in reply to Consistent xml formatting

Order of attribute doesn't matter, therefore they can be normalized. Order of elements is significant, though, so the two XML documents with swapped elements are not equivalent. If your application doesn't care about the order but you do, make it always save the element in a defined order.

In XML::XSH2, you can sort the elements by 

move &{ sort :k @name /path/to/sequence } replace /path/to/sequence ;

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Re^2: Consistent xml formatting
by Haloric (Novice) on Jul 30, 2015 at 09:01 UTC

    Thanks for the reply.

    For my purposes, the order of elements does not matter. It is the contents of a snapshot of a directory (say), in a random order. The 'name' attribute is (say) the file name or a sub directory name (which contains its own elements).

    I want to be able to compare two xml files describing a file system in this way, comparing all attributes and sub elements but using 'name' attribute as the primary key.

    An element can be missing or added in either xml file, and I want to be able to flag it as such. Elements with the same 'name' attribute are to be compared for sub elements and attributes

    I was hoping that getting them into a consistent ordering would help SemanticDiff cope with missing or new elements. But I think now I will have to write custom code that parses the XML to identify the elements that are new / missing between the two files, and uses SemanticDiff perhaps to compare just elements, not the whole document.

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Re^2: Consistent xml formatting
by SimonPratt (Friar) on Jul 29, 2015 at 08:11 UTC

    Sorry, but order of elements is not always significant. The XML standard allows you to define sections that must contain a set of elements regardless of order. This can be specified in an XML schema with the tag <xs:all>

    If OP doesn't care about element order, then they are better off building a schema and using that to validate their XML

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      Are you sure XML schema is part of the standard?
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