map-to-xml

Write out a Clojure map as simple XML

Motivation

This package is intended to write Clojure data as XML in a way that seems natural and obvious -- at least, to me.

If you have a map, {:foo "bar"}, I'd think the obvious way to write that into XML would be: <foo>bar</foo>.

Apparently, that is not so obvious. I originally wrote this quick and dirty code around 2014. I first searched for an existing package, certain that a good one must exist. I found stuff to generate XML from Clojure, but they all seemed to want the data to be annotated. At best, given a nested map like {:foo {:bar "hello"}}, they'd produce <foo bar="hello" />. That's not what I wanted.

Now it's 2018 and the clojure.data.xml package has been created. But it does the same thing as the other packages did. It also, by default, produces unformatted, unreadable XML. It has the ability to do indentation, but warns that it is so slow that it should be considered a debugging feature.

I suppose one can conclude that clojure.data.xml is intended for use in creating large amounts of fully-featured XML, using the Clojure language. That's not what I want. I want to represent Clojure data -- any Clojure data, with an emphasis on what is most common -- as XML.

Since XML requires a root element, I require that the data given to emit as XML be a map: a single map. But that's true only at the top level. It supports sequences once you get past the root element.

Dependencies

This package has no dependencies, which is nice in some sense, but also means I'm likely re-inventing the wheel a lot. It might be nice to integrate this with data.xml, so that it would take generic Clojure data, massage it into the format necessary for data.xml to treat maps as tag and content, and then pass it on to data.xml, specifying the "slow" indentation be used.

Status

Very basic functionality.

License

Copyright (c) 2018, John Valente

Distributed under the MIT Public License