from xml.dom import minidom xmldoc = minidom.parse('binary.xml') reflist = xmldoc.getElementsByTagName('ref') firstref = reflist[0] print firstref.toxml() plist = firstref.getElementsByTagName("p") plist = xmldoc.getElementsByTagName("p") plist plist[0].toxml() plist[1].toxml() plist[2].toxml()