[lxml-dev] xpath on text nodes

[Jamie Norrish]

On Thu, 2009-04-30 at 09:42 +0200, Stefan Behnel wrote:

> It would be rarely used, I'd say. What sort of interesting XPath queries
> could you possibly do on a node that doesn't have any children, nor
> attributes, nor a tag name or namespace.

Besides selecting other nodes and values relative to the text? Yes, it
is possible to use text_result.getparent() and proceed from there - but
this has the downside of requiring, for some XPath expressions, the code
to modify the expression based on whether text_result was the text or
tail of its parent, which is annoying.

> Also, XPath queries can return Elements and (special) strings, but
> also plain numbers and boolean values.
> So you'd still not have a common interface for all possible result types.

Well, I'm not really asking for a common interface - only that XPath be
enabled for the results of an XPath expression for text(). This would
bring it into line with XSLT behaviour, for one.

However, I accept that it's not going to be used often, and probably
isn't worth you implementing for that reason.

About using iterwalk: this wouldn't seem (on a quick perusal of the
documentation) to easily allow for me to get the preceding context of
the text result, unless I picked some arbitrary earlier element as the
starting point. What am I missing?

Jamie
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