I … I think I fell into a hole.
Said hole seems to be #XML + #XSLT shaped.
XSLT’s ability to translate XML into #HTML and / or plain text … is — in a word —AMAZING to me.
Combine #XPath selection and … WOW!
I feel like this is going to be a game changer for some things that I do. Similar to #regularExpressions were 25+ years ago.
The #DNBLab Workshop at #DHd2026 hammers home the continued importance of #XML despite all the nay-sayers. Yes, one can read and parse catalogue data provided through SRU with #Python but one still has to be familiar with #XPath to do anything meaningful.
The pain of MARC fields, tags, and codes remains … on to the MARC manual and the beauty of field 800 …
Just updated the Go based XML processing repositories:
XML DOM loading and accessing:
https://github.com/speedata/goxml
XPATH 2.0 (and a bit of 3.1) accessing:
https://github.com/speedata/goxpath
The new kid on the block (experimental!) a new XSLT 2.0 processor:
@brucelawson Not CSS, but JavaScript with some #XPath:
```js
Node.prototype.querySelectorText = function (t) {
return document.evaluate(`.//*[text()='${t}']`, this, null, 9, null)
.singleNodeValue;
};
```
Sorry for the "reply guy" kinda answer, but I just had fun recalling how all this works, and maybe it's actually useful for someone. Likely not a good idea to spam the `Node` prototype in production, though.
Instead of working something productive, I have been fighting with #FreshRSS and its #XPath (scraping) feature to make a working #unifi blog #RSS feed.
After some back and forth with documentation and #AI, I finally have a working version.
Still blown away that they have terminated the feeds (especially for the blog site), and glad that 1.20 version has introduced this possibility with no need to depend on other public or #selfhosted services.
XQuery & XPath users, watch out - i spent a day debugging!
Turns out in BaseX & i think XPath 4 (upcoming), `else` clauses are optional.
This is unexpected in an expression language -
`let $name := if ($p) then get-name($p)
return some-func($name)`
is the same as
`let $name := if ($p) then get-name($p) else ( )
return some-func($name)`
but in a multi-screen if/then/else it’s more likely you just forgot the else() or mismatched some parens.
wxpath – Declarative web crawling in XPath
https://github.com/rodricios/wxpath
#HackerNews #wxpath #webcrawling #XPath #technology #open-source #GitHub
I'm thinking about experimenting with replacing the filters in #FCLI with something more general purpose, inspired by #procmail recipes.
Procmail uses regular expressions on email headers (and bodies), so I wonder what the equivalent is for #JSON documents. Is this an #XPath like use case? I started looking for the JSON equivalent of XPath, and found #JSONPath, and then realised that XPath supports JSON natively nowadays.
DrScriptt
Till Grallert
speedata
Thomas Steiner 
Elisa Beshero-Bondar
Luka Manestar
barefootliam
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Phil