fast-xml-parser | Validate XML , Parse XML

According to the docs there is a quite flexible option arrayMode:

When false, a tag with single occurrence is parsed as an object but as an array in case of multiple occurences. When true, a tag will be parsed as an array always excluding leaf nodes. When strict, all the tags will be parsed as array only. When instance of RegEx, only tags will be parsed as array that match the regex. When function a tag name is passed to the callback that can be checked.

In your case, a simple regular expression would do. Not sure whether it expects /Items/ or /Item/ though - but you can surely test this in no time.

Example cases that should lead to Item be retrieved as arrays:

Two key steps are required to make this work with promises:

1. Convert each id to a promise that either resolves to the respective response or alternatively to the result of processFlexiTaskResponse2Response

2. Use Promise.all() to combine all these promises to one promise that resolves when all of the per-id promises are resolved.

This is the most relevant part

The problem is that the attributes have curly quotes “ instead of ".

This is often the result of copy/paste from Word and MS Office products that sometimes change regular quotes to the "smart quotes" that are the directional curly. These are not the same as regular quotes and often cause issues with parsing, since they are multi-byte characters and if not encoded properly will get mangled and read as two separate characters.

Fix the XML to use regular quotes:

I solved my issue by doing this :

I've created a simple solution based on your description of the problem. It may not be truly optimal, but it gets the job done (hopefully). See if this is what you need.

We'll use the xml-parse package to process XML.

TL;DR: Get the full code here.

So, to solve this problem, we will go through two steps.

STEP 1: Create maps of the XML files

Let's define a data structure called "map" (should've chosen a more descriptive name but couldn't think of one). This map will be a dictionary.

Our map consists of key-value pairs.

• The key is a path. Our map will contain all existing paths in the XML structure.
• The value is another dictionary:
  • The key is the name of the element.
  • The value is the tag of the element.

So the maps of the two example XML structures you provided will be like this:

Old map:

Issue was caused because in some instances when running the command, npm install was not run prior. Once npm install was run before, all current versions appeared.

Unfortunately, it seems like the answer is that this option is simply not available in fast-xml-parser, as per this issue I found: https://github.com/NaturalIntelligence/fast-xml-parser/issues/175. Text nodes will get merged as one, and the team member explains that this is "not a bug but expected behavior".

Not to be rude, but am I missing a "do the right and obvious thing" switch in the options or something? I'm asking because I want to post an issue, and asking Stackoverflow first is a requirement.

1. You're not being rude. Rude would be to expect SO to triage bug reports (and embarrassing would be to require that greater attention be drawn to bugs via such a policy).

2. Note also the authors of fast-xml-parser are misusing the term valid.
   See Well-formed vs Valid XML.

From fast-xml-parser's limitations section:

Limitations

Currently FXP fails to parse XML with attributes has ">" in the value. This problem is left open as change in regex for its fix is degrading the performance. And the parser become very slow in case of long attrbute [sic] names.

1. Any XML "parser" based on regex is a toy and should not be used professionally.

Bottom line: This is more serious than an isolated bug. It's the tip of the iceberg of a serious design flaw in fast-xml-parser. Recommendation: Avoid.

I would take a check for a nested object at first and if no nested object, push the actual key.