Overview

A pre-commit hook that applies formatting to XML files. Based on the formatter by Kitebird (http://www.kitebird.com/software/xmlformat/). A copy of the original documentation is kept at here.

Description

XML formatting should not be strict. Many environments require special rules to format their XML documents. This tool allow those environments to programmatically define their own formatting rules, controlling the formatting applied to different XML tags.

Usage

You can use this application in multiple ways, both standalone, containerized or as a pre-commit hook.

Standalone

The most basic usage goes through downloading the latest release of the application, unzipping it, and run the bin/xmlformat.sh script. For example, for getting command help you can do:

# bin/xmlformat.sh -h

⚠️ Currently only short parameters are supported.

For displaying the formatted output, just pass the XML file name to the script

# bin/xmlformat.sh test/test_base.xml

Supported languages

The default version of the xmlformat.sh script tries to autodetect the language interpreter available in your system.

XMLFormat comes with three different implementations, so you can choose the one better fitting your infrastructure. To be precise, it tries the following runnable commands:

• perl
• ruby
• podman
• docker
• java (through Jbang)

perl,ruby and java will execute the language-based version of the formatter. podman or docker will use the appropriate container runtime to execute the latest container at quay.io/someth2say/xmlformat:latest.

ℹ️ The containerized versions will always execute the ruby version of the application inside the container.

If you have an special need to override this behaviour, you can use the -l option to force the language to be used.

# bin/xmlformat.sh -l perl test/test_base.xml

ℹ️ You can also use pl for perl and rb for ruby.

Pre-commit hook

XMLFormat can also be used with pre-commit in order to format your XML files before sending them to the repo.

Just add the hook reference to your .pre-commit-config.yaml file:

repos:
  - repo: https://github.com/someth2say/xmlformat
    rev: 0.5
    hooks:
      - id: xmlformat

The same way as you can do with the bin/xmlformat.sh, you can select your runtime and many other option by passing hook arguments:

repos:
  - repo: https://github.com/someth2say/xmlformat
    rev: 0.5
    hooks:
      - id: xmlformat
        args: ["-i","-l","java"]

⚠️ If you provide args to your hook reference, then always provide the -i argument to make sure your files are updated. Else, the files will not be modified, and the hook will never fail.

If the only argument you are passing is the language, you can alternatively use the pre-defined hooks: xmlformat_ruby, xmlformat_perl, xmlformat_java, xmlformat_podman, and xmlformat_docker

Configuration format

The default formatting rules applied by XMLFormat are highly opinionated, and target the DocBook XML format.

You can create your own formatting rules in a configuration file and passing it to the formatter. The format of the configuration file is based on the format described here, with the following additions:

• The wrap-type attribute controls how the content of a text node is wrapped. This attribute accepts three values: length, sentence and none.
  • length makes sure lines are not longer than a fixed length. The length of the lines is controlled by the wrap-length attribute.
  • sentence splits the contents in one sentence per line. Sentence ends are identified by the ., ? and ! characters.
  • none means no line wrapp applies, so all the content of the node will be contiguous. In all cases, words are never wrapped.

A sample configuration entry follows:

para
  entry-break = 1
  subindent = 2
  normalize = yes
  wrap-type = sentence

ℹ️ The *DEFAULT entry in a configuration file applies the formatting settings to all tags.

Once you have the configuration ready, use the -f option to provide the file to the formatter:

# bin/xmlformat.sh -f myconfig.conf test/test_base.xml

Configuration sources

XMLFormat will look for configuration files in the following order:

1. If the -f option is provided, then the parameter file will be used. If the file do not exist or is not readable, then the program will exit.
2. Else, it looks the file in the XMLFORMAT_CONF environment variable, or for a xmlformat.conf file in the XMLFORMAT_CONF folder.
3. Else, it looks the file in the XDG_CONFIG_HOME environment variable, or for a xmlformat.conf file in the XDG_CONFIG_HOME folder.
4. Else, it looks for a xmlformat.conf file in the current folder (pwd).
5. Else, it defaults to the embedded configuration.

Arguments

The following arguments are accepted by XMLFormat:

• -l [lang]: Sets the execution language or container infrastructure

• -h: Shows a help message.

• -f [config_file]: Sets the XML format configuration file to use. Absolute paths must be used.

• -s: Dumps configuration to be used and exits.

• -u: List XML tags with no explicit entry in configuration file. *DEFAULT configuration block will be used for those elements.

• -o: Canonize output. Skips line-wrapping, indentation and line-break additions.

• -v: Increases verbosity level. Once, file progress is shown. Twice, formatting progress for each file is shown.

• -V: Shows the underlying script version and exits.

• -p: Parses the XML documents, but applies not format.

• -i: Format the document in place, replacing the contents of the input file with the reformatted document. If not provided, formatted results are sent to standard output.

Contributors ✨

Thanks goes to these wonderful people (emoji key):

Tom Schraitle 🚧

Tomáš Bažant 💻 🎨

Dan Kolepp ⚠️

Stefan Knorr 📖

This project follows the all-contributors specification. Contributions of any kind welcome!