Xul 2.0.0

XML (XPath, XSD, XSLT) Utilities

Contents

• Xul scripts

  • Installation

  • Dependencies

  • Options

• XML source

  • File

  • URL

  • Pipe

• XML standards

Xul scripts

XML utilities written in Python.

• ppx: pretty print XML

• xp: select nodes in XML source

• transform: transform XML with XSLT

• validate: validate an XML source

Installation

The Xul command line scripts can be installed with pip:

$ pip install Xul

Install Pygments for XML syntax highlighting (optional).

$ pip install Pygments

Dependencies

Xul uses the excellent lxml XML toolkit, a Pythonic binding for the C libraries libxml2 and libxslt.

Options

Use the --help option to print a command line script’s parameters:

$ ppx --help

Usage:  ppx [-nr] xml_source_1 ... xml_source_n

Pretty Print XML source in human readable form.

Options:
  --version             show program's version number and exit
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -n, --no-syntax       no syntax highlighting
  -r, --remove-declaration
                        remove the XML declaration

XML source

An XML source can be a local file, an URL or a pipe.

File

Pretty print any local XML file with ppx:

ppx data_dump.xml

URL

libxml2 also supports loading XML through HTTP (and FTP). For example, to pretty print an RSS feed:

ppx http://feeds.feedburner.com/PythonInsider

Loading XML through HTTPS is not supported and will result in an failed to load external entity error.

Pipe

Redirect output (pipe) to a Xul script:

curl -s https://www.python.org/dev/peps/peps.rss/ | ppx

XML standards

W3C XML standards:

• Extensible Markup Language (XML) 1.0

• XML Schema 1.0

• XSL Transformations (XSLT) 1.0

• XML Path Language (XPath) 1.0

• Namespaces in XML 1.0