Cycling 74 » Topic: How to read XML file and pass to JS object

How to read XML file and pass to JS object

dusx — Tue, 05 Jun 2012 14:54:26 +0000

I am rather new to Max and have been pretty successful so far, however I am now trying to branch out a bit.

What I am trying to do is:
-Read a XML file (currently I am using the ‘text’ object)
-Pass the files contents as a string to a ‘js’ object (I have been trying messages and using ‘prepend’ to add a function to the beginning..)
note: the bang message is received and works

my JS test script:
===================================

autowatch = 1; // allow Max to watch for changes.

inlets = 1;
outlets = 1;

function bang(){
post(“JS is working n”); // includes new line char
}

function msg_string(stringArg){
post(“your string” + stringArg);
post(); // create new line
}

===================================

Re: How to read XML file and pass to JS object

Siska Ádám — Tue, 05 Jun 2012 16:56:02 +0000

Hi,

unless you have some explicit reason to process the XML file in JS, you could use the XML processing tools which I created for Max. The [sadam.dom] and [sadam.sax] objects work with MXJ and they implement a complete W3C-compliant DOM and SAX parser. There’s also a native object called [sadam.rapidXML] which is not 100% W3C-compliant (mainly because it ignores DOCTYPE declarations), but is very fast. They are part of my library which you can get for free from http://www.sadam.hu/software .

Hope this helps,
Ádám

Re: How to read XML file and pass to JS object

dusx — Tue, 05 Jun 2012 18:44:04 +0000

Thanks, Adam
I have infact looked at your tools, and they seem to be very good.
The one thing that turned me away was the non-commercial license. Although I am very far away from a commercial product (just starting) that is my goal, therefore I do not want to build upon a component that is not available for this purpose.
Do you offer a commercial version?

Re: How to read XML file and pass to JS object

Siska Ádám — Thu, 07 Jun 2012 10:12:15 +0000

Hi dusx,

I’ve sent you a message regarding the possibilities of a commercial version.

Best,
Ádám

Re: How to read XML file and pass to JS object

tkzic — Fri, 14 Dec 2012 06:57:21 +0000

Hi dusx,

Have been trying to do the same thing with the [js] object. Tried several libraries with no luck, but did find a workaround:

1. Use aka.shell to convert the xml file to a JSON file using this python script: https://github.com/hay/xml2json – (note you’ll need to change the json ‘import’ statement to: import json as simplejson, optparse, sys, os) and the actual command line syntax is: xml2json.py -t xml2json file.xml > file.json. Or you can use any other command line xml to json converter.

2. Then read in the JSON file with the [js] object using the patch from Peter Nyoeber (near the bottom of the following post):

http://cycling74.com/forums/topic.php?id=33601

You can then access all the data using JSON format inside the [js] object, which is about a thousand times easier than parsing xml anyway.

Note: If you’re using http: requests to get xml data via [jit.uldl] – you can write it out to an xml file using [jit.textfile]. See the CNMAT weather report example. Or let me know and I can post an example.

Hope this helps.