[issue37940] Add xml.tool to pretty print XML like json.tool

[Karthikeyan Singaravelan]

Karthikeyan Singaravelan  added the comment:

There are several modules that expose some of their uses through command line 
like json.tool, zipfile, tarfile, gzip, webbrowser etc. The initial proposal 
was to expose the newly added indent function over the command line to provide 
the same guarantees and semantics. The lxml link lead me to have xpath search 
looks more useful to me. I understand that there was always discussion over 
writing few lines of Python code to do the task and to achieve it via command 
line. Recent addition were around 

* --json-lines added to json.tool in issue31553 
* Add --fast, --best to gzip CLI in issue34969

There were similar discussion where improvements were merged on a case by case 
basis as seen to be a good use case. Some where more on the side of rejection 
like --indent to specify indentation length for json.tool in issue29636. There 
was no xml.tool in the past so there is more consideration to this. I see it 
good that xml also can expose some of its tasks via command line and not to be 
left just because it never had a command line interface from the start. The 
command line API also exposes only the functions already present so I see the 
maintenance cost to be minimal with indent and xpath search in this case. I 
will leave it to you as per the examples and use cases mentioned. If it needs a 
wider discussion on posting to python-ideas/discourse I would be okay to start 
a thread .

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[issue37940] Add xml.tool to pretty print XML like json.tool

[Stefan Behnel]

Stefan Behnel  added the comment:

I agree that formatting is not a use case by itself. I like the idea of XPath 
grepping, though, especially *without* pretty printing, i.e. one result per 
line.

I admit that there is no strong reason for adding such a command line tool to 
the stdlib, though.

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[issue37940] Add xml.tool to pretty print XML like json.tool

[Raymond Hettinger]

Raymond Hettinger  added the comment:

I don't think this should be done:

* Guido didn't want Python to grow into a collection
  of command-line tools
* Browsers like Chrome already provide XML viewers
* If you pretty print JSON, you don't change its meaning,
  but for XML, it adds "text" and "tail" at non-leaf nodes.
  And if leaf text is indented and/or line-wrapped, that
  also changes the stored values.

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[issue37940] Add xml.tool to pretty print XML like json.tool

[Karthikeyan Singaravelan]

Karthikeyan Singaravelan  added the comment:

Thanks Stefan for the link. XPath support sounds cool to me given that there is 
already support in stdlib. It could help with filtering using xml.tool itself 
instead of passing the output to another command to filter. My initial approach 
was to take it from command line --xpath argument and apply it to root node to 
pretty print the elements that match the XPath query. I have pushed the xpath 
changes also to https://github.com/tirkarthi/cpython/tree/bpo14465-xml-tool. I 
will try to add docstrings with xpath examples and tests to raise a PR for this.

# Sample XML

$ python -m xml.tool /tmp/person.xml

  
Idly
  
  
Dosa
  


# Select person with name as Kate

$ python -m xml.tool --xpath './person[@name="Kate"]' /tmp/person.xml

  Idly


# Get all unavailable breakfast items

python -m xml.tool --xpath './/breakfast[@available="false"]' /tmp/person.xml
Dosa


It could also mask the traceback to return error when the XPath is invalid and 
raises exception.


# Error messages

$ python -m xml.tool --xpath './person/[breakfast='Dosa']' /tmp/person.xml
invalid predicate
$ python -m xml.tool --xpath './/[breakfast=Dosa]' /tmp/person.xml
invalid descendant

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[issue37940] Add xml.tool to pretty print XML like json.tool

[Stefan Behnel]

Stefan Behnel  added the comment:

Sounds like a good idea to add something like this.

Have a look here for some more ideas:
https://github.com/lxml/lxml/blob/master/tools/xpathgrep.py

ElementTree should be able to provide most of these features as well these days.

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stage:  -> needs patch

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[issue37940] Add xml.tool to pretty print XML like json.tool

[Karthikeyan Singaravelan]

New submission from Karthikeyan Singaravelan :

Now that XML has pretty print option with issue14465 would it be handy to add a 
command line tool pretty printer similar to json.tool? This can be written as 
one-liner similar to json pretty printing but I think it's a good option and 
having a command line tool also helps in piping the output to other commands 
like filtering particular tags. I tried searching mailing list and couldn't 
find any discussions along these lines. There were some concerns around using 
external tools and  in https://bugs.python.org/issue14465#msg324098 . I thought 
to open this to gather feedback.

Branch : https://github.com/tirkarthi/cpython/tree/bpo14465-xml-tool


python -m xml.tool /tmp/person.xml

  
Idly
  
  
Dosa
  


# Get all breakfast tags

python -m xml.tool /tmp/person.xml | grep breakfast
Idly
Dosa

--
components: Library (Lib)
messages: 350372
nosy: eli.bendersky, rhettinger, scoder, serhiy.storchaka, xtreak
priority: normal
severity: normal
status: open
title: Add xml.tool to pretty print XML like json.tool
type: enhancement
versions: Python 3.9

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