Comment on Evil

• Earflap@reddthat.com ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Meh. I just wish XML was easier to parse. I have to shuttle a lot of XML data back and forth. As far as I can tell, the only way to query the data is to download a whole engine to run a special query language, and that doesn’t really integrate into any of my workflows. JSON retains the hierarchy and is trivially parsed in almost any programming language. I bet a JSON file containing the exact same data would be much smaller also, since you don’t list each tag twice.

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  • bob_lemon@feddit.org ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    I still want someone to explain to me why XML even needs namespaces (which cause about 95% of all issues regarding XML).

    There is a way to separate different XML structures, it’s called files.

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  • JackbyDev@programming.dev ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    XML is also tricky to parse because people forget it is for documents too. It’s basically like HTML. Mixed content elements are allowed. <foo>hey <bar>there</bar> friend</foo> is valid XML. So iterating over elements is trickier than JSON (which is just key value pairs and arrays).

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  • ryathal@sh.itjust.works ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    There are parsing libraries, maybe not as many or as open, but they exist.

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    • Earflap@reddthat.com ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      That’s kind of my point though. For being made specifically for the purpose of being machine readable, its kind of a pain in the ass to work with.

      I want a command line utility where I can just

      xmlquery --query 'some/query' --file foo.xml --output foo-out.xml
      

      or in python

      
      import xml
      
      with open("foo.xml", "r") as file:
          data = xml.load(file.read())
      

      That’s the amount of effort I want to put into parsing a data storage format.

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