How to make xml_split, xml_merge, xml_pp, xml_grep, xml_spellcheck under XML-Twig tools work on Windows

Large XML files could sometimes lead to overall slowness of your program. Thus it makes sense to sometimes split them to rearrange contents within to optimize querying your XML files. This post will touch base on how to split a large XML file on windows OS and I will use a cool tool written by Michel Rodriguez.

XML-twig is presumably an open source library that works on large XML files. Notable tools includes

• XML Grep
• XML merge
• XML pretty printer
• XML spell check
• XML split

Our focus is to build this library on windows so that we can use it from windows command prompt

Download XML-Twig

Get this library from cpan websites. Here is the URL http://search.cpan.org/~mirod/XML-Twig-3.48/Twig.pm

Download the XML-Twig-3.48.tar.gz file and extract it under c:\devtools

Here is a screenshot of what it looks like on my machine

Lets leave it there for the time being and install prerequisites

Pre-requisites

There are a couple of pre requisites that you will want to install.

1. Perl. As this library is written in perl so you would want to install Perl on your system. ActiveState perl is something that I sometimes use and is a good option by far on Windows computers. Download for your processor arch 32 bit or 64 bit from the URL below
   http://www.activestate.com/activeperl/downloads
   I installed it under c:\perl64
2. Visual studio Express 2010 for tool called “nmake”
   I’ve got Visual studio 2012 but you can get an express edition of “Express 2013 for Windows Desktop” from URL below
   http://www.visualstudio.com/en-US/products/visual-studio-express-vs#2010-Visual-CPP
3. Now that perl is available from command prompt You may also want to run this command
   ppm install MinGW64
Above will install dmake as a perl module too just in case if you want to use that. But in this article I will use name.

That’s it for the pre requisites and I hope that you would have installed both of the above so that we can move on to next step.

Making

Ok so lets start with actually installing XML-Twig as a set of tools for you.

1. Open command prompt as Administrator and change directory to c:\devtools
   
   cd c:\devtools

   1	cd c:\devtools

2. Run command below to install all mentioned tool at the start of this article e.g. xml merge, xml_split etc,
   
    perl Makefile.PL -y

   1	perl Makefile.PL -y

3. Please note that as per documentation Here are separate dependencies you will want to install
   XML::Twig needs XML::Parser (and the expat library) installed
   
   Modules that can enhance XML::Twig are: Scalar::Util or WeakRef to avoid memory leaks Encode or Text::Iconv or Unicode::Map8 and Unicode::Strings to do encoding conversions Tie::IxHash to use the keep_atts_order option XML::XPathEngine to use XML::Twig::XPath LWP to use parseurl HTML::Entities to use the html_encode filter HTML::TreeBuilder to process HTML instead of XML

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   Modules that can enhance XML::Twig are:   Scalar::Util or WeakRef to avoid memory leaks Encode or Text::Iconv or Unicode::Map8 and Unicode::Strings to do encoding conversions Tie::IxHash to use the keep_atts_order option XML::XPathEngine to use XML::Twig::XPath LWP to use parseurl HTML::Entities to use the html_encode filter HTML::TreeBuilder to process HTML instead of XML

   
    
4. (Optionally) However if you want to just install xml_split then just execute the command below
   
    perl Makefile.PL

   1	perl Makefile.PL

5. Final steps
   
   nmake.exe nmake.exe test nmake.exe install

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   nmake.exe nmake.exe test nmake.exe install

   
    

nmake is generally found here “C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio xx.x\VC\bin\nmake.exe”

Once you have completed the final step you will see that files such as xml_split.bat etc  are now available under site/bin folder of whereever you have installed perl as I mentioned I installed it under c:\perl64 so I find those commands under c:\perl64\site\bin

If you include this path in environment PATH variable then you will be able to just run something like

c:\xml_split -h

Before I close of this article here is a screenshot of what you will see when you follow above steps

I hope this will work out for you too. In case you have question leave your comment and someone from perl community will be able to help you.

Regards,