Re: Standard API for XPath Expression

[Matt Sergeant <matt@sergeant.org>]

On Wed, 16 May 2001, Francis Norton wrote:

>
>
> Michael Champion wrote:
> >
> >
> > This will probably be in DOM Level 3.
> >
> > The challenge has been to bridge the XPath data model and the DOM data model
> > (selectNodes() more or less ignores a number of ugly corner cases having to
> > do with Text nodes, CDATA sections, namespaces, the liveness of the result
> > list, etc.)
> >
> We're using selectNodes a lot, and have found it rather frustrating that
> we can't use it to return any of the other XPath expression result types
> apart from node-list - namely string, number, boolean or object (well,
> we're not too worried about object yet).
>
> Will the DOM Level 3 proposal address the full XPath data model?

In XML::XPath I implement find, findnodes, and findvalue. find() will give
you the data type of the result (nodeset, number, literal, etc),
findnodes() will always give you a nodeset (or a list of nodes, in Perl's
list context), and findvalue() will return the string-value of the result.

I guess you could do s/find/select/ on those, though I think find is
easier to type than select, and I like to go against Microsoft's grain :-)

-- 
<Matt/>

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