Hi people
I've been studying and using some pieces of the sample code delivered
with xerces.
There's something I don't understand about the DOM parsing. When I'm
traversing the DOM, looking for a particular node with a given name,
each time I have to filter out the nodes that are NOT elements, and NOT
null.
In other words, the children returned by DOMNodeList* getChildNodes()
are not just the nodes I can see when looking at my XML file, but some
further mysterious null and non-element nodes. Aren't nodes simply the
elements we can see in the XML file, for example <imageDescription> or
<fileSize>?
Here's how I get the children of a node:
DOMElement* currentElement = elementRoot; // initialize to root
children = currentElement->getChildNodes();
nChildren = children->getLength(); // this number includes null- and
non-elements!
Even when my parent element contains only 2 children that I know of, I
get, for example, 5 children back according to children->getLength.
To get what I really want I have to test to see which ones are the
"regular" elements by doing:
if(!currentNode->getNodeType() || // is NULL
currentNode->getNodeType() != DOMNode::ELEMENT_NODE ) //
isn't an element
{
continue; // check next node
}
Why is this? What are these mysterious invisible children in the XML
file? Is there a better way to find one or more elements that have a
known location in the DOM for an XML file?
Thanks, Adrian
