Back in the early noughties when I was trying to learn a bit about web development, XML was all the rage. These days it has been displaced in various applications by json and other formats. Configs, that should have been safe XML territory, are also threatened by json, with Microsoft Flow being an example of such use of json. Even so, a number of legacy uses of XML are still going and it is worth being able to decipher it.
Of course you could simply open an XML file in an editor and do lots of manual editing to turn it into csv. At the other end of the spectrum, scripting languages are good at parsing this format. I have found the Python XML Element Tree library useful for that.
A middle road exists, which is to simply drag and drop the file on Excel. This functionality is hardly surprising given that the excel file format itself is based on XML. Using this example data: http://dxlite.g7vjr.org/?band=vhf&limit=500&xml=1
Ignore the style pop up question, then you get a few options:
Of course you could simply open an XML file in an editor and do lots of manual editing to turn it into csv. At the other end of the spectrum, scripting languages are good at parsing this format. I have found the Python XML Element Tree library useful for that.
A middle road exists, which is to simply drag and drop the file on Excel. This functionality is hardly surprising given that the excel file format itself is based on XML. Using this example data: http://dxlite.g7vjr.org/?band=vhf&limit=500&xml=1
Ignore the style pop up question, then you get a few options:
and finally a warning about schema.
Sticking with all the defaults results in the desired table in excel
Things of course will be more complicated with more complicated XML data, and it will be worth looking at the file in an editor, and considering using a proper script to convert it. But excel can be a useful quick and dirty solution.
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