XOM API for Processing XML with Java

[Elliotte Rusty Harold <elharo AT metalab.unc.edu>]

At 7:44 AM -0700 4/29/03, Nils_Kilden-Pedersen AT Countrywide.Com wrote:
> Actually that should have been a reply to Dick H.
> Wouldn't a CDATA section solve any formatting issues he's having, since
> it's supposed to remain untouched?

No, XOM does not treat CDATA sections any differently after parse. 
They are treated like any other text. Thus if you tell XOM to add 
whitespace to indent things, it will add or change white space 
anywhere it deems fit (which is basically anywhere there is 
preexisting white space). It will delete white space that is adjacent 
to tags if it deems fit.

You might reasonably expect an xml:space="preserve" attribute to 
prevent this, though I won't swear it actually does. (Hmm, should 
write a unit test for that one.) But the bottom line is that if you 
tell Serializer to muck with your white space, don't be surprised 
when it mucks with your white space. :-)
--
Elliotte Rusty Harold
elharo AT metalab.unc.edu
Processing XML with Java (Addison-Wesley, 2002)
  http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/xmljava
  http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN%3D0201771861/cafeaulaitA
> From elharo AT metalab.unc.edu  Tue Apr 29 11:48:56 2003
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Date: Tue, 29 Apr 2003 11:47:36 -0400
To: Laurent Bihanic <laurent.bihanic AT atosorigin.com>
From: Elliotte Rusty Harold <elharo AT metalab.unc.edu>
Subject: Re: [XOM-interest] XPath support for XOM
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At 5:26 PM +0200 4/29/03, Laurent Bihanic wrote:
> Hi,
>
> One more remark: With a single method it will be quite difficult to 
> deal with namespaces, especially default namespaces since XPath has 
> no concept of default namespace.

You'll be searching from a context node, and my initial thoughts were 
that the namespaces in scope on the context node would be used for 
the prefix mapping; but you're right. That may not be enough, 
especially for the default namespace. Possibly I could use a dummy 
element as an optional holder of all necessary namespace bindings. 
I'll need to think about this further.
--
Elliotte Rusty Harold
elharo AT metalab.unc.edu
Processing XML with Java (Addison-Wesley, 2002)
  http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/xmljava
  http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN%3D0201771861/cafeaulaitA
> From bill AT dehora.net  Wed Apr 30 19:39:06 2003
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Date: Thu, 01 May 2003 00:37:12 +0100
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To: Elliotte Rusty Harold <elharo AT metalab.unc.edu>
Subject: Re: [XOM-interest] XPath support for XOM
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Elliotte Rusty Harold wrote:
> At 5:26 PM +0200 4/29/03, Laurent Bihanic wrote:
>
> > Hi,
> >
> > One more remark: With a single method it will be quite difficult to 
> > deal with namespaces, especially default namespaces since XPath has no 
> > concept of default namespace.
>
>
> You'll be searching from a context node, and my initial thoughts were 
> that the namespaces in scope on the context node would be used for the 
> prefix mapping; but you're right. That may not be enough, especially for 
> the default namespace. Possibly I could use a dummy element as an 
> optional holder of all necessary namespace bindings. I'll need to think 
> about this further.

I've been using this signature lately:


 NodeList match(Document doc, String xpath, Map namespaces);


the Map has URIs as keys and prefixes (containing 'xmlns:', that 
allows me to specify a default) as values. I did this specifically 
to hide the creating of documents as namespace holders and generally 
to avoid polluting my code with the consequences of dealing with 
XPaths that are no longer self contained things but instead need to 
refer to URIs via prefixes.


From that signature I can quickly build out an interface like this:

public interface Op
{

boolean copy(Document, String xpathFrom, String xpathTo, Map 
namespaces);

boolean remove(Document, String xpathTo, Map namespaces);

boolean move(Document, String xpathFrom, String xpathTo, Map 
namespaces);

boolean touch(Document, String xpathAt, String qName, Map 
attributes, Map namespaces, boolean overwrite);

boolean touch(Document, String xpathElem, Map attributes, Map 
namespaces, boolean overwrite);

}

which covers most of what I need to do with an XML document.



Bill de hÓra