BAD xml

PaulowniaK

I received this xml:

    TableItem1 val1 param1 TableItem2 val2 param2 TableItem3 val3 param3...

Totally defeats the point of XML! :mad: And I'm supposed to manually manipulate this to figure out what's wrong with it!? :mad:

Almost, but not quite, entirely unlike... me...

PIEBALDconsult

Weird. But maybe not wonderful.

Mycroft Holmes

And don't tell me some of the data items have spaces in the data. :laugh: :laugh: :laugh: smack ouch... oh look they have my long sleeved jacket with the buckles at the back, what nice people they are! Some people need to have their keyboards taken away from them.

Never underestimate the power of human stupidity RAH

PaulowniaK

Mycroft Holmes wrote:

And don't tell me some of the data items have spaces in the data.

So it was you who wrote this heap of dung! :mad: ;P ;P ;P Seriously, those spaces were a pain.:suss:

Almost, but not quite, entirely unlike... me...

Mycroft Holmes

No I'm one of the other poor bastards who has had to deal with this type of idiocy. We once wrote a simply Excel to CSV widget that basically allowed you to drag an excel file and drop it onto a desktop icon and it would convert the Excel to a csv if it was a well formed sheet. Worked perfectly on well formed sheets and then started to creep in the "can you tweek it to cater for this or that piece of stupidity" requests. I trashed the entire concept and they now manually export to csv.

Never underestimate the power of human stupidity RAH

walterhevedeich

I had something like this a few years ago when I was working with BizTalk. My boss wanted a generic schema for the input files. Problem was the clients had different headers and are not able to comply with the schema we created. So instead of creating a separate schema for each header, I just added a node that will be populated with the header data (similar to what you have) and do the parsing internally. And no, the delimiters were extended ASCII characters, not whitespaces. But then, you're situation might be different.

Signature construction in progress. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Mark_Wallace

"Good" and "bad" in XML depends entirely on the parser. If the parser can parse it, it's good XML. You have to remember that the point of XML is not the XML itself -- you don't rebuild your entire code base just because some book says that the XML has to be formatted this way or that way.

I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!

Bergholt Stuttley Johnson

Bad XMl, try IBM, the xml we get from them fails the xmls standards, well you might say a lot of companies xml do that, well yes but IBM help write the damn standards in the first place

You cant outrun the world, but there is no harm in getting a head start Real stupidity beats artificial intelligence every time.

ENOTTY

I know what's wrong with it! It's missing the

loctrice

This is priceless, thanks for posting

If it moves, compile it

patbob

The example given misses the point of the "X" in XML -- the design isn't easily extensible. Just because somebody was able to write a parser for a poor design doesn't turn it into a good design, its merely a successfully implemented poor design.

We can program with only 1's, but if all you've got are zeros, you've got nothing.

TheGreatAndPowerfulOz

clearly!

If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader.-John Q. Adams
You must accept one of two basic premises: Either we are alone in the universe, or we are not alone in the universe. And either way, the implications are staggering.-Wernher von Braun
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former.-Albert Einstein

RafagaX

PaulowniaK wrote:

And I'm supposed to manually manipulate this to figure out what's wrong with it!? :mad:

God help you, but I can give you a few pointers if you want to; the main problem, most likely, is the person that wrote this abomination...

CEO at: - Rafaga Systems - Para Facturas - Modern Components for the moment...