XML manipulation

[mastrude]

I'm not a modder and don't want to be one. But I'm playing mods such as FFH2, RifE, and Fall Further. The doco of these is not of the greatest, and anyway I want to go beyond where doco goes. I understand that a lot of mods is in the XML, and I want to delve into it to understand the mods better. Can anyone tell me where the explanatory meat is ? How can I read the XML? Are there schema files? (I have M/S Infopath to read XML with.)

Is there a great piece of shareware that's good for searching XML, filtering it and displaying what you're looking for?

 

[damerell]

I'm not a modder and don't want to be one. But I'm playing mods such as FFH2, RifE, and Fall Further. The doco of these is not of the greatest, and anyway I want to go beyond where doco goes. I understand that a lot of mods is in the XML, and I want to delve into it to understand the mods better. Can anyone tell me where the explanatory meat is ? How can I read the XML? Are there schema files? (I have M/S Infopath to read XML with.)

http://modiki.civfanatics.com/index.php/Civ4_XML_Reference may be of considerable help here.

 

[vincentz]

there are some programs specifically designed for Civ4 XML, where info can be seen/searched much easier than notepad f.ex (which I use to design my mod)

Have a look in the dl base here at cfc.

 

[Kid R]

We do a lot of XML at work and are big fans of XML Notepad which is free to download, no strings attached from M$oft. One guy on our team prefers Notepad++.

Using these tools instead of plain notepad means you get a nice expandable tree view and can drag nodes around etc. The other advantage is you can work with XML files which are all just text munged up together, which is virtually impossible to do by eye in plain Notepad. The Civ 4 XML is very nicely laid out though and there is less reason to need a special tool.

Wikipedia has a comparison page for these kind of editors (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_XML_editors) but o some googling and you'll find a lot more than are shown on that page. Maybe writing an XML editor and releasing it free on the internet is becoming one of today's rites-of-passage for the trainee programmer, instead of doing a pong game like we all used to