try: import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET # in python >=2.5 except ImportError: try: import cElementTree as ET # effbot's C module except ImportError: try: import elementtree.ElementTree as ET # effbot's pure Python module except ImportError: try: import lxml.etree as ET # ElementTree API using libxml2 except ImportError: import warnings warnings.warn("could not import ElementTree " "(http://effbot.org/zone/element-index.htm)") # Or you might just want to raise an ImportError here. # Use ET.Element, ET.ElementTree, etc...