lxml VS Spock

lxml

Parsel is a library build to extract data from XML/HTML documents with XPath and CSS selectors support, and could be combined with regular expressions. It's usees lxml parser under the hood by default.

So, now that I no longer work in that industry, and I had some free time, I created a lazy parsing package using lxml instead of the xml parser in the standard library, which can help people who want to have a python only parsing solution.

Seriously, use LXML.

I got curious about this now so I did some tests on my own, and it appears that the XML parser implementation in Python does indeed strip all newline characters from attributes. Whether this is according to XML standard I do not know; I also briefly tried an alternative XML implementation for Python and it behaves the same, so I would assume that this is standard behavior, but I'm not knowledgable enough about XML to say for certain.

I use lxml for the XML parsing and pyodbc as the ODBC library. We have a small team so I just keep it as simple as possible: 1. A cursor yields the XML documents from a SQL query as a stream 2. A generator function parses the XML document and yields the rows (you could parallelize this step) 3. Stream each of the resulting rows to a single CSV file 4. Scoop up the resulting CSV file into the target database (usually with the DB engine's loader; bulk insert isn't so fast over ODBC) It ends up being a straight forward, low-overhead approach.

If that sounds too weird maybe take a look at pycomm3, python also has lxml as well as requests. You could write a script that retrieves the data from the clx using the appropriate pycomm3 driver for cplx and then do xml things with the data using lxml and transmit the data over http using requests.

I love using the Spock framework for its simplicity, readability, and maintainability. That's why we use Spock to drive our integration tests.

Well I care a lot that it exists. And many other people I know do as well. Just because you don't seem to like it, you shouldn't imagine everyone else is like you.

Maybe Grails is no longer used as much (like Rails itself), but Groovy found other usages since then, like https://spockframework.org/ and Jenkins pipelines (https://www.jenkins.io/doc/book/pipeline/syntax/). It's not going anywhere, and I see no reason for anyone to be upset about it.

In my opinion it is Spock for Java/Groovy [1]. The amount of functionality and readability you can squeeze from Groovy's DSLesque is absurd. Is basically a full fledged new test language with Java sprinkled as the test contents code

[1]: https://spockframework.org/

Groovy allows you to perform transforms on it's AST. If you look at the Spock framework, they used AST transforms to pull off a lot of the DSL.

Spock and Cucumber exemplify the philosophy of behavior-driven development (BDD). The principle behind BDD is that you must first define the desired result of the added feature in a subject-oriented language before writing any tests. The developers are then given the final documentation.

As a quick demonstration, the following (Spock) test asserts that the client JVM code fails to create an SSL connection with the service. Note that I chose to use Vert.x Web Client to handle interacting with the service, but don't let this decision distract from the core content of this post. Nevertheless, if you haven't used Vert.x, I encourage you to try it out -- especially for building server-side network applications.