using shapely: translating between Polygons and MultiPolygons

Further to relet's answer on how to get individual polygons, you can then run an intersection on all the polygons to create the holes. If your dataset contains overlapping polygons though you're out of luck.

Explain again what is wrong with existing shapefile readers?

Would it not be easier to export feature IDs and M values from the shapefile and then join them back to the polygons after using an existing shapefile reader?

For multipatches you can use the same technique of assigning polygon IDs to a "patch ID" and then adding this attribute back to the features.

Edit: Whilst you say you don't want to use OGR, just in case you change your mind..

import ogr
# Get the driver
driver = ogr.GetDriverByName('ESRI Shapefile')
# Open a shapefile
shapefileName = "D:/temp/myshapefile.shp"
dataset = driver.Open(shapefileName, 0)

layer = dataset.GetLayer()
for index in xrange(layer.GetFeatureCount()):
    feature = layer.GetFeature(index)
    geometry = feature.GetGeometryRef()
    #geometry for polygon as WKT, inner rings, outer rings etc. 
    print geometry

The geometry should be output as follows:

POLYGON ((79285 57742,78741 54273...),(76087 55694,78511 55088,..))

The first bracket contains the coords of the exterior ring, subsequent brackets the coords of interior rings. If you have Z values points should be in the format 79285 57742 10 (where the last coord is a height).

Otherwise you could use the Shapely Contains and Within functions to assess every polygon with each other and apply a spatial index beforehand - http://pypi.python.org/pypi/Rtree/ to speed up processing.

First, use ogr to open shapefile:

from osgeo import ogr
source = ogr.Open("mpolys.shp")
layers =  source.GetLayerByName("mpoly")
len(layers)
1

convert shapefile geometries into shapely geometries

from shapely.wkb import loads
element=layers[0] #(because lenght of layer =1, else you need "for element in layers: ...")
geom = loads(element.GetGeometryRef().ExportToWkb())
geom.geom_type
'MultiPolygon'
print geom
MULTIPOLYGON ((..... # the geometry in shapely wkt format

For the polygons in the multipolygon:

poly=[]
for pol in geom:
    poly.append(pol)
poly[0]
<shapely.geometry.polygon.Polygon object at 0x00B82CB0>
poly[0].geom_type
'Polygon'
print(poly[1])
POLYGON ((.... # the geometry in shapely wkt format

And now, you can use all the functions of shapely (shapely)