The wonders of trang

I have been using trang a lot for quite a long time. So, it came as a great shock to me to realise that I had somehow missed some very powerful capabilities it posesses.
There I was, flicking my way through XML Hacks when the book fairly shouted out at me that trang can generate schemas from instance documents. I never knew that. I have no idea how come I never managed to internalise that (now blindingly obvious) fact.

You create an XML instance:


<foo>
<bar baz="bork"/>
Hello World
</foo>


You run:

java -jar d:\data\utils\trang.jar -I xml -O rnc foo.xml foo.rnc


You get:


default namespace = ""

start =
element foo {
(text
| element bar {
attribute baz { xsd:NCName }
})+
}


Wonderful! This riffs rather nicely with an upcoming ITWorld article on the subject of ex post facto formalisation of schemas in XML app dev.