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Date: Fri, 3 Jun 2011 16:38:00 -0400
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To: internals@lists.php.net
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Subject: DOMNode::getAttribute()
From: mjpelmear@gmail.com (Matt Pelmear)

Hello,

I discovered today that the DOMNode::getAttribute() function (which is
undocumented on the php site) returns an empty string if the requested
attribute doesn't exist in the node.

From the source:
	if (value == NULL) {
		RETURN_EMPTY_STRING();
	} else {
		RETVAL_STRING((char *)value, 1);
		xmlFree(value);
	}

Seems to me that it should return NULL. (That's what libxml does, apparently.)

Does anyone know of a particular reason it returns an empty string instead?
Does anyone know of a particular reason it is not documented?
(I'd be happy to document and provide the ridiculously simple patch of
returning NULL...)

Thanks,
-Matt