Instead of keeping track of an internal state in @stack and @context the various
processing methods now take the context as an extra argument and return the
nodes they produced. This makes it easier to recursively call certain methods, a
requirement for processing XPath axes (e.g. the "ancestor" axis).
The AST has been simplified by adjusting the way (path) nodes are nested.
Operators now also use `paths` instead of `expression` to allow for expressions
such as `/A or /B`. Sadly this introduces quite a bunch of conflicts in the
parser but we'll deal with those later if needed.
Come to think of it it might actually be easier to implement the evaluator as
an actual VM. That is, instead of directly running on the AST it runs on some
flavour of bytecode. Alternatively it runs directly on the AST but behaves more
like a (stack based) VM. This would most likely be easier than passing a cursor
to every node processing method.
This method can be used to retrieve the text of the given node only. In other
words, unlike Element#text it does not contain the text of any child nodes.
This method uses a loop to traverse upwards the DOM tree in order to find the
root document/element. While this might have an impact on performance I don't
expect Oga itself to call this method very often. The benefit is that Node
instances don't require users to manually pass the top level document as an
argument.
The combination of iterating over an array and removing values from it results
in not all elements being removed. For example:
numbers = [10, 20, 30]
numbers.each do |num|
numbers.delete(num)
end
numbers # => [20]
As a result of this the NodeSet#remove method uses two iterations:
1. One iteration to retrieve all NodeSet instances to remove nodes from.
2. One iteration to actually remove the nodes.
For the second iteration we iterate over the node sets and then over the nodes.
This ensures that we always remove all nodes instead of leaving some behind.
The documentation still leaves a lot to be desired and so does the API. There
also appears to be a problem where NodeSet#remove doesn't properly remove all
nodes from a set. Outside of that we're making slow progress towards a proper
DOM API.
Instead the various nodes can use NodeSet#index (aka Array#index) instead. This
has a slight performance overhead on very large (millions) of nodes but should
be fine in most other cases.
Yorick Peterse