Re: Suggestion: Using script output - Human-readable and machine-parseable

[David Fifield <david () bamsoftware com>]

On Thu, Apr 07, 2011 at 06:54:48AM -0500, Daniel Miller wrote:
> I'll try to get the XML translation part done in the next week or so,
> and we'll see if you have the same concerns. One issue I anticipate is
> that the less-structured nature of script output means we can't write
> a DTD that defines Nmap's XML output anymore. I don't know as much
> about that, but if someone could offer input on how to define a schema
> that includes arbitrary tags, that'd be great.

I think that's the wrong approach. You can't have arbitrary tags. (How
would a parser know what to do with them?) Instead you need to represent
the tree somehow. I don't think http://yaml.org/xml.html applies. Their
example is

<invoice xmlns:yaml="http://yaml.org/xml";>
   <number>34843</number>
   <date>2001-01-03</date>
</invoice>

We would need something more like

<invoice>
  <dict>
    <elem key="number">34843</elem>
    <elem key="date">2001-01-03</date>
  </dict>
</invoice>

In other words, you're representing data structures like dictionaries
and arrays, not semantic units like numbers and dates.

David Fifield
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