Re: machine-readable explain output

Josh Berkus wrote:
>
>> How would you go about extracting the XML/JSON bits from the rest of
>> what is in the log file?  (apologies if this is a question I should
>> already know the answer to)
>
> If you do CSV output, it's in a field.
>

And even if it's not, a well formed XML document would be fairly easy to 
extract, especially if the root element is well known (e.g. <pg:explain> 
or some such). And if the patch doesn't produce a well-formed XML doc 
then it needs work ;-). It might be nice if Robert were to post some 
samples of the output.

Quick question: does the patch use formal methods using, say, the DOM 
API to build up the XML, or informal methods  (like 
foo.append('<element>'); foo.append(content); foo.append('</element>'); )

As you can tell, I haven't looked over it yet. But I intend to ;-)

cheers

andrew