Interface Attributes

This module, both source code and documentation, is in the Public Domain, and comes with NO WARRANTY. See http://www.saxproject.org for further information.

This interface allows access to a list of attributes in three different ways:

1. by attribute index;
2. by Namespace-qualified name; or
3. by qualified (prefixed) name.

The list will not contain attributes that were declared #IMPLIED but not specified in the start tag. It will also not contain attributes used as Namespace declarations (xmlns*) unless the http://xml.org/sax/features/namespace-prefixes feature is set to true (it is false by default). Because SAX2 conforms to the original "Namespaces in XML" recommendation, it normally does not give namespace declaration attributes a namespace URI.

Some SAX2 parsers may support using an optional feature flag (http://xml.org/sax/features/xmlns-uris) to request that those attributes be given URIs, conforming to a later backwards-incompatible revision of that recommendation. (The attribute's "local name" will be the prefix, or "xmlns" when defining a default element namespace.) For portability, handler code should always resolve that conflict, rather than requiring parsers that can change the setting of that feature flag.

If the namespace-prefixes feature (see above) is false, access by qualified name may not be available; if the http://xml.org/sax/features/namespaces feature is false, access by Namespace-qualified names may not be available.

This interface replaces the now-deprecated SAX1 AttributeList interface, which does not contain Namespace support. In addition to Namespace support, it adds the getIndex methods (below).

The order of attributes in the list is unspecified, and will vary from implementation to implementation.