Unique identifier for <item> containers

[cpetz]

Add some way to uniquely identify consecutive tag pairs in the same nested level. As per your suggestion, an incremented tag attribute should do the trick.Should probably be optional with a flag passed to dicttoxml().

I assume the unique id will be akin to the item/array index number that the tag represents, and will reset for each nested level. (globally unique seems silly, but on that note..)

A longer term goal might be to accept an iterator from the user at the beginning of each sequence; leaving flexibility open without excessive complication. The trick might be embedding the iterator. Maybe perform a typecheck on the 0th index of any sequence, and if a custom class instance is found, pop it from the sequence and process it as an attibute value iterator.
We can let this last one ferment for a while ;) Thanks for your hard work.

[quandyfactory]

Excellent suggestion. As a preliminary stab at how to do this, consider the following example dict:

obj = {
    'mylist': [
        'foo', 
        'bar', 
        'baz'
    ], 
    'mydict': {
        'foo': 'bar', 
        'baz': 1
    }, 
    'ok': True
}

If we want to give each element a unique id and have the ids of list items increment, how about something like the following XML output:

<?xml version="1.0" ?>
<root>
        <mylist id="root_925614" type="list">
                <item id="mylist_572945_1" type="str">foo</item>
                <item id="mylist_572945_2" type="str">bar</item>
                <item id="mylist_572945_3" type="str">baz</item>
        </mylist>
        <mydict id="root_725410" type="dict">
                <foo id="mydict_951836" type="str">bar</foo>
                <baz id="mydict_194434" type="int">1</baz>
        </mydict>
        <ok id="root_215928" type="bool">true</ok>
</root>

The dicttoxml function generates a unique random ID for each element based on the parent element. For list items, the id is in the form parent_unique_index.

What do you think? Does this meet your needs/expectations? If so, I'll be happy to push this change to production.

To enable it, one would assign True to an optional ids argument, like so:

dicttoxml.dicttoxml(some_dict, ids=True)

The default behaviour will remain the same as it is today so as not to break compatibility for existing uses.

[cpetz]

I think that sounds good. I will be implementing the bulk of my XML functions soon, so I will let you know if anything else comes to mind. Thanks again.

[quandyfactory]

This feature is added in v. 1.1. Thanks again for suggesting it!