The curse of Dennis D. Spreen

Nice little unit!

I made an adaptation to let it work in FreePascal

It’s working right now with FreePascal 2.6.0rc1 which introduced generics syntax compatibility with Delphi, still I need to adapt unicode strings to work with FreePascal style unicode strings, but for now it’s working nicely

http://www.mediafire.com/?7erb3crlbk2n5op

Very nice indeed, thank you very much!

Is the example a valid XML? IE won’t display, FF shows many errors. After fixing question mark in xml tag and some quotes attributes errors, the feature of storing (node) text wrapped in quotation marks is still complained by FF. Am I missing something? Thanks

@Broto:
the question mark in the xml tag was just a typo in the example (fixed).

XML-Spec for “well-formed” files requires the attributes wrapped in quotation marks.
VerySimpleXML parses well even without them (if they consist of a single word).

The other non-XML-standard behavior of VerySimpleXML is the usage of the < and > tags inside an attribute or text:
XML spec requires you to write &lt; and &gt; but VerySimpleXML parses well if wrapped in quotation marks.

The XML example just shows these additional VerySimpleXML features. If you feed it with standard well-formed XML files, they will be parsed as well, of course

I has the same issues but was able to fix via validation, i have started using a new xml editor I found recently, http://www.liquid-technologies.com/xml-editor.aspx, anyone know where I can get this for free?

Nice API. Not sure if supporting invalid XML is good idea but at some point it may be useful so thanks for this *subset*-XML and *very subset*-SGML parser

So nice ! I’ll give it a try. I’ve used Delphi native XML, OmniXML, NativeXML to handle gpx file. Lightweight is appealing.

I wonder whether your code can provide me a means of achieving XML of the form:

…

I have battled with TXMLDocument, with no success. All the examples I have seen will get me something of this form:

…

But that is unacceptable.

Thanks for your assistance!

I wonder whether your code can provide me a means of achieving XML of the form:
”

…

”

I have battled with TXMLDocument, with no success. All the examples I have seen will get me something of this form:
”

…”

But that is unacceptable.

Thanks for your assistance!

My apologies. Apparently I cannot insert XML text in the comment.

try using [] instead of &glt;

Hi,
I cannot get this code to compile into delphi 7 – do you have a version that will work in 7?

@Philip:
It uses generics, but it should not be that difficult to rewrite those parts without generics (you need to manually free the list objects).

[...] VerySimpleXML - очень и очень простой парсер. С ним, собственно, я и начал работать сначала из-за его простоты. [...]

Hi, Very nice and elegant code.

I wonder if you can add an alternative to FindNodes that takes an Anonymous method as parameter, so that you can loop the nodes without having to create and free a temporary TXmlNodeList.

Something like:
TXmlNodeCallBack = reference to procedure(node : TXmlNode);

procedure TXmlNode.ScanNodes(Name: String; CallBack : TXmlNodeCallBack);
var
Node: TXmlNode;
begin
Name := lowercase(Name);
for Node in ChildNodes do
if (lowercase(Node.NodeName) = Name) then
CallBack(Node);
end;

Thanks for this great code.
It seems you have a small bug when the file has

and you want to write it back
check it out – I can submit you with example if need be
regards
PW

Given that it is private
FAttributes: TXmlAttributeList;

I would be nice to have methods to able to enumerate attributes captions and values for a node
You can set and get only as long as you know their names
which you might not know ……
Thank you
best

You should know all possible attributes of a node – I can’t imagine an example where you’d need a “dynamic unknown” attribute collection?

Something like that would be acceptable??

property AttibuteCount:integer read GetAttibuteCount;
function ListAttributeNames(Items: Tstrings): Integer;
function ListAttributeValues(Items: Tstrings): Integer;

function TXmlNode.GetAttibuteCount: integer;
begin
if not assigned(FAttributes) then
Exit(0);
Result := FAttributes.Count;
end;

function TXmlNode.ListAttributeNames(Items: Tstrings): Integer;
var
Attribute: TXmlAttribute;
begin
Items.Clear;
if not assigned(FAttributes) then
Exit(0);
for Attribute in Self.FAttributes do
Items.Add(Attribute.Name);
Result := FAttributes.Count;
end;

function TXmlNode.ListAttributeValues(Items: Tstrings): Integer;
var
Attribute: TXmlAttribute;
begin
Items.Clear;
if not assigned(FAttributes) then
Exit(0);
for Attribute in Self.FAttributes do
Items.Add(Attribute.Value);
Result := FAttributes.Count;
end;

Sorry it should on on a nodelist not a node

How do you please delete a node

I find it and then I free it but then it cannot save to file
aNode := x.NodeExist(‘flavors’);
if (aNode nil) then
aNode := aNode.Find(‘ROW’, ‘caption’, ‘World’);
if (aNode nil) then
aNode.Free;

then xml.savetofile crashes
any ideas thanks


...
if (aNode <> nil) then
begin
// remove node from parent childnodes
if (assigned(aNode.Parent)) then
aNode.Parent.Childnodes.Remove(aNode)
end;


If you remove a node, all you have to do is to remove it from the parent childnodes and the node will be freed by the removal procedure.
As only the root node has no parent, you may even omit the “assigned check”, as a “find” call won’t return the root node itself:


...
if (aNode <> nil) then
// remove node from parent childnodes, the node itself will be freed then
aNode.Parent.Childnodes.Remove(aNode);