Re: [Xmlstar-devel] enhanced_select branch

[Noam P. <npo...@us...>]

André Kaplan <ak...@la...> writes:

> I felt a bit let down when I was trying to go over the one-liner since  
> things are rarely as simple as they look like.
> This is why I added options to support other xsl elements.
> First of I didn't much like the idea of writing:
> xml sel -t -i 'condition' -o 'yes' -b -i 'not(condition) -o 'no' -b -b
> for an if/then/else so I added support for choose/when/otherwise:
> xml sel -t --choose --when 'condition' -o 'yes' -b --otherwise -o 'no'  
> -b -b -b

I see your point, though in this specific instance we don't need to be
bound xslt's zany conditionals:

xml sel -t --if 'condition' -o 'yes' --else 'no' -b

>
> Anyway, adding other switches won't prevent you from using xmlstarlet  
> for one-liners if that's how you use it. I also use it for one-liners.
> I just don't want to be stopped at the first hurdle.

The more code there is, the greater the chance of screwing it up.

>> If we do go in the "less verbose stylesheet direction", I think there
>> should be some kind of syntax defined instead of using options for
>> everything. I don't find the dashes very pretty, and single letter
>> options aren't all that human-readable.
>
> Well sure that's a matter of taste. I don't mind too much the dashes,  
> but I rarely write long xml commands directly in the terminal, I  
> directly integrate them in longer shell scripts.

I forgot to mention the quoting, that's probably the worst thing. Shell
evaluation rules are sufficiently icky that I really try to avoid longer
shell scripts.

> As for the the syntax I don't quite understand.
> If that's a full language, then XQuery is already there.
> If that's some shortcuts or syntactic sugar to avoid typing dashes  
> then OK.

Hmm, maybe shell is good enough.

Noam