XML Codec¶

Encode/decode XML payloads.

Identification and Properties¶

Codec ID: xml

Properties:

Name	Type	Default value	Description
`encoding`	string	`utf-8`	encoding: use this to encode the payload. Decoding: assumes the payload follows this encoding if the xml prolog encoding attribute is missing.
`write_prolog`	boolean	`True`	encoding: if True, write the `<?xml version="1.0" encoding="..."?>` prolog.
`prettyprint`	boolean	`False`	encoding: if True, pretty print the XML (carriage returns, hard tabs)

Overview¶

This codec enables to encode/decode XML strings from/to Testerman message structures.

Limitations:

Comments, entity nodes are not decoded (nor can be encoded)
Nested elements are only reported if not preceded by a text. In particular, this makes this codec unsuitable for full XHTML parsing, but should make it more convenient in most testing cases

Something like

<p>In this text, <i>some elements</i> are nested</p>

will be decoded to:

('p', { 'value': u"In this text, <i>some elements</i> are nested" })

I.e. the nested element won’t be constructed; whereas:

<p><i>nested element</i></p>

will be decoded to

('p', { 'children': [ ('i', 'value': u"nested element") ] })

If you don’t need to manage attributes and CDATA sections, you may consider CodecXerLite.

Decoding¶

Input:

<element attr="attrval">
  <subelement>subvalue</subelement>
  <subelement2><![CDATA[cdata value]]></subelement2>
</element>

Decoded message:

('element', { 'attributes': { 'attr': 'attrval' }, 'children': [
  ('subelement', { 'value': 'subvalue', 'cdata': False }),
    ('subelement2', { 'value': 'cdata value', 'cdata': True }),
  ]}
)

cdata is always provided during decoding.

Encoding¶

Input:

('element', { 'attributes': { 'attr': 'attrval' }, 'children': [
  ('subelement', { 'value': 'subvalue' }),
  ('subelement2', { 'value': 'cdata value', 'cdata': True }),
]})

Encoded message:

<element attr="attrval">
  <subelement>subvalue</subelement>
  <subelement2><![CDATA[cdata value]]></subelement2>
</element>

If cdata is not present during a value element encoding, it is assumed to be False.

If both children and value are provided, children has a greater precedence and value will be ignored.

TTCN-3 Types Equivalence¶

      type record Element
      {
      Attributes attributes,
      // if children is present, cdata and value are not present.
      // if cdata and value are present, children it not present.
      boolean cdata optional,
      universal charstring value optional,
      record of Element children optional
      }

type record Attributes
{
  // field name depends on the available attributes. All types are universal charstring
  universal charstring name
}