Re: [xml] XPath queries on document fragments without a document

[Sean Chittenden <sean chittenden org>]

> > while tracing a problem with XPath queries and document fragments
> > I found that it is not possible to XPath query an document
> > fragment, that is parsed by xmlParseBalancedChunkMemory(). this
> > means the fragment does not belong to a document tree ( node->doc
> > == NULL ).
> >
> > now a xpath query run through xmlXPathCompiledEval() on such a
> > fragment will allways returns nothing. apart from i think it's
> > anoying ;) i wonder if there is a reason to refuse such queries.
> > [...]  my question is now: is there a reason to refuse xpath
> > queries on document fragments?
>
>   yes, the XPath semantic is not defined. For example what does "/"
> XPath evaluation should return ???  And an awful lot of XPath
> queries use / , /foo or //foo to start a lookup, no really, having
> element without a document breaks an awful lot of things in the XML
> infrastructure, each time I suggest not to do it, people do it
> anyway and have troubles, big surprise ...

Return NULL on all queries that start with / and node->doc == NULL?  -sc

-- 
Sean Chittenden