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If you're on a unixy box try using 'xmllint -shell some_xml_file.xml'
which will give you a shell to navigate around in the XML file. You can
type 'help' for a list of commands but the ones I find most usefull are:
cd, dir, ls, cat, pwd. I'm not enough of an expert to figure out what the
leading fields on an ls are but I do know that to cd into arrays you use
the syntax 'cd array[4]' to get to a particular element. See
http://marty.feebleandfrail.org/macosxhints/webscrape/ for a tutorial I
wrote on using xmllint and XML::LibXML to scrape web pages.
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Run the XML response from smugmug through a trivial parser like
http://docs.python.org/lib/expat-example.html. If you're traversing the
XML structure, adding calls to something like Perl's Data::Dumper or the
Python module pprint to your code is a huge help.
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Open the XML file in your browser! Compare the output of (1) and (2) as
well as your debug messages.
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Some APIs to XML parsers have annoying built in smartness where they
automagically change how the data is returned. These can do wierd things
to your parsed results! One of the Perl XML parsers, XML::Simple, for
example, has a bunch of flags such as ForceArray
(http://search.cpan.org/~grantm/XML-Simple-2.12/lib/XML/Simple.pm)
and KeyAttr that control how the library will roll single nested elements
up into attributes and when it will return arrays vs. hashes. In
particular I found that you have to be very aware how XML::Simple behaves
when there's one element (a user with 1 album, say) vs. multiple
elements.
studiosells
