Please consider this a reply to any unanswered messages I received in response to my original post.
Dave Angel wrote: > What's your real problem, or use case? Are you just concerned with > diffing, or are others likely to read the xml, and want it formatted the > way it already is? I'd like to put the XML under revision control along with other stuff. Other people should be able to make sense of the diffs and I'd rather not require them to configure their tools to use some XML differ. > And how general do you need this tool to be? For > example, if the only thing you're doing is modifying existing attributes > or existing tags, the "minimal change" would be pretty unambiguous. But > if you're adding tags, or adding content on what was an empty element, > then the requirement gets fuzzy And finding an existing library for > something "fuzzy" is unlikely. Sure. I guess it's something like an 80/20 problem: Changing attributes in a way that keeps the rest of the XML intact will go a long way and as we're talking about XML that is supposed to be looked at by humans, I would base any further requirements on the assumption that it's pretty-printed in some way so that removing an element, for example, can be defined by touching as few lines as possible, and adding one can be restricted to adding a line in the appropriate place. If more complex stuff isn't as well-defined, that would be entirely OK with me. > Sample input, change list, and desired output would be very useful. I'd like to be able to reliably produce a diff like this using a program that lets me change the value in some useful way, which might be dragging a point across a map with the mouse in this example: --- foo.gpx 2009-05-30 19:45:45.000000000 +0200 +++ bar.gpx 2009-11-23 17:41:36.000000000 +0100 @@ -11,7 +11,7 @@ <speed>0.792244</speed> <fix>2d</fix> </trkpt> -<trkpt lat="50.605995000" lon="10.709680000"> +<trkpt lat="50.605985000" lon="10.709680000"> <ele>508.300000</ele> <time>2009-05-30T16:37:10Z</time> <course>15.150000</course> -- Thomas -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
