On Thu, 13 Jun 2002, Rob Whitfield wrote:

> Hi Karl,
> 
> I don't understand your comment.  If I want an instance of an 
> OrderedCollection I do:
> 
>          foo := OrderedCollection new.

Sure, but you *don't* want an instance of the parser.

At least, not to send #parseDocumentFrom: to.

#parseDocumentFromFileNamed: is a class method. In SAXHandler (the
superclass of XMLDOMParser) it returns an instance of a parser. That's
because, I take it, conceputally the parser is acting as a "lazy
stream" over the "parse" of the document.

In XMLDOMParser, #parseDocuemntFrom: returns an instance of the
*parsed* document.

Check the code:

	parseDocumentFrom: aStream
	   ^(super parseDocumentFrom: aStream) document

This is very natural for DOM work, since you expect to work with the
parsed document tree rather than a parser.

If you want to manipulate the parser itself, I suggest looking at
SAXHandler class>>parseDocumentFrom:

parseDocumentFrom: aStream
	| driver parser |
	driver _ SAXDriver on: aStream.
	driver validating: true.
	parser _ self new driver: driver.
	parser startDocument.
	parser parseDocument.
	^parser

As you can see, it takes a bit more set up. And then you'll probably just
want to send "document' to this thing to get the full parsed document.

If you want to generate a different tree than an XMLDocument, you should
subclass SAXHandler (or XMLDOMParser if you want only a slightly different
tree).

> I can then add items to the collection using foo. How is XMLDOMParser 
> different?

In one sense, isn't not different at all. But you *are* systematically
misusing it. You seem to not understand the difference between class
methods instance methods.

>  Assuming you are right what would be the correct way of doing 
> what I want?

It's still not clear to me what you want :)

Cheers,
Bijan Parsia.