Modification and creation

xml2 now supports modification and creation of XML nodes. This includes new functions xml_new_document(), xml_new_child(), xml_new_sibling(), xml_set_namespace(), xml_remove(), xml_replace(), xml_root(), and replacement methods for xml_name(), xml_attr(), xml_attrs() and xml_text().

The basic process of creating an XML document by hand looks something like this:

root <- xml_new_document() %>% xml_add_child("root")

root %>% 
  xml_add_child("a1", x = "1", y = "2") %>% 
  xml_add_child("b") %>% 
  xml_add_child("c") %>% 
  invisible()

root %>% 
  xml_add_child("a2") %>% 
  xml_add_sibling("a3") %>% 
  invisible()

cat(as.character(root))
#> 
#> 

For a complete description of creation and mutation, please see vignette("modification", package = "xml2").

xml_find_first()

xml_find_one() has been deprecated in favor of xml_find_first(). xml_find_first() now always returns a single node: if there are multiple matches, it returns the first (without a warning), and if there are no matches, it returns a new xml_missing object.

This makes it much easier to work with ragged/inconsistent hierarchies:

x1 <- read_xml("
  
  See
  Sea
")

c <- x1 %>% 
  xml_find_all(".//b") %>% 
  xml_find_first(".//c")
c
#> {xml_nodeset (3)}
#> [1] 
#> [2] See
#> [3] Sea

Missing nodes are replaced by missing values in functions that return vectors:

xml_name(c)
#> [1] NA  "c" "c"
xml_text(c)
#> [1] NA    "See" "Sea"

XPath and namespaces

XPath is challenging to use if your document contains any namespaces:

x <- read_xml('
 
   
   
 
')
x %>% xml_find_all(".//baz")
#> {xml_nodeset (0)}

To make life slightly easier, the default xml_ns() object is automatically passed to xml_find_*():

x %>% xml_ns()
#> d1 <-> http://foo.com
#> d2 <-> http://bar.com
x %>% xml_find_all(".//d1:baz")
#> {xml_nodeset (1)}
#> [1] 

If you just want to avoid the hassle of namespaces altogether, we have a new nuclear option: xml_ns_strip():

xml_ns_strip(x)
x %>% xml_find_all(".//baz")
#> {xml_nodeset (2)}
#> [1] 
#> [2]