Re: Bug report comments requested

Peter Royal wrote:
> On Friday, January 10, 2003, at 11:03  AM, Ulrich Mayring wrote:
> 
>> As far as I see it, now it is not possible anymore to distinguish
>> between "empty element" (returns "") and "element not present" (returns
>> null). Many of our applications use these tests.
> 
> 
> Couldn't you test that by doing Configuration.getChild(name, false) to 
> disable the auto-creation of a non-existent child element?

Sorry, I don't know anything about auto-creation of elements. So it 
seems we should change all these tests to the canonical version you 
suggested.

>> Or do you mean that putting xml:space="preserve" at the root element, we
>> will continue to be able to use these tests without any side-effects?
> 
> I believe that will restore the behavior that you are looking for.

I think if "preserve-space" was the default behavior before it was made 
configurable by introducing the xml:space attribute, then I should be ok.

> I didn't think the 1.15 behavior was to return empty string as the value 
> for an empty element. I was under the impression that that behavior was 
> introduced in 1.16 (and thus corrected in 1.20).

Unfortunately we're running on some nightly build before 4.0, so I can't 
say which version of that file we have. But we definitely get an empty 
string, if the configuration element is empty.

thanks for the help,

Ulrich