[R] XML and str

[Martin Maechler]

>>>>> "Ashley" == Ashley Ford <ford at signal.QinetiQ.com>
>>>>>     on Wed, 07 Feb 2007 17:18:56 +0000 writes:

    Ashley> If I read in an .xml file eg with 

    >> xeg <- xmlTreeParse(system.file("exampleData", "test.xml",
                                       package="XML"))

    Ashley> It appears to be OK however examining it with str() gives an apparent
    Ashley> error

    >> str(xeg, 2)
    Ashley> List of 2
    Ashley> $ doc:List of 3
    Ashley> ..$ file    : list()
    Ashley> .. ..- attr(*, "class")= chr [1:2] "XMLComment" "XMLNode"
    Ashley> ..$ version :List of 4
    Ashley> .. ..- attr(*, "class")= chr "XMLNode"
    Ashley> ..$ children:Error in obj$children[[...]] : subscript out of bounds

    Ashley> I am unsure if this is a feature or a bug and if the latter whether it
    Ashley> is in XML or str, it is not causing a problem but I would like to
    Ashley> understand what is happening, any ideas ?

Yes -  thank you for providing a well-reproducible example.
After setting  
      options(error = recover)

I do

   > obj <- xeg$doc
   > mode(obj)     # "list"
   [1] "list"
   > is.list(obj)  # TRUE
   [1] TRUE
   > length(obj)   # 3
   [1] 3
   > obj[[3]]      # ---> the error you see above.
   Error in obj$children[[...]] : subscript out of bounds

   Enter a frame number, or 0 to exit   

   1: obj[[3]]
   2: `[[.XMLDocumentContent`(obj, 3)

   Selection: 0

   > obj$children  # works, should be identical to obj[[3]]
   $comment
   <!--A comment-->

   $foo
   <foo x="1">
    <element attrib1="my value"/>
   ......

This shows that the XML package implements the "[[" method
wrongly IMHO and also inconsistently with the "$" method.

>From a strict OOP view, the XML author could argue that
this is not a bug in XML but rather str() which assumes that
x[[length(x)]] works for objects of mode "list" even when they
are not of *class* "list", but I hope he would still rather
consider changing [[.XMLDocumentContent ...

Martin

    Ashley> examining components eg 
    >> str(xeg$doc$children,2)

    Ashley> List of 2
    Ashley> $ comment: list()
    Ashley> ..- attr(*, "class")= chr [1:2] "XMLComment" "XMLNode"
    Ashley> etc 

    Ashley> is OK.

    Ashley> XML Version 1.4-1, 
    Ashley> same behaviour on Windows and Linux, R version 2.4.1 (2006-12-18)




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