Comments on: I’m Liking Scala’s XML Literals

By: Rudi Angela

Rudi Angela — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 07:39:55 +0000

Yeah, pretty neat…. until you need to produce XML with several namespace prefixes.
I’ve tried using this feature on a project, but ran into problems because all my XML contains prefixed elements.
There is no way to tell scala that the prefixes found in my XML literals belong to a certain namespace.
Perhaps I overlooked something. Tried finding any info online, but had no success.
Most of the real life XML applications I’ve ever had to do with require using namespace prefixes. I do hope there is some way to do it with scala’s XML literals because they are really neat.

By: Geert Van Damme

Geert Van Damme — Sat, 26 Sep 2009 08:55:55 +0000

You’re right. It looks nice.
But posts like this always make me want to test the limits a bit:

scala> val p = new Person(23, “To p: Person = 23, To val xml = p.toXML
xml: scala.xml.Elem =

23
To Servo
Robot

Hmmm, test 1 is passed ;-)
< is converted to <

By: Joey Gibson

Joey Gibson — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 15:20:03 +0000

You’re right, Dave, about having any Scala expression inside the curlies. I made a comment about that in the post, but I didn’t show an example of it. You have a nice example in your post, especially the bit that looks like

{list.map((item) =>

{item}

)}

I really like that. :-)

By: Dave Copeland

Dave Copeland — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 14:43:33 +0000

Given that XML is a fact of life, I do dig this feature. You can make it even more dynamic by putting any Scala expression inside the curly braces, including the generation of further XML: http://www.naildrivin5.com/scalatour/wiki_pages/XmlLiterals#Making_it_more_dynamic What I REALLY wish for is a way to parse/match XML via CSS selectors. I *HATE* the xpath-ish stuff with a passion.