xml.sax package. You can use it to quickly adapt existing xml.sax-compatible scripts to work out of the box, for example, on Jaguar (Mac OS X 10.2), which lacks expat.

It works by using the older xmllib module as a fallback for xml.sax. A test suite verifies call-by-call compatibility no matter which module ends up being used.

Other features include XML event-stream filtering, writing, and creation, with support for writing CDATA sections. (Using these classes also avoids bugs in some versions of xml.sax.)

Generally, the newer your version of Python, the faster it goes. For example, if xml.sax and expat are working, they give a factor-of-3 speedup over the pure-Python xmllib, and on Python 2.3, Unicode encoding conversions will use xmlcharrefreplace for faster writing of XML numeric entities.

Python-licensed. Tested all the way down to Python 1.5.2 and up to Python 2.3. xml.sax-compatible, Unicode-savvy (wherever Python is), and optionally namespace-aware.