vim: format/indent xml file

• It requires xmllint command. libxml2-utils need to be installed:

  sudo apt install libxml2-utils

• Use vim open the xml file, use the following vim command to reformat:

  :%!xmllint --format -

processing XML using powershell

# load XML document from file
$xmlfile = "C:\Users\user1\Documents\123.xml"
[xml]$doc = Get-Content $xmlfile

# find element by tag name
$te = $doc.DocumentElement.SelectSingleNode("token")

# check if element exists
if (-not $te) {
    # create the element if not exist
    $te = $doc.CreateElement("token")
    # append to DocumentELement
    $doc.DocumentElement.AppendChild($te) 
}

# set element value
$te.InnerText = "XXXXXXXX"

# save the document back to the file
$doc.Save($xmlfile)

see also

• DotNet API DOC about XML

Bash: replace substring using regular expressions

With bash, you can replace string using ${variable//pattern/replacement}

a="<token>XXX</token>"

# to replace the token element value with YYY
a=${a//<token>[a-zA-Z0-9]*<\/token>/<token>[a-zA-Z0-9]*<\/token>}

see also

• Search and replace in bash using regular expressions

Java: Remove illegal character 0x0 from string

Unicode 0x0 is illegal in XML.

str.replaceAll("[\\000]+", "")

Python: ElementTree XML element to string

import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET

# element is an xml.etree.ElementTree.Element object
xmlstr = ET.tostring(element, encoding='utf8', method='xml')

See also

• Python ElementTree API

Python: parse xml using ElementTree

• parse from a file:

  import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET
  tree = ET.parse('/home/wilson/my.xml')
  root = tree.getroot()
  

• parse from a string:

  import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET
  root = ET.fromstring('1')
  

see also

• Python ElementTree API

Python: get the sub-elements of a xml element

According to Python XML ElementTree API,

• get all sub-elements(descendants):

  all_descendants = list(element.iter())

• get direct sub-elements(children):

  children = list(element)

XML element naming rules

XML elements must follow these naming rules:

• Names can contain letters, numbers, and other characters. Except for the first character, they can contain
  • digits
  • period(.)
  • hyphen(-)
  • underscore(_)
  • colon(:) - legal but should be used except for namespaces
  • NO other characters are allowed like #, @, $, %
• Names cannot start with a number or punctuation character. Must start with a letter or a underscore(_).
• Names cannot start with the letters xml (or XML, or Xml, or xMl etc)
• Names cannot contain spaces

Any name can be used, no words are reserved.

XSLT for GWT

http://www.ebessette.com/d/software/XSLTForGWT

XPATH for GWT: http://realazthat.blogspot.com/2009/08/xpath-for-gwt.html

Javascript: show XML object as string

IE:
alert(XmlObj.xml);

Firefox:
alert((new XMLSerializer()).serializeToString(XmlObj));