I'm parsing an xml file using Python's ElementTree, like that:
et = ElementTree(file=file("test.xml"))
test.xml starts with a few lines of xml comments.
Is there a way to get those comments from et?
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2 Answers
For ElementTree 1.2.X there is an article on Reading processing instructions and comments with ElementTree (http://effbot.org/zone/element-pi.htm).
EDIT:
The alternative would be using lxml.etree which implements the ElementTree API. A quote from ElementTree compatibility of lxml.etree :
ElementTree ignores comments and processing instructions when parsing XML, while etree will read them in and treat them as Comment or ProcessingInstruction elements respectively.
3 Comments
Paul Oyster
unfortunately, there is no CommentHandler in the version that ships with python 2.5
Paul Oyster
Also, it is too risky to use internal library stuff, as the code should work with future versions of python.
f3lix
Those are legitimate arguments. I edited my answer and added an alternative solution.
Yes, there is a way.
from xml.etree import ElementTree
def parseXml (fn):
try:
target = ElementTree.TreeBuilder (insert_comments=True)
parser = ElementTree.XMLParser(target=target, encoding='utf-8')
et = ElementTree.parse (fn, parser)
except Exception as e:
print ("%s: %s" % (fn, str (e)))
return
for el in et.getroot ():
print (el)
Same applies to processing instructions (ElementTree.PI), they will be inserted into the resulting structure only if insert_pis=true.
1 Comment
mzjn
Note that this requires Python 3.8.