get xml comment using python [duplicate]

Unfortunately reading this XML with the regular xml.etree module does not work - as it can start reading only from the root (or any tag "below") - so it skips the first comment.

The solution I'd suggest is reading the file regularly - using the regular:

dates = []

with open('app.xml', 'r') as fp:
   lines = fp.readlines()

for line in lines:
   if line.startswith('<!--'):
      dates.append(line)

Now, in order to detect dates I'd suggest using a regex:

import re
from datetime import datetime

date_format = r'%d %b %Y  %H:%M:%S %p'
date_regex = re.compile(r'\d{2} \w{3} \d{4}  \d{1}:\d{2}:\d{2} \w{2}')

for date in dates:
    extracted_date = re.findall(pattern=date_regex, string=date)[0]
    date_formatted_to_epoch = (datetime.strptime(extracted_date, date_format) - datetime(1970, 1, 1)).total_seconds()
    print(date_formatted_to_epoch)

Which for me outputs:

1674006055.0

Explanations:

• The reason I used total_seconds() comes from the first answer in this SO post - convert-python-datetime-to-epoch
• The regex is basically saying: we are searching 2 digits, then a space, then a 3 letter word then a space and so on... so if these formats change - it could be problematic to detect them.. you could try this thread as a helpful guide - extracting-date-from-a-string