Question

I had XML files like this:

<root>
    <key0>value</key0>
    <key1>value</key1>
    <key2>value</key2>
</root>

It’s easy to turn such file into key-value structure. Let’s showcase the result in Python dict, for example:

{'key0': 'value', 'key1': 'value', 'key2': 'value'}

Now they added nested elements:

<root>
    <key0>value</key0>
    <key1>value</key1>
    <key2>value</key2>
    <key3>
        <sth0>value</sth0>
        <sth1>value</sth1>
    </key3>
</root>

Still easy:

{'key0': 'value', 'key1': 'value', 'key2': 'value', 'key3/sth0': 'value', 'key3/sth1': 'value'}

I think you got the point. Now what about this?

<root>
    <key0>value</key0>
    <key1>value</key1>
    <key1>
         <inner>value</inner>
    </key1>
    <key2>value</key2>
    <key3>
        <sth0>value</sth0>
        <sth1>value</sth1>
    </key3>
    <key3>
        <sth0>different value</sth0>
        <sth1>different value</sth1>
    </key3>
    <key3>
        <sth0>blah blah</sth0>
        <sth1>blah blah</sth1>
    </key3>
</root>

Of course, I could come up with something after a while of thinking, but something tells me I would meet more and more difficulties. So the question is: Is there an complex algorithm to ‘serialize’ values in similarly simple XML file into key-value form? It has to be deterministically serializable and unserializable and no values can be lost. Order of elements doesn’t matter (Python dict in examples is not a random choice, it’s really what I’m trying to get).

I know XMLs can be very complex (namespaces, attributes, whatever), but this is not the case. The only problem I need to properly resolve is nested values as presented and related multiplicity of the same keys.

Answer 1

Append something unique to the end of each name. Like becomes Key0_unique , where unique is a ascending number or guid.

(Although if your ‘ecosystem’ is big now and growing, I would consider sorting this out now rather than later.)