Mike Driscoll: Parsing XML Comments with Python

The Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a markup format used for data serialization and configuration. Python's xml module provides a way to uncomment lines in an XML file. However, a custom parser is needed to uncomment XML comments. The parser can be created by setting insert_comments to True in ET.XMLParser. This allows the commented text to be printed out. To uncomment the text, the code needs to grab the commented text and reinsert it as a valid XML element. This is done by looping over each element in the XML, checking if it's a comment, and extracting the entire string from the comment. The extracted string is then inserted as a new element and the original comment is removed. Finally, the updated XML is written back to the file. Python's xml module and other third-party modules like lxml provide great alternatives for handling XML.