xmlbuilder2

This is NPR's fork of xmlbuilder2, an XML builder for node.js. The project appears to have been abandoned, or at least it enjoys minimal maintenance. The primary impetus for forking is to include our fix for an issue encoding ampersands, though we hope our fix gets incorporated upstream eventually. This library is an important dependency of the Feed Publish Service.

Installation:

npm install xmlbuilder2

Documentation:

See: https://oozcitak.github.io/xmlbuilder2/

Usage:

xmlbuilder2 is a wrapper around DOM nodes which adds chainable functions to make it easier to create and work with XML documents. For example the following XML document:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<root att="val">
  <foo>
    <bar>foobar</bar>
  </foo>
  <baz/>
</root>

can be created with the following function chain:

const { create } = require('xmlbuilder2');

const root = create({ version: '1.0' })
  .ele('root', { att: 'val' })
    .ele('foo')
      .ele('bar').txt('foobar').up()
    .up()
    .ele('baz').up()
  .up();

// convert the XML tree to string
const xml = root.end({ prettyPrint: true });
console.log(xml);

---

The same XML document can be created by converting a JS object into XML nodes:

const { create } = require('xmlbuilder2');

const obj = {
  root: {
    '@att': 'val',
    foo: {
      bar: 'foobar'
    },
    baz: {}
  }
};

const doc = create(obj);
const xml = doc.end({ prettyPrint: true });
console.log(xml);

---

xmlbuilder2 can also parse and serialize XML documents from different formats:

const { create } = require('xmlbuilder2');

const xmlStr = '<root att="val"><foo><bar>foobar</bar></foo></root>';
const doc = create(xmlStr);

// append a 'baz' element to the root node of the document
doc.root().ele('baz');

const xml = doc.end({ prettyPrint: true });
console.log(xml);

which would output the same document string at the top of this page.

Or you could return a JS object by changing the format argument to 'object':

const obj = doc.end({ format: 'object' });
console.log(obj);

{
  root: {
    '@att': 'val',
    foo: {
      bar: 'foobar'
    },
    baz: {}
  }
}

---

You can convert between formats in one go with the convert function:

const { convert } = require('xmlbuilder2');

const xmlStr = '<root att="val"><foo><bar>foobar</bar></foo></root>';
const obj = convert(xmlStr, { format: "object" });

console.log(obj);

{
  root: {
    '@att': 'val',
    foo: {
      bar: 'foobar'
    }
  }
}

---

If you need to do some processing:

const { create } = require('xmlbuilder2');

const root = create().ele('squares');
root.com('f(x) = x^2');
for(let i = 1; i <= 5; i++)
{
  const item = root.ele('data');
  item.att('x', i);
  item.att('y', i * i);
}

const xml = root.end({ prettyPrint: true });
console.log(xml);

This will result in:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<squares>
  <!-- f(x) = x^2 -->
  <data x="1" y="1"/>
  <data x="2" y="4"/>
  <data x="3" y="9"/>
  <data x="4" y="16"/>
  <data x="5" y="25"/>
</squares>

Usage in the browser:

You can build the minified production bundle (lib/xmlbuilder2.min.js) after cloning the repository and issuing npx webpack in your terminal. The bundle is also in the npm package, so you can also use a public npm CDN like jsDelivr or unpkg:

<!-- latest version from jsDelivr -->
<script src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/xmlbuilder2/lib/xmlbuilder2.min.js"></script>
<!-- latest version from unpkg -->
<script src="https://unpkg.com/xmlbuilder2/lib/xmlbuilder2.min.js"></script>

Donations:

Please consider becoming a backer or sponsor to help support development.