Re: [xml] redicting parts of trees

[Martijn Faassen <faassen infrae com>]

Martijn Faassen wrote:
> Daniel Veillard wrote:
[snip]
> > I think that if we add this then we should try to match the existing
> > semantic of those operation in PHP for example.
>
> Does PHP implement this operation on top of libxml2? We might also want
> to consider the W3C importNode semantic, though I doubt it actually says
> much of use for us here...

Coming back to this myself:

I just checked the dom module of PHP5, and found the implementation of 
what looks to be importNode. Unfortunately it doesn't do what I want, as 
it merely seems to use xmlDocCopyNode, creating a new copy of the node, 
instead of actually moving the existing node. PHP 5's semantic in this 
is compatible with the behavior of importNode as in the W3C DOM, which 
defines importNode like this:

  Imports a node from another document to this document, without
altering or removing the source node from the original document; this
method creates a new copy of the source node.

the semantic that we're talking about here is to adopt a node from 
another document. The W3C DOM level 3 does provide an operation for 
this, on the Document interface:

adoptNode introduced in DOM Level 3

    Attempts to adopt a node from another document to this document. If 
 supported, it changes the ownerDocument of the source node, its 
children, as well as the attached attribute nodes if there are any. If 
the source node has a parent it is first removed from the child list of 
its parent. This effectively allows moving a subtree from one document 
to another (unlike importNode() which create a copy of the source node 
instead of moving it).

More info:

http://www.w3.org/TR/2004/REC-DOM-Level-3-Core-20040407/core.html#Document3-adoptNode

My hopes went up for a minute when I grepped PHP's implementation of the 
DOm and found it did have a reference to adoptNode, but I found this:

/* {{{ proto DOMNode dom_document_adopt_node(DOMNode source);
URL: 
http://www.w3.org/TR/2003/WD-DOM-Level-3-Core-20030226/DOM3-Core.html#core-Document3-adoptNode
Since: DOM Level 3
*/
PHP_FUNCTION(dom_document_adopt_node)
{
 DOM_NOT_IMPLEMENTED();
}
/* }}} end dom_document_adopt_node */

So that doesn't help us very much here. :)

Regards,

Martijn