DOM question

[Richard Lewis]

Hi there,

I have an XML document which contains a mixture of structural nodes
(called 'section' and with unique 'id' attributes) and non-structural
nodes (called anything else). The structural elements ('section's) can
contain, as well as non-structural elements, other structural elements.
I'm doing the Python DOM programming with this document and have got
stuck with something.

I want to be able to get all the non-structural elements which are
children of a given 'section' elemenent (identified by 'id' attribute)
but not children of any child 'section' elements of the given 'section'.

e.g.:

<section id="a">
   <foo>bar</foo>
</section>
<section id="b">
   <foo>baz</foo>
   <section id="c">
       <bar>foo</bar>
   </section>
</section>

Given this document, the working function would return "<foo>baz</foo>"
for id='b' and "<bar>foo</bar>" for id='c'.

Normally, recursion is used for DOM traversals. I've tried this function
which uses recursion with a generator (can the two be mixed?)

def content_elements(node):
    if node.hasChildNodes():
        node = node.firstChild
        
        if not page_node(node):
            yield node
            
        for e in self.content_elements(node):
            yield e
        
        node = node.nextSibling

which didn't work. So I tried it without using a generator:

def content_elements(node, elements):
    if node.hasChildNodes():
        node = node.firstChild
        
        if node.nodeType == Node.ELEMENT_NODE: print node.tagName
        if not page_node(node):
            elements.append(node)
            
        self.content_elements(node, elements)
        
        node = node.nextSibling
    
    return elements

However, I got exactly the same problem: each time I use this function I
just get a DOM Text node with a few white space (tabs and returns) in
it. I guess this is the indentation in my source document? But why do I
not get the propert element nodes?

Cheers,
Richard