Kunal Anand: Some XML exam questions

Kunal has almost picked up my challenge on his blog: come up with deep homework questions having to do with XML.

  • Given at least 10 blog/link feeds, determine the top ten outbound URLs?
  • Parse an iTunes library file and capture all the unique artist/albums.
  • Given a user’s XML file from del.icio.us, determine the top 10 intersecting tags.
  • Scrape a dynamic list from a web site (i.e. the Google Zeitgeist) and serialize a well-formed Atom feed.

The last one seems like mostly hard labour probably requiring quite a bit of fiddling.

The other ones are all interesting because they are examples of aggregation and that’s not trivial to do in XSLT/XPath. Naturally, Kunal suggests to solve these problems using a nice script language like Python, but solving them in XSLT is much more fun because it is harder.

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Daniel Lemire

A computer science professor at the University of Quebec (TELUQ).

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