It is only available on Windows (because of the underlying XPath libraries used, I think it is MSXML), and “only” as of Excel 2013, but still can be useful.
Some links below on FILTERXML and related XPath information so I can more easily find their content back.
The quotes are huge, for one because I don’t use Excel enough to be an expert, but have enough software experience to sometimes want to use complex concepts in Excel. Having all this in one place helps me with that goal.
You need to ensure your data is either XML in a well-formed document format, or you can translate your data to well-formed XML.
The links and quotes starting with the question that sparked my interest:
Yes, I know that Windows XP SP3 and Windows 7 SP1 have been end-of-life for a long time, but in the wild they are still being used so here is for posterity:
Chocolatey extends the NuGet file format .nuspec based XML files as base for their packages with at the time of writing very sparse and limited documentation in what it extends, why it does that and what extra limitations it imposes on the fields used inside .nuspec files.
Hopefully by now that has improved, so this post is a reminder to myself to check that out eventually.
Since an XML Schema allows to both use restriction and extension on data types (the eXtensible in XML!), making them more strict is a relatively straight-forward operation and has the benefit of having these in a central place.
A while ago, I needed to investigate reboot events on some Windows 10 systems. I wanted to use the console instead of the eventvwr GUI Event Viewer.
There is a tool for that called wevtutil which – like eventvwr – uses XPath query parameters and produces XML output.
Postprocessing XML can be a thing, but since .NET has great XML support, you can use PowerShell for that (which for me often is way easier than going the XSLT route, for instance because Windows lacks built-in console XSLT tooling).
Based on the help and the below links, my query command then on these machines turned out to be this: Read the rest of this entry »
It supports various output formats, so on my TODO list is to see how they do their mapping: always an opportunity to learn (it’s based on Python and Go so I am curious what libraries they use as well).
From the documentation:
wttr.in currently supports five output formats:
ANSI for the terminal;
Plain-text for the terminal and scripts;
HTML for the browser;
PNG for the graphical viewers;
JSON for scripts and APIs;
Prometheus metrics for scripts and APIs.
The ANSI and HTML formats are selected based on the User-Agent string.
There are more parameters in the documentation on the main page of the repository and through this command:
The iTunes library xml file is in the same directory as the .itl file. The file is in Apple plist format, and Python’s standard library has a good parser for it.
The Wiert Corner - irregular stream of stuff 