Re: Add JSON, XML, CSV to Baby X resource compiler

On 20/05/2024 20:27, bart wrote:

On 20/05/2024 17:14, Scott Lurndal wrote:

bart <bc@freeuk.com> writes:

On 19/05/2024 11:16, Malcolm McLean wrote:

The Baby X resource compiler takes data - fonts, images, audio, strings
- and converts them into C source so that they can be read by C programs
without relying on external data files.
>

>
I looked online at an XML to CSV converter, which I thought would do
something clever, but it seems to just turn each XML line into one
string per line.

>
You use stylesheets (XSL) with a stylesheet processor to make
arbitrary transformations to an XML document.  The output can
be XML, HTML, CSV, or any custom format required for an application.

 The OP wanted to be able to directly process XML; I suggest that it first be transformed into something more regular.
 

I've made an attempt.
The approach is to convert JSON and CSV to XML, and then handle the data with one unified function.
So the user has three options
/* This one just makes a best guess for what you want */
<dataframe src="mydata.xml" />
/* This one tells the program that the records are in nodes with the tag "record" */
<dataframe src="mydata.xml" xpath="//record" />
/* This one declares your own structure, picking fields from the xml document */
<dataframe src="mydata.xml">
<field name="title" />
         <field name="author" xpath="books/authors/author@name" />
<field name="copyright">
<field name="year" xpath="//copyright/year" />
<field name="owner" xpath="books/authors/author@name" />
</field>
</dataframe>
It's basically working, but it needs quite a bit more work to allow the user tighter control of types.
To explain, a "dataframe" is 2 dimenensional table of values, which can be numbers or non-numerical values. So most statistics are done with dataframes.
But of course XML can also represent trees, which are a diferent ball game. That would be a different tag.
Anyone wants to have a play, or dive in with suggestions, it's all on github. (https://github.com/MalcolmMcLean/babyxrc the changes are on the branch topic/dataimport).
--
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