Issue 38742: ElementTree won't parse comments before root element
issue8277 It couldn't work for those comments before the root element. It will raise an error that "xml.etree.ElementTree.ParseError: multiple elements on top level". Example: test.xml -------- <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <!-- comments here doesn't work --> <root node> <nodeA /> <!-- comments here is ok --> <nodeB /> </root node> test.py ------- from xml.etree import ElementTree class MyTreeBuilder(ElementTree.TreeBuilder): def comment(self, data): self.start(ElementTree.Comment, {}) self.data(data) self.end(ElementTree.Comment) with open('c:/temp/t.xml', 'r') as f: xml = ElementTree.parse( f, parser=ElementTree.XMLParser(target=MyTreeBuilder())) ElementTree.dump(xml)