How to parse XML and count instances of a particular node attribute?

I suggest ElementTree. There are other compatible implementations of the same API, such as lxml, and cElementTree in the Python standard library itself; but, in this context, what they chiefly add is even more speed -- the ease of programming part depends on the API, which ElementTree defines.

First build an Element instance root from the XML, e.g. with the XML function, or by parsing a file with something like:

import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET
root = ET.parse('thefile.xml').getroot()

Or any of the many other ways shown at ElementTree. Then do something like:

for type_tag in root.findall('bar/type'):
    value = type_tag.get('foobar')
    print(value)

And similar, usually pretty simple, code patterns.

minidom is the quickest and pretty straight forward.

XML:

<data>
    <items>
        <item name="item1"></item>
        <item name="item2"></item>
        <item name="item3"></item>
        <item name="item4"></item>
    </items>
</data>

Python:

from xml.dom import minidom
xmldoc = minidom.parse('items.xml')
itemlist = xmldoc.getElementsByTagName('item')
print(len(itemlist))
print(itemlist[0].attributes['name'].value)
for s in itemlist:
    print(s.attributes['name'].value)

Output:

4
item1
item1
item2
item3
item4