XOM API for Processing XML with Java

[Wolfgang Hoschek <whoschek AT lbl.gov>]

Everybody already understands XPath's adjacent text semantics since the 
beginning of this thread.
But that's not the question. The question is why would output 1 
*always* be the "right" thing, as opposed to output 2 or 3, or even 
output 4 (which is returning the first Text node as DOM XPath seems to 
do, as noted by Mike). In other words how to map XPath results on 
output to XOM nodes.

On Jan 10, 2005, at 2:57 AM, Elliotte Harold wrote:

> Wolfgang Hoschek wrote:
>
> > Well, it would be helpful if you could state why this is "clearly 
> > correct".
>
> The XPath data model does not allow adjacent text nodes. According to 
> the spec,
>
> "As much character data as possible is grouped into each text node: a 
> text node never has an immediately following or preceding sibling that 
> is a text node."
>
> Getting this right is critical for making sure that positional 
> predicates do what you expect, and not introducing off-by-one-or-more 
> errors. There are other issues as well, but positional predicates are 
> the ones that are going to come up most frequently.
>
> Hmm, looking at the spec I see one other tricky bit we have to watch 
> out for:
>
> "A text node always has at least one character of data."
>
> In other words, empty Text objects cannot be selected. That's going to 
> be tricky to implement. Time to write a test case.
>
>
> > I'll add the following method to the next Nux release candidate, 
> > unless a convincing argument can be made that one can easily do 
> > without it:
>
> I suspect this method might be useful in and of itself, irrespective 
> of  XPath issues. I'd say go ahead and add it.
>
> --
> Elliotte Rusty Harold  elharo AT metalab.unc.edu
> XML in a Nutshell 3rd Edition Just Published!
> http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/xian3/
> http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0596007647/cafeaulaitA/ref=nosim


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Wolfgang Hoschek                  |   email: whoschek AT lbl.gov
Distributed Systems Department    |   phone: (415)-533-7610
Berkeley Laboratory               |   http://dsd.lbl.gov/~hoschek/
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