---
name: "xml-to-sexp"
section: "1"
platform: "linux"
package: "xml-to-sexp"
version: "1.0-7"
release: "Debian 5.0 (Lenny)"
platforms: ["linux"]
url: "https://new.carta.tech/xml-to-sexp"
---

# xml-to-sexp(1)

convert XML to symbolic expressions

## NAME

xml-to-sexp - convert XML to symbolic expressions

## SYNOPSIS

**xml-to-sexp**

## DESCRIPTION

xml-to-sexp reads from stdin and output to stdout.

## NOTES

This program uses the expat parser library by James Clark, which comes dual-licenced under the MPL/GPL.  This wrapper for expat parses standard input and outputs a simple, lisp-readable representation of the file, with the following features:

\- Translates UTF-8 to ISO Latin-1, so that the resulting output can be\
   used as-is with normal 8bit Unix lisps.  Stuff outside of ISO\
   Latin-1 is silently elided (can easily be changed to dump core\
   instead ;).

\- PCDATA is mapped to CL strings, where as many PCDATA segments as\
   possible are merged into one string.

\- Elements are mapped to lists, with the first item being the start\
   tag, which is mapped to a nested list, i.e.

  \<element attr="value"\>...\</element\>\
   is mapped to\
   (("element" "attr" "value") ...)

\- Processing Instructions (PIs) are mapped to a single cons, i.e.\
   \<?foo ...?\> is mapped to ("foo" . "...")

## AUTHORS

This man page was writting by Kevin Rosenberg \<kmr@debian.org\> since the upstream program did not include a man page.