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RE: hackable xml

• From: Tony Nassar <tnassar@palantir.com>
• To: xml-dev <xml-dev@lists.xml.org>
• Date: Thu, 12 Aug 2010 13:13:15 -0700

Wow! I very often have to handle documents with multiple namespaces. Admittedly, I don't think that collisions between element names have ever been issue.

I think that that the problem here is not XML, it's the APIs. I have no trouble with XSLT, but my coworkers do, and if I had to carry out the task that Andrew describes, I'd probably resort to sed -i! I avoid DOM like the plague, and don't want to have a dependence on JDOM or some other API. 

I work for a Java-intensive shop, but I'd recommend Groovy (a dynamic language build on top of Java). I believe there is a Python library that does similar things to the following (I'm sure Javascript does, too, but it's not an option for me). I really don't think this could be any easier.

// Here's the problem statement.
welch = """<config xmlns="http://somecomp.com">
  <foo>abc</foo>
</config>
"""

// parsed into a nested plain old Java object
config = new XmlParser().parseText(welch)
// Set the value.
config.foo[0].value = 'xyz'
// Verify that this is what you wanted.
new XmlNodePrinter(preserveWhitespace: true).print(config)

-----Original Message-----
From: Andrew Welch [mailto:andrew.j.welch@gmail.com] 
Sent: Monday, July 26, 2010 11:22 AM
To: Richard Salz
Cc: xml-dev
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.

• Follow-Ups:
  • RE: hackable xml
    • From: "Klotz, Leigh" <Leigh.Klotz@xerox.com>