13.6.2.3 NodeList Objects

A NodeList represents a sequence of nodes. These objects are used in two ways in the DOM Core recommendation: the Element objects provides one as it's list of child nodes, and the getElementsByTagName() and getElementsByTagNameNS() methods of Node return objects with this interface to represent query results.

The DOM Level 2 recommendation defines one method and one attribute for these objects:

item(i): Return the i'th item from the sequence, if there is one, or None. The index i is not allowed to be less then zero or greater than or equal to the length of the sequence.

length: The number of nodes in the sequence.

In addition, the Python DOM interface requires that some additional support is provided to allow NodeList objects to be used as Python sequences. All NodeList implementations must include support for __len__() and __getitem__(); this allows iteration over the NodeList in for statements and proper support for the len() built-in function.

If a DOM implementation supports modification of the document, the NodeList implementation must also support the __setitem__() and __delitem__() methods.

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