xmltodict

Last year I posted a similar Ask HN; it got 11 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38505531. I asked, "What lesser-known Python libraries do you wish people knew about?" The suggestions there are worth looking up. Don't miss DiskCache (https://github.com/grantjenks/python-diskcache). I really like xmltodict (https://github.com/martinblech/xmltodict). Despite the name, it works in both directions. It is the most ergonomic library I have used for creating XML. It has external type stubs: https://pypi.org/project/types-xmltodict/. Since you have recently discovered Rich, you may want rich-argparse (https://github.com/hamdanal/rich-argparse). It colorizes argparse CLIs with little effort from the user. DeepDiff (https://github.com/seperman/deepdiff) has helped me with testing. I needed to compare two nested data structures but igno

I think there's a happy middle ground that I'm shocked doesn't exist or is obscure as hell because I've never found it in the wild is a "default" schema that is compatible with JSON types and can be serialized the same way JSON does. Because whenever it comes up on the on-disk format seems pretty irrelevant people just want to have an xml.load to map to their language primitives in a sane way. There's this kind of stuff but it's niche and more convention than actual schema. https://www.xml.com/pub/a/2006/05/31/converting-between-xml-... https://untangle.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ https://github.com/martinblech/xmltodict

You implicitly need a schema in JSON too: it's the API documentation. Then, every implementer in a statically typed language needs to translate the JSON format into structures in their own language. And this is impossible to automate, unless the JSON API uses a formally defined schema (eg. OpenAPI or GraphQL schemas), but then we're back to square 1. If you don't care about that (eg. in dynamically typed languages), you can parse XML just like you parse JSON, using something like https://github.com/martinblech/xmltodict

xmlstarlet is really nothing like jq, as a language. But yes, I use it because it is the best commandline xml processor I'd found. That's the only similarity to jq. Is this the yq? https://kislyuk.github.io/yq/ It does contain an 'xq', as a literal wrapper for jq, piping output into it after transcoding XML to JSON using xmltodict https://github.com/martinblech/xmltodict (which explodes xml into separate JSON data structures). This is a bash one-liner! But TBF it really is a 'jq for xml'. I think it would be horrible for some things, but you could also do a lot of useful things painlessly.

I recently found this. Works like a charm: https://github.com/martinblech/xmltodict

Most of my experience is from Python. Each time I use it I have to look at the docs for etree (a library that ships with Python). We would hit performance and feature support issues with etree and tried lxml but had binary compatibility issues between our environments. The Hitchhiker's Guide to Python[1] (a popular reference for Python) recommends untangle[2] and xmltodict[3], neither of which I've used. I feel like in other languages I've used had similar brittleness when dealing with xml. I might be biased because working with xml in an editor it's difficult to validate visually or grok in general when used in practice. [1] http://python-guide-pt-br.readthedocs.io/en/latest/scenarios... [2] https://untangle.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ [3] https://github.com/martinblech/xmltodict

I used to hate doing XML in Python - ElementTree was the nicest of them 10 years ago, but it still hurt. But last year, I discovered xmltodict[0] and since then, I don't really care - it makes doing xml (both reading and writing) no more cumbersone than using dicts, while still supporting stuff like namespaces, CDATA and friends. I still think XML is a horrible, misguided idea - from inception, but even more so in how it is used in practice - but I no longer feel any pain interfacing with it. [0] https://github.com/martinblech/xmltodict