DOM oddity?

[Martin von Loewis]

"Magnus Lie Hetland" <mlh at idi.ntnu.no> writes:

> From the xml.dom documentation[1]:
> 
>   prefix
>      The part of the tagName preceding the colon if there is one, else
>      the empty string. The value is a string, or None
> 
> Under what circumstances can the prefix be None (as opposed to the empty
> string)?

If there is no namespace prefix, it is None. For example, if you do
createAttribute(), the DOM spec specifies that the result is

   A new Attr object with the nodeName attribute set to name, and
   localName, prefix, and namespaceURI set to null. The value of the
   attribute is the empty string.

In Python, a null string maps to None; since the empty string maps to
the empty string.

HTH,
Martin