[XML-SIG] help - attributes namespace - is this a bug in PyXML

[Andrew Clover]

Ajay <abra9823 at mail.usyd.edu.au> wrote:

> the problem though seems that i can't use xpath in PyXML with a document
> parsed using xml.dom.minidom

> dataNodes = xpath.Evaluate(".//*[local-name()='DATA']", doc.documentElement)
> TypeError: can only concatenate list (not "tuple") to list

Weird, works for me (0.8.3, even back to 0.6.6), and I can't see any 
reason why the Union method might be getting a tuple instead of a list 
with minidom.

> since i use xpath to just locate node subsets, i would have to rewrite
> funtions to do that by just looping through the different nodes (i don't
> know how hard that will be) --- is there someone who has already done
> that?

Sounds pretty easy to me; your example could be implemented as 
documentElement.getElementsByTagNameNS('*', 'DATA'). List comprehensions 
can also simplify looking through childNodes; anything doing a depth 
search will need a few trivial recursive functions.

> "Never gets the attribute - always returns false for hasAttribute, empty
> string for getAttribute, or null for getAttributeNode."
> funny. i should have read that before trying hours on why my calls weren't
> working

Well quite, similar frustrations led me to compile it!

That one's a bug from old versions of cDomlette though, shouldn't affect 
4DOM. The calls fail in 4DOM under a more limited set of circumstances; 
I've updated the table to add bug 20 to the latest 4DOM too as per your 
previous bug.

> efficiency and a future port to a PDA are the reasons why i didn't use
> pxdom.

Well, a PDA port shouldn't be a problem - pxdom is pure-Python 
(compatible back to 1.5.2). Of course for efficiency as you say it's 
pretty poor.

cDomlette is the best option for efficiency, but has C parts so would 
need suitable recompiling. It has a decent XPath too. Support for DOM 
features is deliberately very limited so don't expect to be able to move 
an arbitrary DOM application to it without change.

-- 
Andrew Clover
mailto:and at doxdesk.com
http://www.doxdesk.com/