XML Shell
  Carlo Contavalli <ccontavalli at commedia.it>
  Thu May 1 17:34:37 CEST 2003

  This file documents a patch I've made for courier to allow automatic
  maildir creation. This manual, the mentioned patch and all the pro-
  vided files are copyright © Carlo Contavalli 2001-2003. Please read
  the following sections for more details. Note that this is free soft-
  ware and authors hold no responsibility for any damage or loss, direct
  or indirect, caused by using this software.  Use it only on your OWN
  risk and AFTER carefully reading this documentation.  The latest ver-
  sion of this document can be found at  <http://www.commedia.it/ccon-
  tavalli/>.

  1.	License, copyright and...

  This document was written by Carlo Contavalli <ccontavalli at
  commedia.it> and is thus Copyright © Carlo Contavalli 2001-2002.


  Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
  under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.1 or
  any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
  Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts and no Back-Cover Texts.

  Any example of program code available in this document should be
  considered protected by the terms of the GNU General Public License.


  The software to which this document refers to is free software; you
  can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU
  General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation;
  either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later
  version.


  The software this document refers to is distributed in the hope that
  it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied
  warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See
  the GNU General Public License for more details.


  You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
  along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software
  Foundation, Inc., 675 Mass Ave, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA.


  Trademarks are owned by their respective owners.


  2.	About this document

  Ok, simple as it is, I needed to have a bash script driven by a xml
  file...

  At the time, I didn't know about pyxie or that nsgmls gives a nice
  output that can be easily used, so I ended up taking ``xml2'' by Dan
  Egnor from the Debian archive, stripping down most of the lines and
  adding a bounce of them just to get ``xml-sh''.

  xml-sh is just a small C program that given an xml file on standard
  input (using < redirection), it generates on standard output something
  like the following:

  E	  html
  E	  head
  E	  title
  T	  This is the title
  L	  title
  E	  meta
  A	  http-equiv	  content-type
  A	  content text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1
  L	  meta
  L	  head
  [...]


  easy to read from a bash script with something like:


       while read type name value; do
	 case $type in
	       A)
		;;

	       E)
		;;

	       L)
		;;

	       T)
		;;
       done;


  As you may guess, ``E'' means a tag was entered, ``L'' that it was
  left, ``A'' means an attribute was found, and ``T'' is followed by the
  text enclosed by an opening and a closing tag, with spaces stripped
  down to `` ''.

  Each argument is separated by a ``tab'', so you can use a simple
  ``read''...

  You can also specify the ``-c'' option, in which case xml-sh will also
  print the nesting level the tag was found in. This is useful for
  skipping all the tags between one opening and closing tags. For
  example, the following xml:


       <test>
	 <test>
	   <test>
	     This is a test   look     how
	     spaces are handled
	   </test>
	 </test>
       </test>


  would generate the following ``xml-sh -c'' output:


  E	  1	  test
  E	  2	  test
  E	  3	  test
  T	  3	  This is a test look how spaces are handled
  L	  3	  test
  L	  2	  test
  L	  1	  test


  3.	Installation

  You need:

  ·  A POSIX C compiler, a POSIX system and any kind of make

  ·  libxml 1 installed somewhere on your system, complete of the
     headers (in Debian, install libxml-dev)

  ·  the script ``xml-config'' somewhere in your path

     After decompressing the tarball with something like


	 gzip -cd xml-sh.tar.gz |tar xv


  just cd into xml-sh and run make.


	 $ cd xml-sh
	 $ make


  and you should be done. Now, you can simply copy the file xml-sh wher-
  ever you prefer.

  Keep in mind that xml-sh is really simple... you shouldn't have any
  problem compiling it once all the prerequisites are satisfied. It
  actually took me longer to write this document than to hack xml-sh.
  Have fun!