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)

[Ned Batchelder]

On Sunday, June 28, 2015 at 5:02:19 PM UTC-4, Denis McMahon wrote:
> 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>.

You are right that XML does not specify that <things> is an ordered collection.
But XML does preserve the order of the children.  There are many XML schema
that rely on XML's order-preserving nature.

> 
> 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