Shlomi Fish > XML-LibXML-2.0107 > XML::LibXML::Attr


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XML::LibXML::Attr - XML::LibXML Attribute Class


  use XML::LibXML;
  # Only methods specific to Attribute nodes are listed here,
  # see XML::LibXML::Node manpage for other methods

  $attr = XML::LibXML::Attr->new($name [,$value]);
  $string = $attr->getValue();
  $string = $attr->value;
  $attr->setValue( $string );
  $node = $attr->getOwnerElement();
  $attr->setNamespace($nsURI, $prefix);
  $bool = $attr->isId;
  $string = $attr->serializeContent;


This is the interface to handle Attributes like ordinary nodes. The naming of the class relies on the W3C DOM documentation.


The class inherits from XML::LibXML::Node. The documentation for Inherited methods is not listed here.

Many functions listed here are extensively documented in the DOM Level 3 specification ( Please refer to the specification for extensive documentation.


Class constructor. If you need to work with ISO encoded strings, you should always use the createAttribute of XML::LibXML::Document.

  $string = $attr->getValue();

Returns the value stored for the attribute. If undef is returned, the attribute has no value, which is different of being not specified.

  $string = $attr->value;

Alias for getValue()

  $attr->setValue( $string );

This is needed to set a new attribute value. If ISO encoded strings are passed as parameter, the node has to be bound to a document, otherwise the encoding might be done incorrectly.

  $node = $attr->getOwnerElement();

returns the node the attribute belongs to. If the attribute is not bound to a node, undef will be returned. Overwriting the underlying implementation, the parentNode function will return undef, instead of the owner element.


This function tries to bound the attribute to a given namespace. If $nsURI is undefined or empty, the function discards any previous association of the attribute with a namespace. If the namespace was not previously declared in the context of the attribute, this function will fail. In this case you may wish to call setNamespace() on the ownerElement. If the namespace URI is non-empty and declared in the context of the attribute, but only with a different (non-empty) prefix, then the attribute is still bound to the namespace but gets a different prefix than $prefix. The function also fails if the prefix is empty but the namespace URI is not (because unprefixed attributes should by definition belong to no namespace). This function returns 1 on success, 0 otherwise.

  $bool = $attr->isId;

Determine whether an attribute is of type ID. For documents with a DTD, this information is only available if DTD loading/validation has been requested. For HTML documents parsed with the HTML parser ID detection is done automatically. In XML documents, all "xml:id" attributes are considered to be of type ID.

  $string = $attr->serializeContent;

This function is not part of DOM API. It returns attribute content in the form in which it serializes into XML, that is with all meta-characters properly quoted and with raw entity references (except for entities expanded during parse time). Setting the optional $docencoding flag to 1 enforces document encoding for the output string (which is then passed to Perl as a byte string). Otherwise the string is passed to Perl as (UTF-8 encoded) characters.


Matt Sergeant, Christian Glahn, Petr Pajas




2001-2007, Ltd.

2002-2006, Christian Glahn.

2006-2009, Petr Pajas.

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