
Show HN: XML Fiddler – tool for quick XML exploration - masa331
https://masa331.github.io/xml_fiddler/
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masa331
Hi everybody, author here

this is simple tool i created to solve a couple of pain points i had when
viewing XMLs. I often work with XMLs or XSDs from various sources and i need
to quickly search through them or extract some sample data. This tool makes it
a bit easier for me than viewing the documents directly through browser, which
i used previously.

It already helped me a lot in my day to day work so i thought it might also
help someone else. Post similar tools if you know them. I always find those
useful.

Have a good one!

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haasted
Very minor request: Pressing "extract" provides no real UI feedback as to what
happened. Until I "discovered" the correct tab, it felt a bit like the button
was not wired up to anything.

No UX expert, but would it be possible to do something that signals to the
user that something did indeed happen?

~~~
masa331
Hi, thanks, that's a good point. I will look into it

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warpech
Similar to XML Notepad, one of the nicest freeware mini apps ever published by
Microsoft:
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/XML_Notepad](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/XML_Notepad)

~~~
masa331
Hi, thanks for the suggestion. I will look into it when working with bigger
files

edit: here is the repo link:
[https://github.com/microsoft/xmlnotepad](https://github.com/microsoft/xmlnotepad)

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tandav
I recently found this. Works like a charm:

[https://github.com/martinblech/xmltodict](https://github.com/martinblech/xmltodict)

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jarym
Decent tool, simple and easy! Glad that XML is still getting attention these
days. While JSON is excellent for almost everything, there are still areas
where XML excels.

~~~
masa331
In my industry(accounting in a small europe country) XML is the standard which
is used for any data exchange. Then CSV. I don't think i'v ever got my hands
on anything in JSON. Maybe once or twice. In APIs of course but these aren't
much common here yet anyways.

~~~
toyg
XML got to be the standard for historical reasons, but it's resisting very
well where its superior formality and exactness give it an edge over "hip"
loose formats like JSON.

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afandian
As we're talking XML and XSD, does anyone have a good open tool for
diagramming XML schemas into something browseable and graphical? Looking to
automatically build docs from XSD in a CI task rather than having to do it
manually.

oXygen gives nice output, but it's not open and doesn't work well in a CI
pipeline.

~~~
austincheney
CSS. You can apply CSS directly to a schema instance in order to allow
beautiful display in a browser. If you are feeling really wild you can add a
tiny sprinkle of JavaScript at the tail end of the file for complete
interaction via DOM walking.

Here is an example of a schema instance with CSS. Keep in mind this is
literally the XSD file: [http://mailmarkup.org/mail-
documentation.xsd](http://mailmarkup.org/mail-documentation.xsd)

~~~
afandian
This is incredibly cool. Plenty of food for thought. I think people would miss
seeing UML type diagrams, especially for a large intricate schema.

This is what we've currently got:
[http://data.crossref.org/reports/help/schema_doc/4.3.7/4.3.7...](http://data.crossref.org/reports/help/schema_doc/4.3.7/4.3.7.html)

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Minor49er
"Extract" doesn't seem to work, but the rest of this is simple and intuitive.
Very nicely done. I wish I had this tool a long time ago!

~~~
masa331
Hi, thanks. When you press Extract the extracted data shows in the Extracts
tab in menu. It doesn't do anything immediatelly. That's not good UX and i'm
gonna adress it somehow as someone else already suggested.

Or there were no data in Extracts after you tried to extract something? If you
don't mind please open up an issue with sample data and xpath in
[https://github.com/Masa331/xml_fiddler/issues](https://github.com/Masa331/xml_fiddler/issues)
and i will look into it

~~~
Minor49er
That makes sense to me now. Even though Extracts was right there, I didn't
make the connection. I assumed that it would copy the same way that the XPath
is copied when that button is clicked.

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ggoo
Nice! simple and intuitive, I like it!

