XML and Octave: review of tools

[Alois Schloegl]

XML support would important for a variaty of data formats. For example, 
it would also enable a simple interface to the ODF-spreadsheet format.
In order to indentify the most useful approach, I was investigating the 
various XML tools available. Here is the result:

(1) There are XMLREAD and XMLWRITE in Octave-forge. That these functions 
support (only) XML data which follow octave.dtd; other .DTD's are not 
supported.

(2) Then, there is XMLTREE from http://www.artefact.tk/software/matlab/xml/
It is GPL,  but  it uses object-oriented language elements which are not 
(yet?) supported in Octave.
Although, XMLTREE extracts only parts of the information in XML files, 
it seems to be the most powerful and flexible approach for reading XML 
files.

(3) XML-toolbox from http://www.geodise.org/downloads/ :
BSD-like license, The software is distributed as p-code, the m-files 
contain just the help documentation.
Therefore, it can not be used with Octave.

(4) And there is XML4MAT from http://xml4mat.sourceforge.net/
It is GPL and come as pure M-file, this would be suitable for Octave.
However, it requires REGEXPREP. Paul Kienzle did a M-file implemenation 
- Thanks - its already in Octave-forge; an oct-implementation will 
certainly improve speed.
Unfortunately, XML4MAT does not work with all XML-files. For example,  
it does not work for  the XML files extracted from an ODF spreadsheet.

(5) Finally, there is the attempt to use LIBXML for reading XML files. 
Muthu is familiar with libxml2 and will look into this.

Any thoughts on that ? Did I miss any other approach on XML support in 
Octave?
Currently, no solution is fully satisfying. If anyone is interested 
working on this, I can provide a suite of XML files for testing and/or 
I'm willing to do the tests.


Alois