To those who are using large xml files here is a simple python script that could be useful

readxml.py

from xml.etree import ElementTree as ET
import re

def strip_whitespace(my_string):
    """Removes spaces, tabs, and newline characters from a string.
    \s matches any whitespace character, this is equivalent to the class [\t\n\r\f\v]."""
    return re.sub("\s", "", my_string)

my_xml = """
<root>
    <child>One</child>
    <child>Two</child>
</root>
"""

my_xml = strip_whitespace(my_xml)

element = ET.XML(my_xml)

for subelement in element:
    print subelement.text