compactxml

---

Compact XML

Summary

Compact XML is an alternative syntax for representing XML files. It uses indentation to indicate nesting to give a python like feel, XPath based prefixes to identify nodes, and has a macro system to shorten common XML constructs. It is intended for writing element based XML files, especially those where the XML elements share a common structure such as XSLT files.

This package includes a parser and bidirectional converter for converting from this compact XML syntax to XML, and from XML to this compact XML syntax.

Why Do I Want This?

Unlike most projects to create a shorter XML, compact XML is not designed for compressing XML on the wire. Instead, this syntax is designed to make editing XML easier with common editors, and to provide a convenient, configurable shorthand when authoring XML documents with a common syntax.

If you spend all day writing XSLT files or something similar, this will let you work with source files that look like this::

xsl:stylesheet
	xsl:output xml no

	xsl:template "@* | node( )"
		xsl:copy
			xsl:apply-templates "@* | node( )"

Instead of like this::

<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
<xsl:output method="xml" indent="no"/>

<xsl:template match="@* | node( )">
	<xsl:copy>
		<xsl:apply-templates select="@* | node( )"/>
	</xsl:copy>
</xsl:template>

</xsl:stylesheet>

If you're integrating with a python based program, the parser can be built in and parse compact XML files to XML directly. Otherwise a simple command line utility is included that can be used inside make or equivalent to convert to XML as part of your build process.

Install

compactxml is a pure python library, and should be platform independent. It has been developed and tested on python 2.6 on linux, however. As dependencies, it requires that lxml_ and pyparsing_ be installed to function.

A normal python setup.py install command should work to install the library.

.. _lxml: http://codespeak.net/lxml/ .. _pyparsing: http://pyparsing.wikispaces.com/

Usage

There is a compactxml.expand function for converting from compact XML syntax to XML, and a compactxml.compact function for converting from XML to compact XML syntax, with variations on both depending on the output format desired. help( compactxml ) will give better usage instructions, and the included documentation in compactxml.rst provides a comprehensive overview of the compact xml syntax.

Any errors in expansion or compaction are raised as compactxml.ParsingError.

There is also a command line utility compactxml.py in the source distribution which can be used for converting from/to compact xml syntax. See compactxml.py --help for usage information after installation.

Documentation

Detailed documentation <http://packages.python.org/compactxml>_ of the compact XML format is available through the python package index, including a tutorial for new users.