[libxml-devel] Proposed API changes for working with child nodes and attributes

[Charlie Savage]

I've noticed two oddities in the libxml api - dealing with child elements and attributes. In both cases, the returned value is a single item (an attribute or node) that then provides methods to get to the next item.

So:

some_node = doc.find('/foo')

child = some_node.children
while child
  ... do stuff
  child = child.next
end



some_node = doc.find('/foo')

some_node.children.each do |node|
  ... do stuff
end

There is also a bit of ruby syntactic sugar that defines an each method, so you can do: Thus node.children is a XML::Node that acts both as a single node and also a collection. The same is true for attributes. For anyone who works with the DOM's built into browsers, or follows the W3C standards (\http://www.w3.org/TR/2000/REC-DOM-Level-2-Core-20001113/core.html), this is a bit weird and non-intuitive.

some_node = doc.find('/foo')

child_nodes = some_node.children
child_nodes.class == "Array"

some_node.each_child do |node|
  ... do stuff
end


And for attributes, I vote that libxml copies REXML's interface:

http://www.germane-software.com/software/rexml/doc/classes/REXML/Attributes.html

Thoughts?

Charlie

I'd prefer that node.children becomes node.first and node.children returns an array of child nodes. We'd then add an each_child method to XML::Node (based on node.first and node.next) for quick and easy iteration.

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