XML simpletype, simplecontent, complextype, complexcontent

xmlxsd

I'm having some confusion on the type simpletype, simplecontent, complextype and complexcontent.

I'm almost new to xsd. Can someone help to clear the confusion that giving concrete examples.

Best Answer

I know it's a bit late but I hope this article helps someone.

In short:

<complexType> and <simpleType> both define types. Complex types can have element descendants and attributes while simple types can't.

Complex types can have simple or complex content. Types with <complexContent> can contain child elements while those with <simpleContent> can only contain characters.

Related Solutions

Python – How to parse XML and count instances of a particular node attribute

I suggest ElementTree. There are other compatible implementations of the same API, such as lxml, and cElementTree in the Python standard library itself; but, in this context, what they chiefly add is even more speed -- the ease of programming part depends on the API, which ElementTree defines.

First build an Element instance root from the XML, e.g. with the XML function, or by parsing a file with something like:

import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET
root = ET.parse('thefile.xml').getroot()

Or any of the many other ways shown at ElementTree. Then do something like:

for type_tag in root.findall('bar/type'):
    value = type_tag.get('foobar')
    print(value)

And similar, usually pretty simple, code patterns.

Xml – What does in XML mean

CDATA stands for Character Data and it means that the data in between these strings includes data that could be interpreted as XML markup, but should not be.

The key differences between CDATA and comments are:

As Richard points out, CDATA is still part of the document, while a comment is not.
In CDATA you cannot include the string ]]> (CDEnd), while in a comment -- is invalid.
Parameter Entity references are not recognized inside of comments.

This means given these four snippets of XML from one well-formed document:

<!ENTITY MyParamEntity "Has been expanded">

<!--
Within this comment I can use ]]>
and other reserved characters like <
&, ', and ", but %MyParamEntity; will not be expanded
(if I retrieve the text of this node it will contain
%MyParamEntity; and not "Has been expanded")
and I can't place two dashes next to each other.
-->

<![CDATA[
Within this Character Data block I can
use double dashes as much as I want (along with <, &, ', and ")
*and* %MyParamEntity; will be expanded to the text
"Has been expanded" ... however, I can't use
the CEND sequence. If I need to use CEND I must escape one of the
brackets or the greater-than sign using concatenated CDATA sections.
]]>

<description>An example of escaped CENDs</description>
<!-- This text contains a CEND ]]> -->
<!-- In this first case we put the ]] at the end of the first CDATA block
     and the > in the second CDATA block -->
<data><![CDATA[This text contains a CEND ]]]]><![CDATA[>]]></data>
<!-- In this second case we put a ] at the end of the first CDATA block
     and the ]> in the second CDATA block -->
<alternative><![CDATA[This text contains a CEND ]]]><![CDATA[]>]]></alternative>

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Python – How to parse XML and count instances of a particular node attribute

Xml – What does in XML mean

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