[XML-SIG] Accessing internal entities with minidom or 4DOM

[Phil Glaser]

Hi,

> > The only documentation I could find for 4DOM
> > (http://pyxml.sourceforge.net/topics/howto/section-DOM.html)
> did not give
> > any details about how to access the internal subset, but doc.childNodes
> > would appear to indicate that it's not seeing any entities. (If
> there's more
> > documentation anywhere please let me know.)
>
> I recommend that you read the DOM spec, at
>
> http://www.w3.org/TR/2000/REC-DOM-Level-2-Core-20001113/core.html

Ah, ok. I've seen this before, and should have remembered it. This is
enlightening.

> Notice that there is no programmatic way to set the entities member of
> a DocumentType node, so an XML parser would need a private interface
> to the DOM implementation to set this member to a non-trivial value.

> In short, that aspect of the DOM is not implemented in any of the
> Python DOM implementations.

Ok, I see the problem. But according to the spec I should at least have
read-only access to the internal subset. The existence of minimdom's
internalSubset property lead me to believe that I should be able to do this
at least with minidom, but that maybe I'm doing something wrong in my code.
Or are you saying that this particular DOM Level 2 interface is not yet
implemented in either minidom or 4DOM?

I am grateful for your assistance. Many thanks!

Regards,

Phil