I was mucking about with some XML the last few days, and using XFactorStudio‘s XPath to parse it. I was a little rusty on some of the syntax and I remembered a whlie back I was using Oxygen, which had a nice XPath visualizer in it. I got to thinking and realized that would be pretty easy to make in Flash. So here you have it, the BIT-101 XPath Query Tool.
You can use it on line, or click the link to download the swf. It can be used standalone, or you could even drop it in your WindowSWF directory and have it be a panel inside Flash. Naturally, it requires installation of the XPath classes from XFactorStudio. [Let me correct that. The swf itself does not require that you install the classes. But if you want to then go and build that query in your own file, you will need to install XPath.]
For the next version I’m going to try to make it so you can download an XML file from a URL, and maybe use SWF Studio to make a standalone EXE that you could load local XML files from.
You should think about making it into a plugin for FlashDevelop … I was actually thinking about something similar the other day, since SEPY has an XML Reader/Parser as one of its side panels. Then all we’d need is a SharedObject reader and regex evaluator (like http://www.rexv.org/)
Good work!
Hey I was wondering if you could help me out with the syntax for an xpath query. I am trying to join two ‘or’ contains statments with an ‘and’ clause. something like this:
query:String = //ep[contains (user, ‘term’) or contains (user2, ‘term’)] and [(contains(date, ‘date’) or contains(date2, ‘date’)]
nice article, using an xml editor to work with my xml files, and so far so good, feel free to take a look; http://www.liquid-technologies.com/xml-editor.aspx