XOM API for Processing XML with Java

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

peter murray-rust wrote:
> If I set the value of Text nodes to null, the value is actually set 
> to an empty String ("").

I worried about this a great deal in the early days. There's no perfect 
solution here. The issue is that XML has no real understanding of null. 
Thus almost everywhere in the model part of XOM, null is treated the 
same as the empty string. You're right. I should document what's going 
on better though.

Hmm, it occurs to me now that it might have made sense to disallow text 
nodes with no content; i.e. throw an exception when setting the value of 
a text node to either null or the empty string. There's a lot of icky 
code in the XOM internals to handle the case of text nodes with empty 
content that could have been avoided. However, changing it now would 
probably have unintended consequences, and I suspect it's too late to 
change that now. :-(

> On a related note, is there a convenience method for removing text 
> Nodes with zero-length strings?

No. There isn't.

--
Elliotte Rusty Harold  elharo AT metalab.unc.edu
XML in a Nutshell 3rd Edition Just Published!
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