Re: XML tools for Octave

[Andy Adler]

On Mon, 12 Jun 2006, Alois Schloegl wrote:

> > 3. Doesn't manage xml comments (<!-- -->)
>
> Comments are loaded and appear in the substructure  data  as strings.

Yes, but the parser doesn't specially identify them, so you need
to search for comments.

> > 4. Confused by processing instructions
> >      <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
> What do you mean by "confused"? So far I've not observed a problem with this.

The parser gives an error for this file.
     <?xml version="1.0" ?><a></a>

> Currently, the biggest issue for me is that the outcome needs some 
> postprocessing.
> Instead of
>      X.data.='aECG'
>      X.sub = {anystruct}
>
> I'd like to see
>      X.aECG = {anystruct}

Yes. This would be much better.

Instead of just complaining, I've decided to make a positive proposal.

Attached is a concept parser (it just parses files to stdout), based
on the libexpat library.

The advantage is that libexpat is available on all linux platforms and
is distributed with Matlab on windows, so it would be fairly easy to
port to Matlab as well.

Could you take a look to give some feedback on this parser?

> Basically, I want to load large XML data sets, e.g. like this one
> http://hci.tugraz.at/schloegl/biosig/xml/Exa01.xml
> and extract the information which is needed for the common interface on 
> biomedical data formats in the "BioSig for Octave and Matlab" toolbox.
>
> Moreover, reading OpenOffice Spreadsheet files (which are just zipped XML) 
> would be a nice and useful feature.

OpenOffice files have many components, including images and several
xml files. It would be necessary to specify which file to parse, but this
shouln't be difficult if we can assume that libz is available (which I
don't think is the case for Matlab).

The easiest would be to decompress to a temprorary file.

--
Andy Adler <address@hidden> 1(613)562-5800x6218

xmlparse.cc.gz
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