The author knows that it's useful. See http://effbot.org/zone/xml-scanner.htm http://effbot.org/zone/xml-scanner.htm where the author uses the scanner: > The 2

The author knows that it's useful. See http://effbot.org/zone/xml-scanner.htm http://effbot.org/zone/xml-scanner.htm where the author uses the scanner: > The 2.0 engine provides another (undocumented) feature that can be used to optimize this even further. The scanner method is used to create a scanner object and attach it to a string. See http://bugs.python.org/issue5337 http://bugs.python.org/issue5337 where the Python developers wondered if it should be documented. There's a 10 year old notice at https://mail.python.org/pipermail/patches/2006-November/021090.html https://mail.python.org/pipermail/patches/2006-November/0210... saying that the code would crash if the scanner was called from multiple threads. There's no doubt much more information about this - the above was all I cared to find out.