Hi, I'm looking for a simple XML pretty formatter, or parser who can remove all superfluous characters from XML files.

My application receives an XML file from an external app. containing many spaces and CRLFs after closing tags, this doesn't affect my parser, but I need to add the XML to a log file and those spaces make very difficult to read the logs.

Thanks in advance.

Leonardo M. Ramé
http://leonardorame.blogspot.com

Leonardo M. Ramé wrote

Hi, I'm looking for a simple XML pretty formatter, or parser who can remove all superfluous characters from XML files.

I have created just the thing for you. :-)
I created to XSL files that cleans up XML files. I used it for the FPDoc xml which when created by makeskel is really ugly. ;-)

usage is as follows:

   $ xsltproc -o new.xml pretty_print.xsl ugly.xml

Hope that's useful.

Regards,
- Graeme -

_______________________________________________
fpGUI - a cross-platform Free Pascal GUI toolkit
http://opensoft.homeip.net/fpgui/

I don't know what your requirements are for platform/language, but this works nicely for me:

------------------------------
#!/usr/bin/perl

use XML::Tidy;
my $xmlFile = '/path/to/filename';
my $tidy_obj = XML::Tidy->new('filename' => $xmlFile);
$tidy_obj->tidy();
$tidy_obj->write();
------------------------------

Thanks Seth and Graeme, the problem is the program must run on a remote server that hasn't installed Tidy.pm, but fortunately it has xsltproc, so I'll try Graeme's solution.

BTW, is there any Pascal source code out there to do this?.

Leonardo M. Ramé
http://leonardorame.blogspot.com

Thanks Graeme!, pretty_print.xsl solved the issue.

Leonardo M. Ramé
http://leonardorame.blogspot.com

Leonardo M. Ramé wrote

BTW, is there any Pascal source code out there to do this?.

I'm sure you can convert the .xsl file to pascal source, but that might just be more effort than it's worth.

Regards,
- Graeme -

_______________________________________________
fpGUI - a cross-platform Free Pascal GUI toolkit
http://opensoft.homeip.net/fpgui/

I think he meant a pascal version of the xsltproc program.

Michael.

Michael Van Canneyt wrote

I think he meant a pascal version of the xsltproc program.

Oh, my mistake.. xsltproc is just a frontend for the libxslt library. So you should be able to write a object pascal program that talks to the libxslt library directly (like is done for many other libraries - just convert the header files). Or do you want a object pascal version of the library as well? That would be even more work. :-(

Regards,
- Graeme -

_______________________________________________
fpGUI - a cross-platform Free Pascal GUI toolkit
http://opensoft.homeip.net/fpgui/

IMHO we should have the latter. We have a near-complete DOM implementation in native object pascal, we have XPath in native pascal. It seems only natural to have XSLT native as well...

Michael.

On Fri, May 15, 2009 at 11:01 AM, Michael Van Canneyt >

IMHO we should have the latter. We have a near-complete DOM implementation in native object pascal, we have XPath in native pascal. It seems only natural to have XSLT native as well...

That would be nice obviously, but it's not something I think can be done quickly. A project for a rainy day (oh boy, I'm screwed - it's winter here). :-)

I'll make a note in my todo list, but realistically I will not be able to touch it for the next 12 months. My clones are on strike!

Regards,
- Graeme -

_______________________________________________
fpGUI - a cross-platform Free Pascal GUI toolkit
http://opensoft.homeip.net/fpgui/

People, my problem was solved with the help of xsltproc in a Linux box where one our services is running, and it works really good.

But it could be nice to have an Object Pascal version of the library, to be able to do the same without needing to use an external program.

Leonardo M. Ramé
http://leonardorame.blogspot.com