Thursday 12 May 2011

How To Use the Copy Tag in XML

XML or Extensible Markup Language is a standard in recording documentation that makes items easily readable in the Internet and in other forms due to the simplicity of the design. An XML file will follow an outline form that organizes all information but sometimes, when reading an XML file, you do not need to access them all at the same time. There are also cases that only snippets of the file are needed, you will need to just copy and paste it to a different location. If you want to know how to do that, then just read the outlined steps below and you will see how easy it is to achieve.

* Starting with creating a new file. You can start the copying by creating a brand new file that will host the copied segment of the XML. You can do this in a text editor that has an option to save the text file as an XML file (with an .xml extension).
* Creating the new tag. A tag is a section of the code that is enclosed by the < and > symbols. Anything contained in this section is “tagged”. Tags are classified into three – a start tag which looks like this - < section > , an end tag which looks something like this - < / section > and an empty element tag < line – break / >. A copy tag will look like this - xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">, which is called an XSLT file. This means that you are copying the piece from a code and not necessarily the actual code.
* Parsing XML files. Most browsers deployed today are well equipped in reading XML files. Most of the time, configurations and other items that can be edited often are the ones stored in XML files.
* Other samples of XML tags. There are other tags in XML that you can find useful such as the copy tag, which creates a copy of another tag. You can also use the attribute tag, which adds an XML attribute to the parent element. The expr tag can be used to perform expressions while the param tag is for forming parameters in parent transforms. Parse is for parsing a series of XML lines which is often used in finding URL’s in a series of texts in a specified content. The set tag is for defining variable Xpath expressions while the sort tag is for sorting a list of nodes from your xpath expression.


There are many other commonly used tags in XML and more often than not, are used depending on what type of application is using the XML file. XML files are often used in API or application programming interfaces that guides a developer on what to use when one wants to link to a certain application. For example, if you want to have an application that connects to Facebook or any other social networking site, then you would need to get hold of the Facebook API (which is often available for free) so that you would know how to connect to Facebook properly.

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