case sensitivity and XML
Fredrik Lundh
effbot at telia.com
Sun May 21 16:30:12 EDT 2000
Michal Wallace (sabren) wrote:
> Not so. In xmllib, you use functions like:
>
> start_sometag(self, attrs):
> pass
checked the library reference lately? that's not the documented
way of doing things...
(tags can contain colons and dots -- and with namespaces, they
can be complete URI's. the 1.5.2 alphas didn't even support the
start/end hooks; iirc, I added the compatibility code...)
xmllib already contains functions to map arbitrary tag names to
handlers. see the library reference for details.
> Suppose you have this: '<sometag a="lowercase" A="uppercase" a-b="a dash b"/>'
> Then, case sensitive python would yield this dictionary:
>
> attrs == {"a":"lowercase", "A":"uppercase", "a-b":"a dash b"}
>
> No problem whatsoever. Case INsensitive python yields the same dictionary,
> but how do you tell "a" apart from "A"? For example, what is the truth
> value of: attrs["a"] == attrs["A"] ?
oh, you're still thinking that case-insensitive identifiers means
that *all* string comparisitions should ignore case? I'm pretty
sure that wasn't what Guido had in mind...
> One option is to say that python just won't be able to parse some
> XML documents. I think that would be suicide for the language, as
> more and more people and companies start using XML.
well, start/end has never worked for all valid XML documents, so
that's not much of an argument...
</F>
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