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Ovid (2709)

Ovid
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Stuff with the Perl Foundation. A couple of patches in the Perl core. A few CPAN modules. That about sums it up.

Journal of Ovid (2709)

Wednesday April 09, 2008
10:59 AM

Another Reason XML Annoys Me

[ #36111 ]

Consider these:

<foo></foo>
<foo/>

Yeah, they're equivalent, but I wish they weren't. The first could easily represent an empty string and the second could mean "undefined", but they don't. Sure, I could leave the tag out, but not if it's being validated against a schema which requires it.


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  • You know, if the schema requires the element to be there, it means that "undef" is not a valid value for the internal representation of that element. If it were, the schema should have declared the element as optional :)

    It's like you put a "NOT NULL" on database column, and then complain you can't put a NULL in it... (OK, XML and RDBMS are not that similar, but it was the closest example I could come up with)

  • I agree, but I have a real world problem. The client has agreed to send data which passes the schema, but they often send a lot of junk. As a result, we frequently don't know if they forgot to send something or if the information just really isn't there :(

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