On Mon, 1 Dec 2003, George Schlossnagle wrote: > [puts on evil twin hat]
Theo? > To play devil's advocate to the idea - the problem with it is that it > requires a bunch of extra code when examining an unknown document. > This is similar to the (promised by Sterling to be fixed) quirk of > SimpleXML returning a string when a chile has a single descendent of a > given name and an array otherwise. This seems intuitive at first, but > means that you need to always check the type of your value before you > use it. The same problem exists here. If you're trying to examine an unknown document using SimpleXML, you're in deep trouble. I don't think SimpleXML really gives you the introspection features that one needs for crawling the tree. For instance, you can't look at attributes at all unless you already know they exist because we've overloaded foreach to iterate through an object's children nodes instead of its "array elements." (Using the correct syntax here with all the overload is difficult.) SimpleXML is best when you're already somewhat familiar with the schema. (IMO) I was trying not to bring up the scalar/array bit because I knew that would just open up a whole new can of worms. Sterling told me at ApacheCon that he'd fix this, but I'll believe him when I see the code. :) I've run into the single/multiple bit before in my actual programs, and I've also run into occasions where an element was missing. However, I've yet to run into occasions when I thought something would be a parent and it turned out to be a leaf. Have you? -adam -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
