My gripe today is with create_element_ns. Terence Kearns has a pretty good summary of the issue in his comments. Essentially, you cannot add a namespace to a node with the default prefix in a way that is recognised by the rest of DOM XML. The problem is that supplying an empty $prefix parameter to create_element_ns is treated the same as omitting the $prefix parameter altogether, in which case DOM XML generates a random prefix.

The libxml2 convention is that passing a NULL prefix to xmlNewNs binds the default namespace, while passing an empty string is illegal. Unfortunately, this convention might break a lot of PHP code that relies on DOM XML generating random namespace prefixes, because people are more likely to omit $prefix than to supply an empty string when they want the random-prefix behaviour. However, I figure it’s better to break lazy code than to invert the libxml convention.

My patch changes the DOM XML behaviour so that an empty string prefix such as $doc->create_element_ns('foo', 'http://example.net', '') activates the old DOM XML random-prefix:

   <a1337:foo xmlns:a1337="http://example.net" />

while omitting $prefix altogether as in $doc->create_element_ns('foo', 'http://example.net') binds the default namespace:

   <foo xmlns="http://example.net" />

The online documentation doesn’t mention it any more, but there’s a history of PHP not dealing well with array references.

PHP segfaults. Unfortunately it’s quite hard to reproduce artificially; we don’t see the segfault until way after the reference was taken (presumably after the GC has done its rounds). It’s 100% reproducible in our program, but I’m still working on a minimal test case.