Re: [Docutils-develop] XML output

[David G. <go...@us...>]

Adam Chodorowski wrote:
> In the project I'm using docutils in, we've decided to convert the
> ReST sources to XML (with the docutils DTD) and then use some XSLT
> tools to transform this into different formats. [#]_
...
> .. [#] The reason for this, as opposed to writing a new docutils
>        writer, is mainly because we have a developer that has a lot
>        of experience with XML/XSLT and no experience with docutils
>        or Python: we believe that this aproach will give us results
>        faster, basically.

That's fair and reasonable.  Whatever works!

> However, we discovered that the output from "quicktest.py -r" is not
> valid XML.

That's probably not the best tool to use.  Note the name,
"quicktest.py".  It's meant for quick & dirty output for parser
testing purposes.  There's no Reader or Writer involved, and no
transforms are applied.  See
http://docutils.sf.net/docs/tools.html#quicktest-py .

> What's the best way to fix these issues? Perhaps a dedicated XML
> writer is necessary (I hope not...)?

One already exists: docutils-xml.py.  Try it instead of quicktest.py.

I just tried running it on tools/test.txt and had some trouble.  Fell
victim to a bug in Python 2.2's StringIO.py.  Moral: upgrade to 2.2.1!
With 2.2.1 in place, it worked without problem.

I've added an encoding attribute to the XML declaration (``<?xml
version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>``) and a ``<!DOCTYPE document ...``
declaration.  It would be easy enough to add an XSL stylesheet
declaration as well; I'll wait for the need to arise.

> There are two problems with the output:
> 
> 1. The text contents are not encoded / decoded in any way;
>    everything is just output verbatim. This is a problem if the
>    input file is ISO-8859-1 and XML is supposed to be UTF-8. Some
>    --input-encoding and --output-encoding options would be nice.

Patches are welcome, but I suspect that once you try docutils-xml.py
you'll forget all about quicktest.py.

> 2. The "xml:space" attribute is used incorrectly. In the output one
>    can find "xml:space=1"; the only valid values from xml:space are
>    "default" and "preserved".

An oversight, now fixed ("preserve", actually).  Thanks.  The snapshot
has been updated: http://docutils.sf.net/docutils-snapshot.tgz

-- 
David Goodger  <go...@us...>  Open-source projects:
  - Python Docutils: http://docutils.sourceforge.net/
    (includes reStructuredText: http://docutils.sf.net/rst.html)
  - The Go Tools Project: http://gotools.sourceforge.net/