Eric,

Thanks for checking. I agree that this behavior is acceptable, but a documentation fix would be appropriate. The documentation of iterparse should mention the events it accepts, also saying that those are strings. 

The events are listed at http://effbot.org/zone/element-iterparse.htm

Would you like to try your hand at submitting a patch for Python 3.2? I will review and apply it to 3.2 and 3.3