Re: [Tcllib-devel] XML generation

[Andreas K. <and...@ac...>]

Lars Hellström wrote:
> Lately, a lot of the projects I've been working on have involved (i) 
> generating Tcl data structures that could be viewed as a particular 
> encoding of part of an XML document and (ii) converting said data 
> structures to XML on output.
> 
> While (i) is always rather specific, the (ii) part tends to be very 
> generic, and while it's code-wise very short, it kind of worries me 
> that I'm copying the same procedures from project to project, so I've 
> been thinking "maybe this should go into tcllib?" As a matter of fact, 
> I've been somewhat surprised to not already find something along these 
> lines in there, but maybe it's too elementary to make a package for... 

The doctools support TMML as output format, which is a XML format. Joe English 
wrote that plugin (IIRC), and provided

	tcllib/modules/doctools/mpformats/_xml.tcl

containing the more generic support code. This is not a package outright, just 
a file which is dt_source'd by the {fmt,toc}.tmml files/engines.

The _html in mpformats also has bit of generic tag generation.

> The intent is not to provide industrial capacity XML handling (there 
> are well-known compiled extensions for that), but rather to provide a 
> cheap package that you can put into your script when you just want to 
> add XML as another output format.
> 
> The latest version of my command is TDLtoXML::xml_from_trees (but never 
> mind the namespace) on http://wiki.tcl.tk/25681#pagetocbc2b8a8c. This 
> coverts from a tdom list format to XML (cf. http://wiki.tcl.tk/26156), 
> and that is perhaps something that should be scrutinised, since putting 
> something like this in tcllib is an act of blessing its data format.
> 
> Comments, anyone?

Not yet, will have to make the time for a look.

-- 
Andreas Kupries
Senior Tcl Developer
ActiveState, The Dynamic Language Experts

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