enumerate XML tags (keys that will become headers) along with text (values) and write to CSV in one row (as opposed to "stacked" values with one header)

[Denis McMahon]

On Sun, 28 Jun 2015 09:46:36 +0200, Stefan Behnel wrote:

> Denis McMahon schrieb am 26.06.2015 um 09:44:
>> xml data is an unordered list, and are trying to assign an order to it.
>> 
>> If the xml data was ordered, either each tag would be different, or
>> each tag would have an attribute specifying a sequence number.
> 
> XML is not unordered. The document order is well defined and entirely
> obvious from the data. Whether this order is relevant and has a meaning
> or not is, however, not part of XML itself but is left to the semantics
> of the specific document format at hand. Meaning, XML document formats
> can choose to ignore that order and define it as irrelevant. That
> doesn't mean it's not there for a given document, but it may mean that a
> re-transmission of the same document would be allowed to use a different
> order without changing the information.
> 
> This property applies to pretty much all structured data formats and not
> just XML, by the way, also to CSV and other tabular formats.

The point I am trying to make to OP is that the following two XML 
fragments define the same data:

<things>
  <thing>string 1</thing>
  <thing>string 2</thing>
  <thing>string 3</thing>
</things>

and:

<things>
  <thing>string 3</thing>
  <thing>string 2</thing>
  <thing>string 1</thing>
</things>

Each <thing> is just a member of the collection things, the xml does not 
contain sufficient information to state that <things> is an ordered 
collection containing a specific sequence of <thing>.

Mechanisms such as node.firstChild and node.getChild(x) are all very well 
for manipulating the xml, but any specific ordering of the original data 
should be carried out by using an appropriate attribute of the ordered 
data elements at the point where the xml representation is created.

-- 
Denis McMahon, denismfmcmahon at gmail.com