[XML-SIG] Error in pyexpat docs

[uche.ogbuji@fourthought.com]

An excerpt from the Python 2.0 docs for pyexpat:

"""
ParseFile (file) 
      Parse XML data reading from the object file. file only needs to provide 
the read(nbytes) method, returning the empty string when
      there's no more data. 

[snip]

The following attributes contain values relating to the most recent error 
encountered by an xmlparser object, and will only have correct
values once a call to Parse() or ParseFile() has raised a 
xml.parsers.expat.error exception.

ErrorByteIndex 
      Byte index at which an error occurred. 

[etc.]
"""

The wrong, "xml.parsers.expat" is the first indicator that there might be a 
problem, yet I took the docs at their word and wrapped the call to ParseFile 
in a blanket try/except, only to find that no exception of any sort is ever 
raised by ParseFile.

It turns out that ParseFile actually returns 0 on error, returning 1 otherwise.

The first matter is that the code and the docs need to be reconciled.  
However, I would _much_ rather prefer that things were as in the docs.  I 
think ParseFile should raise an exception rather than return an error flag.  
Interestingly enough, this is the same argument I had with a colleague just 
last week.


-- 
Uche Ogbuji                               Principal Consultant
uche.ogbuji@fourthought.com               +1 303 583 9900 x 101
Fourthought, Inc.                         http://Fourthought.com 
4735 East Walnut St, Ste. C, Boulder, CO 80301-2537, USA
Software-engineering, knowledge-management, XML, CORBA, Linux, Python