Secondly, it's great that it's available in identical form in both Python and C versions. Not everyone can install C modules on their server, but offers a massive performance boost for those that can.

Lastly, the performance overhead of reading in and parsing the file is a significant, if not the only, benchmark. It is one constant that everyone needs to be able to do, but you cannot tell what the user plans to do from that point onwards.

I had written a similar C module for PHP and was planning to port it to Python before discovering elementtree. I'll now abandon that idea as Fredrik's module is perfect for what I need. Well done Fredrik.

Phillip.