[XML-SIG] 'searching' XML documents to extract 'chunks' of XML

[Tony McDonald]

> 
> 
> Looks like the tilda was missing from that URL... this one works:
>
> http://www.handshake.de/~dieter/pyprojects/xslpattern.html
>
> Cheers :)
>
>

[snip]

> If you can first transform your XML document into a DOM,
> you may find "xsl-pattern" useful.
> "xsl-pattern" is an implementation of the XSL pattern subset
> (which is a XQL subset) -- see
>      URL:http://www.handshake.de/pyprojects/xslpattern.html
> for details.
>
[snip]

Many thanks for that Dieter (for the info.) and Jeff (for the URL :).


Dieter, do you have any sample code where the package is 'doing its stuff'?
I've downloaded it and had a look around - I had always thought that XSL was
a stylesheet translation language for XML, and where I've seen it mentioned,
DSSSL and Jade (both of which blew my head off!) haven't been far behind.

Have I missed something really obvious?

At the moment, I have well formed and valid XML generated from an Omnimark
program. I want to search on it and extract from it, based on tag structure
and attribute values, sub-parts of the original XML document. I then want to
churn the resultant tag-soup into HTML and RTF. XQL 'hid' all the DOM stuff
from me (enter a command line query and the XML that 'matched' would come
spurting out). The main problems are that the Perl XQL is quite slow, and it
doesn't do any StyleSheet manipulations.

It seems like it may be time to start playing with the big boys and DOM's,
but being a Python newbie (via Zope) I'm a wee bit apprehensive about
this.... :)

So I guess *now* I'm asking - how do you create a DOM given that you have a
well-formed XML document to feed it...

Thanks for any pointers...
tone