XML from absolutely nothing

XML elements

The basic unit of an XML document is an XML element.

A standard XML element consists of:

• a start tag – e.g. <my-element>;

• optional content – e.g. Some data;

• an end tag – e.g. </my-element>.

<my-element>Some data</my-element>

If an element has no content, it can be abbreviated into an empty element tag:

<my-element />

To repeat then, there are three types of tag:

• a start tag – e.g. <a-name>;

• an end tag – e.g. </a-name>;

• an empty element tag – e.g <a-name />.

A tag always starts with < and ends with >.

A start tag and an empty element tag must start with an element name. This is a case-sensitive string starting with a letter or underscore, followed by any combination of letters, digits, hyphens, underscores, and periods.

A start tag and an empty element tag can have attributes. These are name, value pairs:

<a-name an-attribute="my value" another-attribute="3">Some text</a-name>
<a-name an-attribute="my value" another-attribute="3" />

The content of an element consists of zero or more items, where an item can be:

• Text

• An element

Elements contained in other elements are child elements, e.g:

<a-parent>
    <a-child>with text content</a-child>
    <another-child>with more text</another-child>
</a-parent>

You can mix text items and element items in element content, like this:

<a-parent>
    Some text
    <a-child>with text content</a-child>
    More text
    <another-child>with more text</another-child>
    Text continues
</a-parent>

but it is more common to have element content that is either one or more element items, or one single text item.

XML documents

There is a single element at the root of a valid XML document. This is the root element.

Contents of some_example.xml

<a-root-element my-type="example">
    <at-second-level>
        <first-thing>Some text</first-thing>
        <second-thing>More text</second-thing>
    </at-second-level>
</a-root-element>

To take another example, this would be a valid XML document, because it has a single element at the root level:

<my-element>
    Some text
</my-element>

But this would not, because it has two elements at the root level:

<my-element>
    Some text
</my-element>
<another-element>
    More text
</another-element>

The XML document may start with a special construction called the XML prolog of this form:

<?xml version="1.0"?>

Default XML encoding is UTF-8, but you can specify another encoding in the XML prolog:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-16"?>

Reading XML

For example, in Python:

>>> import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET
>>> tree = ET.parse('some_example.xml')
>>> root = tree.getroot()
>>> print(root.tag)
a-root-element
>>> print(root.attrib)
{'my-type': 'example'}
>>> children = root.getchildren()
>>> print(len(children))
1
>>> only_child = children[0]
>>> for child in only_child.getchildren():
...     print(child.tag, child.text)
... 
first-thing Some text
second-thing More text