[Octave-bug-tracker] [bug #45951] Add "xmlread" to core Octave or replace the one in io package

[Philip Nienhuis]

Follow-up Comment #1, bug #45951 (project octave):

Yes, the io pkg xmlread / xmlwrite / xmltree is completely undocumented. But I
tend to keep it around until either
- A good replacemnt comes up, or
- It no longer builds with (then) current Octave.
Maybe some svn archeology or google searches might turn up hints how to get it
working but I haven't bothered yet.

Several Octave users seem to have gripes against Java so invoking Java class
libs like xerces for core functions may not meet much enthusiasm. (I have no
opinion here)
But in the io package things are different :-)

Depending on what you want to achieve, there are some alternatives:

- For small parts of XML files there's getxmlnode.m and getxmlattv.m in the io
package. I wrote those to be able to get some special localized data from
spreadsheet files (often zipped archives) in small XML support files when
speed isn't critical.
Looking at the example you referred to I think a few lines of code invoking
them will do as well.

- Reading series of data can be done very fast using regular expressions.
Markus Bergholz showed how to do it with .xlsx Excel files, later on I've used
it for gnumeric and several xml based data logger files. In io pkg's private
directory there are several examples for the OCT interface.
XML gurus may frown here but tests at work show that regexps work 2 to 3 times
as fast as when using real XML parsers.


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