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

[Stefan Behnel]

Hi,

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.

Stefan