cxpath - a programmer's friendly interface to XPath

With cxpath you can access XML files via XPath 2.0 in a Go friendly matter.

<a:root xmlns:a="anamespace">
  <a:sub>text</a:sub>
</a:root>

package main

import (
	"fmt"
	"log"

	"github.com/speedata/cxpath"
)

func dothings() error {
	ctx, err := cxpath.NewFromFile("myfile.xml")
	if err != nil {
		return err
	}
	// for XPath queries
	ctx.SetNamespace("a", "anamespace")
	root := ctx.Root()
	// prints 'root'
	fmt.Println(root.Eval("local-name()"))
	// prints sub
	fmt.Println(root.Eval("local-name(a:sub)"))
	// prints anamespace
	fmt.Println(root.Eval("namespace-uri(a:sub)"))
	sub := root.Eval("a:sub")
	for cp := range sub.Each("string-to-codepoints(.)") {
		// prints 116, 101, 120, 116 - the codepoints for 'text'
		fmt.Println(cp)
	}
	return nil
}

func main() {
	if err := dothings(); err != nil {
		log.Fatal(err)
	}
}

Error handling

The constructors NewFromFile and NewFromReader return errors the usual Go way. For all other methods, errors are stored in the Error field of the returned Context so that method chaining stays clean:

root := ctx.Root()
result := root.Eval("some/xpath")
if result.Error != nil {
    log.Fatal(result.Error)
}
fmt.Println(result.String())

The same applies to the Each iterator. If the XPath expression is invalid, the iterator yields a single Context with the Error field set:

for item := range root.Each("some/xpath") {
    if item.Error != nil {
        log.Fatal(item.Error)
    }
    fmt.Println(item.Int())
}

The value accessors Int() and Bool() also store conversion errors in Context.Error rather than returning them directly.

Installation

go get github.com/speedata/cxpath