XML tutorials and examples

Introduction

When fixed character width data file formats become too complex, with for example the number of columns depending on values in previous columns or from data in other files, the effort to write parsers to read and write the information and make sure it is correctly understood becomes very time- and resource consuming. One possible solution is to use an XML format for the data exchange files, in order to draw from the large amount of packages and libraries already written to parse such documents. In this page you will find links and examples that will help with getting familiar with the XML format and how to write tools utilizing it.

XML Overview

See the Wikipedia entry for XML for a description of the XML markup language, link here. Especially take note of the terminology of the different parts of the XML structure.

XML tutorials

An XML tutorial focusing on the web aspect: W3 Schools XML tutorial

A video XML tutorial on youtube: XML basics

XML concrete example

Our source files

Our final XML file

Fortran example of create our XML file from the source file

Python example of create our XML file from the source file

Python example of reading our XML file