xml-ANNOUNCE

XML Virtual FileSystem for Midnight Commander


WHAT IS IT
   View an XML file in Midnight Commander as a filesystem.


WHAT'S NEW

Version 1.2.1.post1 (2025-01-11)

   Update docs.


WHERE TO GET
   Home page: https://phdru.name/Software/mc/xml.html
   Download:  https://phdru.name/Software/mc/xml
    git clone https://git.phdru.name/extfs.d.git
    git clone  git://git.phdru.name/extfs.d.git

   Installation instructions: https://phdru.name/Software/mc/INSTALL.html


The VFS represents tags as directories; the directories are numbered to
distinguish tags with the same name; numbering also helps to sort tags by their
order in XML instead of sorting them by name and prevents name clash when tag
names coincide with the names of special files used by XML VFS. Attributes,
text nodes and comments are represented as text files; attributes are shown in
a file named "attributes", attributes are listed in the file as name=value
lines (I deliberately ignore a small chance of newline characters in values);
names and values are reencoded to the console encoding. Text nodes and comments
are collected in a file named "text", stripped and reencoded. The filesystem is
read-only.

Date/time for all directories/files set to the last modification time of the
XML file.

Implementation based on minidom doesn't understand namespaces, it just shows
them among other attributes. ElementTree-based implementation doesn't show
namespaces at all. Implementation based on lxml.etree shows namespaces in a
separate file "namespaces".

It is useful to have a top-down view on an XML structure but it's especially
convenient to extract text values from tags. One can get, for example, a
base64-encoded image - just walk down the VFS to the tag's directory and copy
its text file to a real file.

The VFS was inspired by a FUSE xmlfs: https://github.com/halhen/xmlfs


AUTHOR
   Oleg Broytman <phd@phdru.name>

COPYRIGHT
   Copyright (C) 2013-2025 PhiloSoft Design

LICENSE
   GPL