Sort xml attributes alphabetically

Question

I'd like

<node a="2" d="1" c="2">

to be converted to

<node a="2" c="2" d="1">

Can you propose some solution with less effort?

Might help to explain why you care about the order of the attributes. Any XML parsing code should accept attributes in any order. — Caleb, Oct 03 '12 at 19:23
Why?!? There is no order in the attributes of an XML node - nor should the "order" matter in any way.... — marc_s, Oct 03 '12 at 19:23
The solution depends entirely on the programming language, what library you're using, etc. And as marc_s mentioned, this is for aesthetics and possibly better human-readability only. — John, Oct 03 '12 at 19:24
Well, I've got java code that load and saves xml data. I've migrated from digester to Jaxb. I want to make sure that everything is ok. — Stepan Yakovenko, Oct 04 '12 at 05:17

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Oct 03 '12 at 23:00

2

Use an XML canonicalization library. XML canonical form requires the attributes to be in alphabetical order (so that two documents can be compared for equivalence by comparing them at the byte level).

answered Oct 03 '12 at 23:00

Michael Kay

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Not without knowing anything about your environment and constraints, no. – Michael Kay Oct 04 '12 at 11:19
Well, I run Windows 7 or Linux. I use java 1.6. So? – Stepan Yakovenko Oct 04 '12 at 18:50
Then you can google as easily as I can: try http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5117610/java-xml-canonicalization – Michael Kay Oct 08 '12 at 09:50

Sort xml attributes alphabetically

1 Answers1