bug#63125: 30.0.50; [BUG] last argument of libxml2-parse-html-region has no effect?

[Ruijie Yu]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

>> Date: Fri, 28 Apr 2023 00:19:22 +0800
>> From:  Ruijie Yu via "Bug reports for GNU Emacs,
>>  the Swiss army knife of text editors" <bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org>
>> 
>> I'm trying out the function `libxml2-parse-html-region' as recommended
>> by a thread in help-gnu-emacs.  However, I discovered that the last
>> argument of this function does not help me normalize a relative url.
>> 
>> Reproducer:
>> 
>> Visit the attached toy html file.  I imagine that it is hosted at
>> "https://example.com/good/day";.
>> 
>> Run this snippet:
>> 
>>     (pp (libxml-parse-html-region
>>          (point-min) (point-max)
>>          "https://example.com/good/day";))
>> 
>> Compare it with this snippet:
>> 
>>     (pp (libxml-parse-html-region
>>          (point-min) (point-max)))
>> 
>> What I get is this result for both snippets (which is shown twice, once
>> "pretty-printed", and once returned as a string):
>> 
>> --8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8---
>> (html nil
>>       (body nil "\n    "
>>             (a
>>              ((href . "/hello"))
>>              "1")
>>             "\n    "
>>             (a
>>              ((href . "../world"))
>>              "2")
>>             "\n    "
>>             (a
>>              ((href . "good"))
>>              "3")
>>             "\n    "
>>             (a
>>              ((href . "morning/or/night"))
>>              "4")
>>             "\n  "))
>> --8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8---
>> 
>> Notice, that the href values are not normalized: they are copied
>> verbatim from the original html file.
>> 
>> If I understand the docstring correctly, the last argument of
>> `libxml2-parse-html-region', when specified as a url string, should be
>> used as the "base point" of resolving relative paths found within the
>> html document.  But the <a href=xxx> paths are not resolved at the
>> moment.
>
> If you look at xml.c, you will see that we just call a libxml function
> passing it this URL.  So if anything isn't as expected, the answer is
> in libxml, not in Emacs.

Thank you for pointing that out.  I will take a look at its source in a
day or two.  I am also upgrading it from 2.10.3-2 to 2.10.4-2, and will
see if that changes anything.

If I end up deciding that it is a libxml2 bug, I'll file a bug there and
link to this bug.

For completeness, here attached is the toy html file that I forgot to
attach in my initial report.

  
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-- 
Best,


RY

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