Python lxml: Ignore XML declaration (errors)

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I am trying to parse the file browser Thunar's custom actions files (~/.config/Thunar/uca.xml) with the lxml Python module.

For some reason, Thunar obviously writes a malformed declaration into these files:

<?xml encoding="UTF-8" version="1.0"?>

Obviously, the version is expected to appear as the first "attribute" in the declaration. lxml raises an XMLSyntaxError if I try to parse the file.

And no, I cannot simply correct the declaration, becaue Thunar keeps overwriting it with the bogus one.

This might very likely be a bug in Thunar.

Nevertheless, I would like to know how to ignore the XML declaration with lxml.

I know that I could pre-process the XML document to filter out the XML declaration. But this doesn't seem very elegant. Since XML seems to default to version 1.0 and UTF-8 encoding, there surely is a possibility to just ignore the declaration and assume that in lxml. I didn't find anything in the documentation or on google, I might have overlooked something.

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