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Re: hackable xml

• From: "Pete Cordell" <petexmldev@codalogic.com>
• To: "Andrew Welch" <andrew.j.welch@gmail.com>,"Richard Salz" <rsalz@u...>
• Date: Mon, 26 Jul 2010 18:49:03 +0100

Is there a list of types of operation such a community would like to do?
The below example hints that you might be able to come up with a set of
simple shell scripts (maybe implemented in perl/python/etc) that you could
pipe together, perhaps storing intermediate variables in the environment.

So if you had:

<ns1:config xmlns:ns1="http://somecomp.com">
  <ns1:foo>abc</ns1:foo>
</ns1:config>

xgetnsprefix "http://somecomp.com" ns < in.xml | xchgeval $ns:foo newValue >
out.xml

where  xgetnsprefix extracts the namespace prefix associated with 
"http://somecomp.com" and stores it in the shell variable ns and xchgeval 
changes the value of the specified element.

No prizes for efficiency, but it depends whether human performance or 
computer performance is more important to you.

Pete Cordell
Codalogic Ltd
Interface XML to C++ the easy way using XML C++
data binding to convert XSD schemas to C++ classes.
Visit http://codalogic.com/lmx/ or http://www.xml2cpp.com
for more info
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Andrew Welch" <andrew.j.welch@gmail.com>
To: "Richard Salz" <rsalz@us.ibm.com>
Cc: "xml-dev" <xml-dev@lists.xml.org>
Sent: Monday, July 26, 2010 4:21 PM
Subject: Re:  hackable xml



On 26 July 2010 13:53, Richard Salz <rsalz@us.ibm.com> wrote:
> I don't get it -- which community needs this xml-like thing? And why?

The community that just wants to read or write very simple xml files.

Given:

<config xmlns="http://somecomp.com">
  <foo>abc</foo>
</config>

...and you want to update the value of <foo>, how would you do it?

Or put more realisticly, a colleague of yours knows very little about
XML and all of its related technologies, and asks you how they should
do it.

- XSLT transform
- XQuery update
- JDOM, XOM etc
- SAX parse and generate the events
- some data-binding tool (if an xsd exists)

All fairly straight forward for the xml community, but to anyone else
each of those seem like a massive overkill for such a seemingly simple
task.  Perhaps there is a simple way that I've missed?

The ultimate goal of hackable xml is to make it possible to just do a
string replace of "<foo>abc</foo>" with "<foo>newValue</foo>" (which
is often what happens anyway, causing many hours of fun) and then
serialize/reparse without any issues.



-- 
Andrew Welch
http://andrewjwelch.com
Kernow: http://kernowforsaxon.sf.net/

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• Follow-Ups:
  • Re: hackable xml
    • From: "Pete Cordell" <petexmldev@codalogic.com>

• References:
  • hackable xml
    • From: Andrew Welch <andrew.j.welch@gmail.com>
  • Re: hackable xml
    • From: David Carlisle <davidc@nag.co.uk>
  • Re: hackable xml
    • From: Andrew Welch <andrew.j.welch@gmail.com>
  • Re: hackable xml
    • From: Richard Salz <rsalz@us.ibm.com>
  • Re: hackable xml
    • From: Andrew Welch <andrew.j.welch@gmail.com>