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netvl / xml-rs

An XML library in Rust
MIT License
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[Question] Is this library suited for XML reformatting? #198

Closed hoijui closed 1 year ago

hoijui commented 4 years ago

Hello! :-) I would like to make a tiny tool, that reformats XML in a specific format, well suited for diffing/storing it in git and the like. We currently need this especially for SVG, but I guess doing it for XML in general would not hurt either. The question is, whether this library is suited for such a task, with the main issue being fine-grained control over the output formatting, I imagine.

A little sample output:

...
  <defs
     id="defs6">
    <linearGradient
       gradientTransform="translate(-944.87702,-1490.4786)"
       id="linearGradient1424"
       osb:paint="solid">
...

The exact details may vary, but more or less, something like the above seems to make sense.

NOTE: Please also give word if you know of such a tool already existing! There is at least gsvg, but it is Node.js based, which I consider far from optimal for such a kind of tool.

I am not yet a rust dev, but am looking for a somewhat simple project to start. So if you have some sample code that does something similar already, I would be happy about that too.

hoijui commented 4 years ago

There is also tidy, which is written in C. It seems quite large, powerful and complex, and I was not able to make it behave properly (for example, it produces different output if you run it once on a file, or twice).

gsvg even changes the actual content of the file, so my SVGs look different after applying it.

kornelski commented 1 year ago

Yes and no. The XML writer provided by this library does not have enough control for this, and I don't think files that pretty are needed.

However, you can use the XML reader and use its events to print parsed XML data any way you want.