[Bulk] Re: Alternatives to XML?

[Frank Millman]

"Roland Koebler"  wrote in message news:20160826140213.GA17438 at localhost...

> Hi,

> OMG!
> So, you have a fileformat, which looks like XML, but actually isn't XML, 
> and will break if used with some "real" XML.

I don't want to pursue this too much further, but I would like to point out 
that my format is genuine XML. I can back that up with two pieces of 
supporting evidence -

1. After going through the unescape > gui > edit > back_to_application > 
escape routine, I validate the result before saving it -

    try:
        return etree.fromstring(value, parser=self.parser)
     except (etree.XMLSyntaxError, ValueError) as e:
        raise AibError(head=self.col_defn.short_descr,
            body='Xml error - {}'.format(e.args[0]))

2. This is how I process the result at run-time. I do not try to parse it 
myself. I convert it into an EtreeElement, and step through it. Each 'tag' 
in the XML maps to a function name in the processing module -

    for xml in elem:
        await globals()[xml.tag](caller, xml)

The built-in ElementTree would work for this, but I actually use lxml, 
because I use a little bit of xpath in my processing, which ElementTree does 
not support.

Frank