XML Output: libxo - provide single API to output TXT, XML, JSON and HTML

[Lars Engels]

On Thu, Jul 24, 2014 at 09:49:21PM -0700, Simon Gerraty wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> At a vendor summit a few years ago I asked about whether anyone but us
> (Juniper) would be interested in the ablity to have standard BSD apps
> output XML.
> 
> I was actually surprised by the amount of interest expressed.
> I've occasionally nagged our UI team ever since for a clean and simple
> API that we could contribute to address this.
> 
> We now have a what I think is a viable candidate
> and we'd like to take the next steps towards contributing it and
> converting at least a few apps.
> 
> Not only does it handle TXT and XML output but JSON and HTML as well,
> and very rich HTML at that.
> With some slick javascript - you can do amazing things with the level of
> detail you can get out of this sort of thing.
> 
> The API is of necessity a bit more complex than just printf(3).
> Considering the level of functionality available though it is a good
> tradeoff.
> 
> The main open issue (assuming this functionality is still desired) is
> support of wide charachters.
> 
> We figure the worst case solution is a sed(1) script to generate the wide
> version of the API from the normal one, but perhaps simply always using
> UTF8 would be a better solution?
> 
> Thanks
> --sjg

FYI: There's also a Summer of Code project to handle the same:

https://wiki.freebsd.org/SummerOfCode2014/MachineReadableFromUserlandUtils

But I think that one mainly handles JSON output.

Lars
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