README.rmd

---
title: "Package xmlconvert"
output: github_document
---

```{r setup, include=FALSE}
knitr::opts_chunk$set(echo = TRUE)
```

![xmlconvert logo](man/figures/xmlconvert.png)

## What *xmlconvert* does

The `xmlconvert` package is made to easily and comfortably convert XML data to R dataframes and the other way around. It provides a lot of options to control the conversion process and to export the results to CSV or Excel files, if desired. 


## How you install *xmlconvert*

Just execute `install.packages("xmlconvert", dependencies = TRUE)` in the R console to install the package including all packages it depends on. By default, the `xlsx` package for writing Excel files is not installed together with `xmlconvert`. `xmlconvert` will tell you when you need `xlsx` and will ask you to install it then.


## How you work with *xmlconvert*

The functions `xml_to_df()` and `df_to_xml()` are the two workhorses of the package. 

The functions assume that each data record (e.g. a customer) in the XML data is stored in one XML element/tag; the individual fields (e.g. name, address, e-mail), however, can be represented in different ways.

An XML data file could like this:

```{xml}
<datarecord>
  <field1>value1-1</field1>
  <field2>value1-2</field2>
</datarecord>

<datarecord>
  <field1>value2-1</field1>
  <field2>value2-2</field2>
</datarecord>
```

When working with the `xml_to_df()` and `df_to_xml()` functions, we would first of all use the `records.tags` argument to provide the tag name of the XML element that represents the records, in this example `datarecord`. Alternatively, the `xml_to_df()`'s `records.xpath` argument can be used to supply an XPath expression describing the location of the data records.

In the next step, we need to specify how to find the fields. In the example above, each field within a data record has its own XML element, and the tag name of this element is the field name. In this case, we would use `fields = "tags"` to make it clear to the `xmlconvert` functions that the fields are represented by XML elements. Not always will the tag names be the field names. The XML could also look like this:

```{xml}
<datarecord>
  <field name="field1">value1-1</field>
  <field name="field2">value1-2</field>
</datarecord>

<datarecord>
  <field name="field1">value2-1</field>
  <field name="field2">value2-2</field>
</datarecord>
```
Here, the XML elements representing the fields all have the tag `field`. The name of the field is not given by the tag name but is an attribute (called `name` in our case) of the `field` element. This attribute name can be supplied to the `xmlconvert` functions using the `fields.names` argument.

In this case,  `xml_to_df()` could be called like this:
`xml_to_df("mydata.xml", records.tag = "datarecord", fields = "tags", fields.names = "name")`

However, instead of being XML elements, the data fields could also be represented by individual attributes, as in the following example:
```{xml}
<datarecord field1="value1-1" field2="value1-2" />
<datarecord field1="value2-1" field2="value2-2" />
```

In this case, we use `fields = "attributes"` instead of `fields = "tags"` to adjust to this XML data structure. Here, a call of `xml_to_df()` could look like this:
`xml_to_df("mydata.xml", records.tag = "datarecord", fields = "attributes"`)

The `xmlconvert` functions offer a lot of options to specify which data fields are to be used, how to deal with missing values, how to treat different data types and how to export the results. Please consult the online help by executing  `?xml_to_df` in the R console for more information on these options.


## Contact the author

Joachim Zuckarelli

Twitter: [@jsugarelli](https://twitter.com/jsugarelli)

GitHub: [https://github.com/jsugarelli/xmlconvert](https://github.com/jsugarelli/xmlconvert)