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Date: Tue, 13 Jan 2004 11:41:13 -0500 (EST)
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To: Christian Schneider <cschneid@cschneid.com>
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] SimpleXML: Moving Forward
From: adam@trachtenberg.com (Adam Maccabee Trachtenberg)

On Tue, 13 Jan 2004, Christian Schneider wrote:

> Adam Trachtenberg wrote:

>  > However, I don't really see any way around this otherwise. Either it's
>  >  general or not. It can't be both. (Unless there's some magical type
>  > that's both an array and a scalar.) I'm willing to put up with this
>
> Elements are already a magical type which is an object and an array.
> Making foreach work on a both the scalar and array incantation of child
> elements seems very useful to me. And usefulness seems to be the goal of
> SimpleXML as far as I understand.

If that can be done, then I am all for it. Maybe we can somehow make
an individual item Iterable.

> > maxOccurs attributes in the schema for an element. If maxOccurs > 1,
> > then the elements would be placed in an array even if there was only one
> > element in that particular instance.
>
> I don't like the idea:  Different behaviour with or without schema. I
> write code without schema first. If I decide to add a schema later code
> has to be rewritten. Not good.

Don't do that. Use the schema. :)

> > AFAIK, it's actually also impossible to find out the name of the
> > document element using SimpleXML, even using XPath.
>
> Yup, right now the only way is probably to wrap it in a dummy tag before
> giving it to SimpleXML. Sounds like a good idea anyway to me, if I have
> a domain specific document with varying content I'd probably do
> <domain>...</domain> anyway.

Unless, of course, you're not in control over those documents.

> >> I would actually expect abcd but only once:
> >> Node Value: abcd
> >>
> >> Concatenating all text parts _and_ returning them once for each part
> >> definitely seems wrong.
> >
> > Aren't those two lines contradictory? :)
>
> Why? Right now it returns abcd twice which is definitely wrong.
> Returning ab and cd or (preferably IMHO) abcd once seems right.

Sorry. I misread. I thought you wrote "returning them once definitely
seems wrong." I agree that we should return "abcd" in this case.

-adam

-- 
adam@trachtenberg.com
author of o'reilly's php cookbook
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