Java EE (Java Enterprise Edition) General Discussion

There is an xml file whose contents are

    <!--  Comments -->
    <?xml version='1.0' encoding='UTF-8'?>
    <stuff>
    </stuff>

I'm not able to parse the file because the parser requires that

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

is the first line of the file, whereas we have comments at the top of the file.

Is there a feature to ignore comments at the top of the file?

BTW, factory.setIgnoringComments(true) did not work.

      final DocumentBuilderFactory factory = DocumentBuilderFactory.newInstance();
      factory.setIgnoringComments(true);
      DocumentBuilder builder;
      try
      {
         builder = factory.newDocumentBuilder();
         System.out.println(builder.getClass());