Replacing inner contents of an SVG in Python

Question

I have an svg template that I am copying and customizing to create several different cards and tiles for a game. I want to programmatically (in Python, preferably) change elements from the template per-card. I seem to have no trouble finding ways to change attributes or css, but I'm having trouble finding a library where I can easily parse an existing svg and replace elements.

The svg of my template looks somewhat like this:

<!--Square 2" Tile Template -->
<svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" width="181" height="181">
    <text id="tile_text" y="90" width="100%" 
          style="text-align:center;font-family:Verdana;font-size:20">
        TEXT TO REPLACE
    </text>
</svg>

I have looked at Python's lxml and xml.dom.minidom but neither of them seem to support something like tile_text_element.innerHTML = "New Tile Name". Help?

EDIT:

To add a little bit about my workflow, I am creating a bunch of individualized svgs for each card, then batch rendering them to pdf through inkscape.

Answer 1

Another way is to use lxml, seems to work, WARNING bad quality code:

$ cat card.py
#!/usr/bin/env python

from lxml import etree

with open('card.svg') as card:
    root = etree.fromstring(card.read())

root.find('.//{http://www.w3.org/2000/svg}text').text = "foobar"
print etree.tostring(root)
$ python card.py
<svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" width="181" height="181">
    <text id="tile_text" y="90" width="100%" style="text-align:center;font-family:Verdana;font-size:20">foobar</text>
</svg>