8.6.1 Module Contents

The xml.dom contains the following functions:

registerDOMImplementation(

name, factory)

Register the factory function with the name name. The factory function should return an object which implements the DOMImplementation interface. The factory function can return the same object every time, or a new one for each call, as appropriate for the specific implementation (e.g. if that implementation supports some customization).

getDOMImplementation(

[name[, features]])

Return a suitable DOM implementation. The name is either well-known, the module name of a DOM implementation, or None. If it is not None, imports the corresponding module and returns a DOMImplementation object if the import succeeds. If no name is given, and if the environment variable PYTHON_DOM is set, this variable is used to find the implementation.

If name is not given, this examines the available implementations to find one with the required feature set. If no implementation can be found, raise an ImportError. The features list must be a sequence of (feature, version) pairs which are passed to the hasFeature() method on available DOMImplementation objects.

Some convenience constants are also provided:

EMPTY_NAMESPACE

The value used to indicate that no namespace is associated with a node in the DOM. This is typically found as the namespaceURI of a node, or used as the namespaceURI parameter to a namespaces-specific method. New in version 2.2.

XML_NAMESPACE

The namespace URI associated with the reserved prefix xml, as defined by Namespaces in XML (section 4). New in version 2.2.

XMLNS_NAMESPACE

The namespace URI for namespace declarations, as defined by Document Object Model (DOM) Level 2 Core Specification (section 1.1.8). New in version 2.2.

XHTML_NAMESPACE

The URI of the XHTML namespace as defined by XHTML 1.0: The Extensible HyperText Markup Language (section 3.1.1). New in version 2.2.

In addition, xml.dom contains a base Node class and the DOM exception classes. The Node class provided by this module does not implement any of the methods or attributes defined by the DOM specification; concrete DOM implementations must provide those. The Node class provided as part of this module does provide the constants used for the nodeType attribute on concrete Node objects; they are located within the class rather than at the module level to conform with the DOM specifications.

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