Re: [lxml-dev] Checking whether a node is a comment/element

On 19 Jul 2008, at 08:48, Stefan Behnel wrote:

Geoffrey Sneddon wrote:

...

What's the best way to check whether a given node is a comment or an element? For the former, I'm currently using isinstance(node, etree._Comment), which is rather obviously sub-optimal.

You can do

node.tag is etree.Comment

to check if it's a comment, and

isinstance(node.tag, basestring) # Py2.x

or

isinstance(node.tag, str) # Py3

to see if it's a normal Element.

This may be sub-optimally obvious, but I find it better than checking for underscored classes.

Yeah, seems better, though slightly bizarre. Thanks. -- Geoffrey Sneddon