hey Mike -- I didn't scroll through that white space in your
message and missed reading you have tried XMLSpy. Good luck
finding the feature sets you need. Have you told Altova what you
need? If the feature is as helpful as you suggest they would probably
want to support it.
--
<%= Clinton Gallagher, "Twice the Results -- Half the Cost"
Architectural & e-Business Consulting -- Software Development
NET
csgallagher@REMOVETHISTEXTmetromilwaukee.com
URL
http://www.metromilwaukee.com/clintongallagher/
"Mike Kamermans" <mopaxian@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:Xns9546C9632A989nihongoresources@213.75.12.14 8...[color=blue]
> I hope someone can help me, because what I'm going through at the moment
> trying to edit XML documents is enough to make me want to never edit XML
> again.
>
> I'm looking for an XML editor that has a few features that you'd expect
> in any editor, except nearly none of them seem to have:
>
> 1 - Search and repalce with Regular Expressions.
> 2 - Search and Replace in an Xpath context.
> 3 - User specified tag-generation for either on a single line, or
> over multuiple lines.
> 4 - Auto XML-formatting (ideally using the previous property)
> 5 - A "wrap selection in element" option
>
>
> (1)
>
> Admittedly, this is not so hard. A lot of XML editors have it, but some
> don't.
>
> (2)
>
> This seems a lot harder to come by. In fact, so far no XML editor rogram
> seems to have it. XMLwriter, XMLmind, XMLspy, <Oxygen/>... none of them.
> This is hell, it's a function that I simply *need* as editor of XML
> documents.
>
> The fact that this doesn't exist means I'm resorting to scriptin Perl
> scripts that do regular expression replacements that act only within
> specific element nests. I have to do this manual for every xpath I need
> something changed in... this wastes so much of my time it's surreal.
>
> (3)
>
> Again, something that apparently no editor seems to have. The fact that
> this is missing means that editors that have what I need as (4), auto-
> format XML in a completely unreadable fashion when in-sentence markup is
> used to for instance indicate something is <bold>bold</bold> or has ruby-
> style (
www.w3c.org/TR/ruby) overhead reading.
>
> if I type <ruby> and the editor I use auto-compeletes it to:
>
> <ruby>
> <rb></rb>
> <rt></rt>
> <ruby>
>
> then that's completely useless, it's needed on a single line, not four
> separate lines...
>
> conversely, if I'm typing <table> I don't want the autocomplete to give
> me <table><tr><td></td></tr></table>, I need it on multiple lines.
>
> (4)
>
> Why programs such as XMLspy miss this option is beyond me, but it's
> something that's just really needed.
>
> (5)
>
> you select a bit of XML, select "wrap in element", give the program the
> element's name, and presto, your selected text now sits between <element>
> and </element>.
>
> This is also something that anyone who writes XML, or has to edit it,
> would expect to exist. It's common sense. But then again, not every XML
> editor seems to have it.
>
>
> If anyone knows an editor that has these features, please, PLEASE let me
> know. At the moment I'm editing some bad XML and for something as
> stupidly trivial as a text search and replace in an XPATH context, I need
> to first script something in PERL that does the replacing in the proper
> elements, then I need to autoformat the XML in XMLwriter because PERL
> uses a blind replace, so tabs aren't shifted when a new tag is inserted
> or an obsolete one removed. Then a have to kill all the bad formatting
> that XMLwriter generated in terms of for instance <ruby> tags using
> regular expression replacing in a high-level texteditor like TextPad.
>
> I'm literally wasting hours with simple tasks...
>
> Whoever knows, you're my hero.
>
>
> Mike Kamermans
>
> PS: I tried XMLspy, XMLmind, XMLwriter, Cooktop, Peter's XML editor and
> Oxygen... from all those, only programming what I need in PERL seems to
> be able to do what I'd expect from a half-decent XML editor.[/color]
