Compare XML snippets?

Building on another SO question, how can one check whether two well-formed XML snippets are semantically equal. All I need is "equal" or not, since I'm using this for unit tests.

In the system I want, these would be equal (note the order of 'start' and 'end'):

<?xml version='1.0' encoding='utf-8' standalone='yes'?>
<Stats start="1275955200" end="1276041599">
</Stats>

# Reordered start and end

<?xml version='1.0' encoding='utf-8' standalone='yes'?>
<Stats end="1276041599" start="1275955200" >
</Stats>

I have lmxl and other tools at my disposal, and a simple function that only allows reordering of attributes would work fine as well!

Working snippet based on IanB's answer:

from formencode.doctest_xml_compare import xml_compare
# have to strip these or fromstring carps
xml1 = """    <?xml version='1.0' encoding='utf-8' standalone='yes'?>
    <Stats start="1275955200" end="1276041599"></Stats>"""
xml2 = """     <?xml version='1.0' encoding='utf-8' standalone='yes'?>
    <Stats end="1276041599" start="1275955200"></Stats>"""
xml3 = """ <?xml version='1.0' encoding='utf-8' standalone='yes'?>
    <Stats start="1275955200"></Stats>"""

from lxml import etree
tree1 = etree.fromstring(xml1.strip())
tree2 = etree.fromstring(xml2.strip())
tree3 = etree.fromstring(xml3.strip())

import sys
reporter = lambda x: sys.stdout.write(x + "\n")

assert xml_compare(tree1,tree2,reporter)
assert xml_compare(tree1,tree3,reporter) is False

You can use formencode.doctest_xml_compare -- the xml_compare function compares two ElementTree or lxml trees.

The order of the elements can be significant in XML, this may be why most other methods suggested will compare unequal if the order is different... even if the elements have same attributes and text content.

But I also wanted an order-insensitive comparison, so I came up with this:

from lxml import etree
import xmltodict  # pip install xmltodict


def normalise_dict(d):
    """
    Recursively convert dict-like object (eg OrderedDict) into plain dict.
    Sorts list values.
    """
    out = {}
    for k, v in dict(d).iteritems():
        if hasattr(v, 'iteritems'):
            out[k] = normalise_dict(v)
        elif isinstance(v, list):
            out[k] = []
            for item in sorted(v):
                if hasattr(item, 'iteritems'):
                    out[k].append(normalise_dict(item))
                else:
                    out[k].append(item)
        else:
            out[k] = v
    return out


def xml_compare(a, b):
    """
    Compares two XML documents (as string or etree)

    Does not care about element order
    """
    if not isinstance(a, basestring):
        a = etree.tostring(a)
    if not isinstance(b, basestring):
        b = etree.tostring(b)
    a = normalise_dict(xmltodict.parse(a))
    b = normalise_dict(xmltodict.parse(b))
    return a == b