XML sorting tool

The tool isn't a common to handle almost all XML files - it's the mere tool to accomplish the author's work. What's more, it hacked xml.dom.minidom with internal attributes (Element._attr and Element.data) for all element attributes and data to simplify the code - Though it works with both Python 2.7 and 3.6, it's not an official implementation.

It works only with XML normal elements, comments and common data fields. It hasn't supported CDATA, characters, etc. Because it's a specific tool (to handle Android manifest.xml frankly), new features may not be impelemented.

The tool could be used to sort the elements, and element attributes. The pattern has the format element:attr1,attr2,.... If element isn't provided, the attributes will be effective to all existent elements. For example, the attributes of an Android project could be sorted:

<project groups="pdk" name="platform/art" path="art" revision="refs/tags/android-8.1.0_r43"/>

With the matched pattern only for the element project project:path,name,revision,groups, the output element would be:

<project path="art" name="platform/art" revision="refs/tags/android-8.1.0_r43" groups="pdk"/>

The output project starting with sorted attribute path would be good to investigate the directory structures of git-repositories in an Android project.

Options

Option -C can do case-insenstive compare of two elements. And with the option -k, the occurence order will be kept not to change the XML so much. It'll keep the orders of remote and default in Android default.xml.

Option -g will detect the flags like @foo(bar) in the xml comments and categorize the elements following the comments as a group for sorting. It'll be useful when spliting the xml into several parts with the specific comment lines.

A new option --android is added to append following patterns for Android specific xml file:

• project:path,name,revision,groups
• remote:name,fetch,review
• copyfile:src,dest
• linkfile:src,dest

To handle the Android xml file, the command link could be:

$ xml_sorter.py -C -k --android -f default.xml -o sorted.xml

The option -o would be ignored if option -i is used to update the xml file in place.

What's more. An extra option -r (--omit) has been implemented to omit some elmenent or element attributes. The matched pattern are the same like the one for sort. The only difference is the pattern will be treated as element if no colon as the delimiter is provided.

And option -x is designed to omit the duplicates attributes if corresponding patterns are provided. The original pattern has been expanded like elem:attr1=attr2,attr3,.... With the option, once the value of attr2 is equaling to the one of attr1, the entire attribute attr2 will be omitted in the output. For example, with the option -x "project:name=path":

<project path="device/generic/x86" name="device/generic/x86" groups="pdk" />

the duplicated path attribute will be omitted to

<project name="device/generic/x86" groups="pdk" />