[Doc-SIG] Error in pyexpat docs
uche.ogbuji@fourthought.com
uche.ogbuji@fourthought.com
Sun, 29 Oct 2000 12:16:53 -0700
An excerpt from the Python 2.0 docs for pyexpat:
"""
ParseFile (file)
Parse XML data reading from the object file. file only needs to provide
the read(nbytes) method, returning the empty string when
there's no more data.
[snip]
The following attributes contain values relating to the most recent error
encountered by an xmlparser object, and will only have correct
values once a call to Parse() or ParseFile() has raised a
xml.parsers.expat.error exception.
ErrorByteIndex
Byte index at which an error occurred.
[etc.]
"""
The wrong, "xml.parsers.expat" is the first indicator that there might be a
problem, yet I took the docs at their word and wrapped the call to ParseFile
in a blanket try/except, only to find that no exception of any sort is ever
raised by ParseFile.
It turns out that ParseFile actually returns 0 on error, returning 1 otherwise.
The first matter is that the code and the docs need to be reconciled.
However, I would _much_ rather prefer that things were as in the docs. I
think ParseFile should raise an exception rather than return an error flag.
Interestingly enough, this is the same argument I had with a colleague just
last week.
--
Uche Ogbuji Principal Consultant
uche.ogbuji@fourthought.com +1 303 583 9900 x 101
Fourthought, Inc. http://Fourthought.com
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