Hi!

I tried to use the more general xml.dom interface, no longer defaulting to minidom straight away (or using etree).

The DOM tree gained with PullDOM seem to be incomplete.
Here is the output of the program attached.

$ python pulldom_test.py
with pulldom
(<xml.dom.minidom.Document instance at 0xb722962c>, [])
with minidom
(<xml.dom.minidom.Document instance at 0xb72459ac>, [<DOM Text node "u'\n'">, <DOM Element: a at 0xb71cb74c>, <DOM Text node "u'\n'">, <DOM Element: b at 0xb71cb7ac>, <DOM Text node "u'\n'">, <DOM Element: c at 0xb71cb80c>, <DOM Text node "u'\n'">])

I'd expect the same result for both ways of populating the minidom DOM implementation.

Thanks & Cheers, Achim

sorry, the output given before was generated with python2.7

changing the line
xml.sax.parseString(xml_data, d_handler)

to

xml.sax.parseString(bytes(xml_data, "utf-8"), d_handler)

makes it working for python 3.2, result the same:

$ python3.2 pulldom_test.py
with pulldom
<xml.dom.minidom.Document object at 0x9bf9f2c> []
with minidom
<xml.dom.minidom.Document object at 0x9c2fccc> [<DOM Text node "'\n'">, <DOM Element: a at 0x9c3850c>, <DOM Text node "'\n'">, <DOM Element: b at 0x9c3856c>, <DOM Text node "'\n'">, <DOM Element: c at 0x9c385cc>, <DOM Text node "'\n'">]

Both test were done on debian testing/wheezy.

$ python3.2 -V
Python 3.2.2rc1
$ python -V
Python 2.7.2+

So, is there a code or documentation bug in any version?

Potentially both: The xml.dom.pulldom documentation is not really there.

Maybe the PullDOM builds a partial tree, not caring about nested nodes. In contrast to SAX2DOM, which seems to fill the DOM tree completely.

I tried to figure out, what the programmer intended to do: Obviously SAX2DOM extends the behaviour of PullDOM.

The documentation (online V3.2, retrieved today) does state: "PullDOM allows building only selected portions of a Document Object Model representation"

Does that mean, one would derive a customized class from PullDOM, implement methods like SAX2DOM, but control the construction with conditions?

For example:

class MyDOM(PullDOM):
    def startElement(self, name, attrs):
        PullDOM.startElement(self, name, attrs)
        if name[:3]=="my_":
            curNode = self.elementStack[-1]
            parentNode = self.elementStack[-2]
            parentNode.appendChild(curNode)

When someone says "YEAH, MATE, ABSOLUTELY, YOU GOT IT!", I might be able fill some of the documentation gaps.

Achim: where did you see your quote about the purpose of PullDOM? Neither <https://docs.python.org/3.2/library/xml.dom.pulldom.html> nor <https://hg.python.org/cpython/annotate/3.2/Lib/xml/dom/pulldom.py> even mention the word “selected”.

In Issue 9453 it was suggested to deprecate SAX2DOM due to being undocumented and quirky. Do you think we could do the same for PullDOM, or do you think it is useful?