{"id":1670,"date":"2009-07-25T12:11:48","date_gmt":"2009-07-25T19:11:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/multimedia.cx\/eggs\/?p=1670"},"modified":"2009-09-18T21:47:30","modified_gmt":"2009-09-19T04:47:30","slug":"xml-monkey","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/multimedia.cx\/eggs\/xml-monkey\/","title":{"rendered":"XML Monkey"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’m trying to come to terms with the reality that is XML. I may not like the format but that won’t change the fact that I have to interoperate with various XML data formats already in the wild. In other words, treat it like any random multimedia format. For example, suppose I want to write software to interpret the various comics that I’ve created with Taco Bell’s series of Comics Constructors CD-ROMs<\/a>.<\/p>\n


\n\"Amazon
\n<\/center><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n


\n\"Amazon
\n<\/center><\/p>\n

The comics are saved as XML files that look something like this:<\/p>\n

[xml]
\n\n \n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n <\/sq1>
\n…\n <\/page0>\n…
\n<\/comic>
\n[\/xml]<\/p>\n

How to even begin with this? Sometimes a good book can help. Yesterday, I found an old book from 1999 called “Just XML” by John E. Simpson<\/a>. It weighs in at nearly 400 pages. I thought XML was supposed to be relatively straightforward to understand.<\/p>\n

The book is supposed to be geared toward web programmers. I’m not a web programmer, but I do wish to know how to programmatically access this data. I have seen that Python has interfaces to libraries that parse XML. So I shoved xml-monkey.xml through the example code shown at the end of Python’s xml.parser.expat<\/a> documentation. This yields:<\/p>\n

\r\nStart element: COMIC {}\r\nStart element: PAGE0 {u'name': u'pgt1'}\r\nStart element: SQ1 {u'scale': u'350', u'bg': u'bg07', \r\n  u'mirror': u'0', u'y': u'2\r\n  83', u'x': u'388', u'rotation': u'0'}\r\nStart element: OBJECT {u'scale': u'100', u'name': u'ch01', \r\n  u'sq': u'1', u'depth': u'1', u'mirror': u'0', u'y': u'368', u'x':\r\n  u'196', u'rotation': u'0', u'libType': u'characters'}\r\nEnd element: OBJECT\r\nStart element: OBJECT {u'scale': u'100', u'name': u'ch10', \r\n  u'sq': u'1', u'depth': u'2', u'mirror': u'1', u'y': u'370', u'x': \r\n  u'338', u'rotation': u'0', u'libType': u'characters'}\r\nEnd element: OBJECT\r\nStart element: OBJECT {u'scale': u'100', u'name': u'0', u'sq':\r\n  u'1', u'depth': u'3', u'mirror': u'0', u'y': u'376', u'x': u'342',\r\n  u'rotation': u'0', u'libType': u'characters'}\r\nEnd element: OBJECT\r\nStart element: OBJECT {u'scale': u'100', u'name': u'ob02', \r\n  u'sq': u'1', u'depth': u'4', u'mirror': u'0', u'y': u'367', u'x': \r\n  u'469', u'rotation': u'0', u'libType': u'objects'}\r\nEnd element: OBJECT\r\nStart element: OBJECT {u'scale': u'100', \r\n  u'cont': u\"We might as well face it-- XML isn't going away\", \r\n  u'name': u'bu01', u'sq': u'1', u'txtColor': u'', u'depth': u'5', u'mirror': \r\n  u'1', u'y': u'265', u'x': u'216', u'libType': u'bubbles', u'rotation': u'0'}\r\n...\r\n<\/pre>\n
So that’s something. I thought XML documents were required to start with a little more boilerplate such as <?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″?>. I see that there are a few levels to XML validity, the first is “well-formed” in which the document adheres to basic XML syntactic rules. Then there’s actually being “valid” which requires a document type definition to validate against. That DTD, I do not have.<\/p>\n
But this is still a good start. I can see how I might start processing the data using Python. This is good since I am encountering more and more XML files that I’m interested in manipulating.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Getting my feet wet with Python and XML, as well as a Comics Constructor software package<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28,55],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1670","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-programming","category-python"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t