Question

I would like to comment out a text like this:

<name>cranberry</name>

However, my script returns the output like this:

<!-- &lt;name&gt;cranberry&lt;/name&gt; -->

My Script:

import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET
from xml.etree.ElementTree import Comment

tree = ET.parse(r"C:\sample.xml") 
root = tree.getroot() 
comment = ET.Comment("<name>cranberry</name>")
root.insert(0,comment)
tree.write(r"C:\sample1.xml")

Any advice would be appreciated.

Answer 1

The older ElementTree library included in Python 2.6 does indeed XML-escape data in comments unconditionally:

$ python2.6 -c "from xml.etree import ElementTree as ET; print ET.tostring(ET.Comment('<'))"
<!-- &lt; -->

You have a few options:

• Upgrade to Python 2.7; it handles comment serialization correctly:

  $python2.7 -c "from xml.etree import ElementTree as ET; print ET.tostring(ET.Comment('<'))"
  <!--<-->
  

• Install the external ElementTree library.

• Use the Minidom (not recommended, the DOM API is overly verbose):

  from xml.dom import minidom
  
  doc = minidom.parse(r"C:\sample.xml")
  
  comment = doc.createComment("<name>cranberry</name>")
  doc.documentElement.appendChild(comment)
  
  doc.writexml(r"C:\sample1.xml")