Quick start

Treefic is available both as a python library and as a command-line tool. This section gives an overview on how to use the latter.

Basic usage

The treefic command-line tool can be invoked with two parameters: * the name of a file containing the grammar to be used * the name of a file containing the textual data to convert to XML.

E.g.:

treefic examples/avpairs-grammar.txt examples/avpairs-data.txt

The data file contains the following data:

      name = Doe
first-name = John
     email = john@doe.org
   address = 123 Second Street / Smalltown

and the resulting output is (without indentation):

<av-pairs>
  <pair key="name">Doe</pair>
  <pair key="first-name">John</pair>
  <pair key="email">john@doe.org</pair>
  <pair key="address">123 Second Street / Smalltown</pair>
</av-pairs>

Pipeline usage

As an alternative, if only one filename is given, treefic will read the textual data from its standard input. It is indeed intended to be used in a pipeline where preceding commands produce the textual data, and following commands processing the corresponding XML tree. E.g.:

grep -v name examples/avpairs-data.txt \
| treefic examples/avpairs-grammar.txt \
| xmllint --relaxng examples/avpairs-schema.rng

To go further

The next section explains how to write a grammar file recognized by treefic.