Question

I want to open an XML file and process it in a special way in Emacs. (Let’s say a major mode which is customized to open XML files and process it and present it in a special way)
What I want to do is to hide the extra markup tags in XML and show just the content to the user. Can anyone advice me how I should do this?

`<name id=22> Luke </name>` 

=> I just want “Luke” to be shown.

Answer 1

One way to do this would be to use a regular expression to extract the element information from your XML, and then open a temporary buffer for viewing into which you paste that element information. i’m not sure that narrowing is granular enough to hide the markup and display only the element information.

Having said that, an alternative to the temporary buffer approach would be to extract the element information, paste it into the bottom of the file, and then narrow to just that portion of the file so that the source markup is invisible.

The function below does approximately what I have in mind:

(defun show-xml-entities ()  
  (interactive)  
  (save-excursion  
    (let ((old-max (point-max)))  ;; save current end of buffer  
      (goto-char (point-min))     ;; go to beginning of buffer  
      (while (re-search-forward ">\\([^<>]+\\)<" nil t)  ;; search for elements until not found  
    (when (> (length (match-string-no-properties 1)) 0)  ;; if match is non-zero length  
      (setq temp (point-marker))                         ;; save end of match  
      (goto-char (point-max))                            ;; go to end of buffer  
          ;; paste current match to end of buffer   
      (insert (concat (buffer-substring-no-properties (match-beginning 1) (match-end 1))))  
      (goto-char (marker-position temp))  ;; return to end of current match  
      )  
    )  
      (narrow-to-region old-max (point-max)))   ;; narrow to newly pasted element text  
    )  
  )