Re: [xml-cppdom-devel] [PATCH]: Preserve newlines in cdata

[Carsten N. <car...@gm...>]

	Hello Patrick,

Patrick Hartling wrote:
> I committed your change,

Thanks!

> but this brings up a point in CppDOM that confuses
> me. I think that the CppDOM "cdata" concept is really the DOM text node. I
> am not sure if XML CDATA is even supported by CppDOM, but I suppose that I
> could write a test to determine that.

hm, I had looked at <http://www.w3schools.com/xml/xml_cdata.asp> and 
from there it seems there is a distinction between parsed character data 
(PCDATA) which is what you get when using:

<some_tag>this is parsed character data</some_tag>

and unparsed character data (CDATA) which looks like:

<some_tag><![CDATA[unparsed character data here]]></some_tag>

The difference seems to be that PCDATA is seen by the xml parser and it 
looks for more tags in it, so that neesting tags works, while CDATA 
seems to turn the parser mostly off until the "]]>" sequence is seen.

> Perhaps there does not need to be a distinction as far as user-level code is
> concerned. What makes me wonder is that actual DOM implementations do
> distinguish between the two in their APIs. JDOM, however, has
> Element.getText(), which returns what they describe as "the concatenation of
> all Text and CDATA nodes returned by getContent()." Note that JDOM has the
> class type org.jdom.CDATA which is a subclass of org.jdom.Text. CppDOM
> identifies nodes as being of the "cdata" type, but I think that, in CppDOM
> terms, this means that the node contains a sequence of characters.

hm, I wonder if the distinction is only made so that reading in a file 
and writing it out again becomes an identity operation - i.e. so that 
the writer can put in the "<![CDATA[", "]]>" sequences?

> I guess as long as CppDOM can properly parse both a CDATA node and a text
> node in the input XML, my concerns don't matter. It may really just boil
> down to a terminology issue.

I think that is the case here.

	Cheers,
		Carsten