XML mangles order of heterogeneous elements about yq HOT 2 OPEN

Hmm yeah I think you're right, the only way to handle scenarios like you have would be to have everything as an array. This would be more correct - but less usable and I don't think most people are looking for that structure when they want to convert XML->Yaml.

It would also mean that you couldn't really convert ordinary Yaml/JSON to XML without complex work to re-arrange data into that sequence of key value pairs format.

A decoding flag could be added to parse/encode XML to/from that format - which would allow for existing behavior to continue (which I think, despite not being as accurate, is what most people would intuitively expect).

Be interested in knowing how often this case comes up

from yq.

I think the existing heuristic needs improvement, but an alternate dialect would be more convenient than a --xml- flag. Since lists are harder to use, -pX instead of -px would be a good shorthand, but just renaming -pxml to -pXML doesn't really signify the intent.

Conversion to/from this format could be handled by a pair of built-in functions. There's also the unfortunate case of nested (unnamed) arrays, which XML has no concept of.

from yq.