xml_split(1)

NAME

         xml_split - cut a big XML file into smaller chunks

DESCRIPTION

       "xml_split" takes a (presumably big) XML file and split it in several
       smaller files. The memory used is the memory needed for the biggest
       chunk (ie memory is reused for each new chunk).

       It can split at a given level in the tree (the default, splits children
       of the root), or on a condition (using the subset of XPath understood
       by XML::Twig, so "section" or "/doc/section").

       Each generated file is replaced by a processing instruction that will
       allow "xml_merge" to rebuild the original document. The processing
       instruction format is "<?merge subdocs=[01] :<filename> ?>"

       File names are <file>-<nb>.xml, with <file>-00.xml holding the main
       document.

OPTIONS

       -l <level>
           level to cut at: 1 generates a file for each child of the root, 2
           for each grand child

           defaults to 1

       -c <condition>
           generate a file for each element that passes the condition

           xml_split -c <section> will put each "section" element in its own
           file (nested sections are handled too)

           Note that at the moment this option is a lot slower than using "-l"

       -b <name>
           base name for the output, files will be named <base>-<nb><.ext>

           <nb> is a sequence number, see below "--nb_digits" <ext> is an
           extension, see below "--extension"

           defaults to the original file name (if available) or "out" (if
           input comes from the standard input)

       -n <nb>
           number of digits in the sequence number for each file

           if more digits than <nb> are needed, then they are used: if
           "--nb_digits 2" is used and 112 files are generated they will be
           named "<file>-01.xml" to "<file>-112.xml"

           defaults to 2

       -e <ext>
           extension to use for generated files

           defaults to the original file extension or ".xml"

       -i  use XInclude elements instead of Processing Instructions to mark
           where sub files need to be included

       -v  verbose output

           Note that this option can slow down processing considerably (by an
           order of magnitude) when generating lots of small documents

       -V  outputs version and exit

       -h  short help

       -m  man (requires pod2text to be in the path)

EXAMPLES

         xml_split foo.xml             # split at level 1
         xml_split -l 2 foo.xml        # split at level 2
         xml_split -c section foo.xml  # a file is generated for each section element
                                       # nested sections are split properly

SEE ALSO

       XML::Twig, xml_merge

TODO

       test
           At the moment this is really alpha code, tested only on small, sim-
           ple documents.

           It would be a good idea to first check that indeed the whole docu-
           ment is not loaded in memory!

       optimize the code
           any idea welcome! I have already implemented most of what I thought
           would improve performances.

       provide other methods that PIs to keep merge information
           XInclude is a good candidate (alpha support added in 0.04).

           using entities, which would seem the natural way to do it, doesn't
           work, as they make it impossible to have both the main document and
           the sub docs to be well-formed if the sub docs include sub-sub docs
           (you cant have entity declarations in an entity)

AUTHOR

       Michel Rodriguez <mirod@cpan.org>

LICENSE

       This tool is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it
       under the same terms as Perl itself.

perl v5.8.8                       2005-03-17                      XML_SPLIT(1)