Finding top-level xml comments using Python's ElementTree

Question

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?

Answer 1

For ElementTree 1.2.X there is an article on Reading processing instructions and comments with ElementTree (http://effbot.org/zone/element-pi.htm).

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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.