Homepage: http://www.gci-net.com/~johnw/emacs.html
Author: John Wiegley
Updated:
Code to efficiently read/write XML data with Elisp
XML is yet another way of expressing recursive, attributed data
structures -- something which Lisp has had the capacity to do for
decades.
The approach taken by xml-parse.el is to read XML data into Lisp
structures, and allow those same Lisp structures to be written out
as XML. It should facilitate the manipulation and use of XML by
Elisp programs.
NOTE: This is not a validating parser, and makes no attempt to read
DTDs. See psgml.el if you need that kind of power.
Also, tags beginning with
My own book!
First
John
Wiegley
A very small chapter
Wonder where the content is...
It would be parsed into this Lisp structure:
'(("book" ("id" . "compiler"))
("bookinfo"
("bookbiblio"
("title" "My own book!")
("edition" "FIrst")
("authorgroup"
("author"
("firstname" "John")
("surname" "Wiegley")))))
("chapter"
("title" "A very small chapter")
("para" "Wonder where the content is...")))
Now it can easily be modified and interpreted using ordinary Lisp
code, without the ordeal of manipulating textual XML. When you're
done modifying it, you can write it back out (complete with proper
indentation and newlines) using:
(insert-xml t)
See the documentation for `read-xml' and `insert-xml' for more
information.
There are also a set of helper functions for accessing parts of a
parsed tag:
xml-tag-name get the name of a tag
xml-tag-attrlist returns a tag's attribute alist
xml-tag-attr lookup a specific tag attribute
xml-tag-children returns a tag's child list
xml-tag-child lookup a specific child tag by name
Also, the attribute list and child lists can be searched using
`assoc', since they roughly have the same format as an alist.
###autoload