On 08/31/2012 08:21 AM, Stefan Behnel wrote: > Florian Lindner, 31.08.2012 14:03: >> I plan to use the etree.ElementTree XML parser to parse a config file >> in which the order of the elements matter, e.g.: >> >> <A> >> <C /><D /> >> </A> >> >> is not equal to: >> >> <A> >> <D /><C /> >> </A> >> >> I have found different answers to the question if order matters in XML >> documents. So my question here: Does it matters (and is more or less >> guarenteed to matter in the future) for the ElementTree parser of >> python? > It matters for XML documents, so, yes, any XML parser will definitely > honour the document order (which is actually well defined for an XML > document). > > What you might be referring to is the case of a specific XML document > format, where the application (or sometimes specification) can explicitly > state that the element order in a given subtree has no meaning for the > semantics of the element and that therefore code must ignore the order in > which elements occur. But that won't magically make the parser ignore it > for you. That's a totally different level of abstraction and a deliberate > decision of the code that *uses* the parser. > > There is a place in xml documents which is defined to be unordered. That's the attributes within one element.
<E attr3="x" attr1="y" attr2="z" /> is indistinguishable from: <E attr2="z" attr1="y" attr3="x" /> -- DaveA -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
