code: def parse(to_parse, ignore_whitespace_text_nodes=True, adapter=None):
      
      if adapter is None:
          adapter = best_adapter
      if isinstance(to_parse, basestring) and '<' in to_parse:
          return adapter.parse_string(to_parse, ignore_whitespace_text_nodes)
      else:
          return adapter.parse_file(to_parse, ignore_whitespace_text_nodes)
docs: Parse an XML document into an *xml4h*-wrapped DOM representation
      using an underlying XML library implementation.
  
      :param to_parse: an XML document file, document string, or the
          path to an XML file. If a string value is given that contains
          a ``<`` character it is treated as literal XML data, otherwise
          a string value is treated as a file path.
      :type to_parse: a file-like object or string
      :param bool ignore_whitespace_text_nodes: if ``True`` pure whitespace
          nodes are stripped from the parsed document, since these are
          usually noise introduced by XML docs serialized to be human-friendly.
      :param adapter: the *xml4h* implementation adapter class used to parse
          the document and to interact with the resulting nodes.
          If None, :attr:`best_adapter` will be used.
      :type adapter: adapter class or None
  
      :return: an :class:`xml4h.nodes.Document` node representing the
          parsed document.
  
      Delegates to an adapter's :meth:`~xml4h.impls.interface.parse_string` or
      :meth:`~xml4h.impls.interface.parse_file` implementation.