Re: about MarkupBuilder

On 26 May 2004, at 13:05, steb wrote:
> Hi,
>  
> I would like to know what is the best groovysh way to create and 
> update an xml file, say like the example taken from Mark Volmann's 
> article :
>          import groovy.xml.*;
>         
>            mb = new MarkupBuilder()
>           text = mb.html() {
>           head() {
>              title("This is my title.")
>           }
>           body() {
>              p("This is my paragraph.")
>           }
>         }
>         
> I don't understand why "text" equals to "html" (as mentioned on 
> http://raibledesigns.com/page/rd).  So how to get the complete xml 
> string?

MarkupBuilder outputs the markup as text to some Writer. It does not 
presume to capture in some String buffer somewhere the output thats 
occurred on each method call. If thats what you want to do, you could 
use a StringWriter

buffer = new StringWriter()
mb = new MarkupBuilder(buffer) // new helper constructor just added to 
CVS
mb.html { head { } body { p("hey" } }
text = buffer.toString()

> How would you add a paragraph to body or change its value? 

The script which works on the markup builder instance creates the 
content. So you can use normal groovy script to generate whatever code 
you wish.

for (x in 1..10) {
     p("some text ${x}")
}

etc

> Would you use the XMLParser but then, how to write back to the file?

The purpose of GroovyMarkup and builders is to generate a bunch of 
markup and stream it somewhere (SAX events, DOM trees, beans, text 
file, Ant tasks etc).

I suspect what you really wanna do is operate on some DOMish tree 
structure then write it out again somewhere? If so there's a 
NodeBuilder you can use to make a tree of Nodes and then you can 
navigate and modify the nodes and then output it again.

James
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