nilbus
commented
5 years ago A NodeSet contains a list of Nokogiri::XML::Node objects. Typically a NodeSet is return as a result of searching a Document via Nokogiri::XML::Searchable#css or Nokogiri::XML::Searchable#xpath
Since a NodeSet can contain non-contiguous fragments of a document, it’s somewhat ill-defined what pretty-printing would look like. I’m kind of curious to hear your thoughts on this. It’s easy if the NodeSet contains sibling nodes (under the same parent). But what about (for example):
- matching all
<em>tags in an XHTML document having em tags at several different depths and inside different parent tags in the document hierarchy. Do we include all ancestors to the root? That’s certainly more than is contained in the NodeSet and would have to be reconstructed. Or do we print the results flattened as if they were siblings when they are not? Or make this configurable? - the results from matching an xpath selector on attributes rather than tags. This is similar to the item above, except we’d likely want to reconstruct only the tag the attributes belong to rather than recurring to the root node.
- How do we represent a NodeSet containing text nodes from an xpath selector?
Whatever the answers to these questions, to continue using the XSLT method this gem currently uses, the NodeSet would need to be transformed into a new XML document that represents what you want to print.
Having chosen answers to these questions, it probably wouldn’t be too hard to implement, if you’re interested in taking this on.
It kind of defeats the point of a library for allowing humans to read XML if you can't partially parse the XML and then show it.