xmltree.3am - Man Page

The xmlbase library contains rules that automatically store the document's element tree in memory. The tree contains a node for each:

• Element
• Attribute
• Text content fragment

Each node in the tree can be referenced by an integer node index. The root element node has an index of 1. Nodes are stored in lexicographical order.

The stored tree is not fully available until the end of the input file. The intended way of using the tree is to put all the processing code in the END clause.

XmlPrintElementStart(index)

Prints the element's start tag, including the attributes. The index argument must point to an element node.

XmlPrintElementEnd(index)

Prints the element's end tag. The index argument must point to an element node.

XmlPrintNodeText(index)

Prints the text content of the node. The index argument must point to an attribute or text fragment node.

The xmltree library provides an XPath-like facility for querying or navigating the document tree.

n = XmlGetNodes(rootnode, path, nodeset)

Populates de nodeset integer array argument with the indexes of the nodes selected from the starting rootnode by the given path pattern. Returns the number of selected nodes.

value = XmlGetValue(rootnode, path)

Returns the text content of the set of nodes selected from the starting rootnode by the given path pattern. The content depends on the node kind:

Attribute node

The content is the attribute value.

Text fragment node

The content is the text fragment.

Element node

Concatenates the content of the descendant element and text fragment nodes. Attributes are excluded from the result.

path

A relative path from one node to one of its descendants is denoted by a sequence of slash separated labels. The label of a child element is the element name. The label of an attribute node is the attribute name prefixed by the "@" sign. The label of a text content node is the string "#text". The path from one node to itself is an empty path. Examples: book/title, recipe/ingredient/@calories, book/author/#text.

path pattern

A sequence of selection steps selector!condition!selector!condition.... Each step is a pair of contiguous "!" delimited fields of the expression.

selector

Regular expression that will be matched against relative paths between nodes.

condition

Like selectors, and may also have a trailing "/?" prefixed value pattern, also given as a regular expression.

selection step

A selection step selects descendant-or-self nodes whose relative path matches the selector, and in turn have some descendant-or-self node whose relative path and text content match the condition.

Examples:

book! --> selects all books.
book!author --> selects all books that have an author.
book!author/?Kipling --> selects all books written by Kipling.
book!@onloan --> selects all books that are loaned.
book!@onloan!title! --> selects the titles of all books that are loaned.