1from xml.dom import minidom
2
3# parse an xml file by name
4mydoc = minidom.parse('items.xml')
5
6items = mydoc.getElementsByTagName('item')
7
8# one specific item attribute
9print('Item #2 attribute:')
10print(items[1].attributes['name'].value)
11
12# all item attributes
13print('\nAll attributes:')
14for elem in items:
15    print(elem.attributes['name'].value)
16
17# one specific item's data
18print('\nItem #2 data:')
19print(items[1].firstChild.data)
20print(items[1].childNodes[0].data)
21
22# all items data
23print('\nAll item data:')
24for elem in items:
25    print(elem.firstChild.data)

1Soviut's advice for lxml objectify is good. With a specially subclassed simplejson, you can turn an lxml objectify result into json.
2
3import simplejson as json
4import lxml
5
6class objectJSONEncoder(json.JSONEncoder):
7  """A specialized JSON encoder that can handle simple lxml objectify types
8      >>> from lxml import objectify
9      >>> obj = objectify.fromstring("<Book><price>1.50</price><author>W. Shakespeare</author></Book>")       
10      >>> objectJSONEncoder().encode(obj)
11      '{"price": 1.5, "author": "W. Shakespeare"}'       
12 """
13
14
15    def default(self,o):
16        if isinstance(o, lxml.objectify.IntElement):
17            return int(o)
18        if isinstance(o, lxml.objectify.NumberElement) or isinstance(o, lxml.objectify.FloatElement):
19            return float(o)
20        if isinstance(o, lxml.objectify.ObjectifiedDataElement):
21            return str(o)
22        if hasattr(o, '__dict__'):
23            #For objects with a __dict__, return the encoding of the __dict__
24            return o.__dict__
25        return json.JSONEncoder.default(self, o)
26See the docstring for example of usage, essentially you pass the result of lxml objectify to the encode method of an instance of objectJSONEncoder
27
28Note that Koen's point is very valid here, the solution above only works for simply nested xml and doesn't include the name of root elements. This could be fixed.
29
30I've included this class in a gist here: http://gist.github.com/345559