Re: [RFC][patch] XML structured script output (Nmap-script-XML as of 15 July)

[David Fifield <david () bamsoftware com>]

On Thu, Jul 19, 2012 at 04:08:37PM -0700, David Fifield wrote:
> I can deal with the field names being lower-case and identifier-like;
> maybe people will even prefer them that way. But the fact that "md5" and
> "sha1" are not on adjacent lines is galling. Maybe a special kind of
> table format that keeps order (i.e., an array of name-value pairs)? That
> would seem to require a higher-level function with which to set output
> values.

There is something like this in Python called an OrderedDict,
        http://docs.python.org/dev/library/collections.html#collections.OrderedDict

What if we provided each script instance with a global "output" variable
that is an ordered dict. Scripts can assign into this table, and the
output will retain the same order as the assignments. Scripts can keep
returning as string as they do now. Basically every time they add
something to their output string, they can add something to the global
"output" as well.

New scripts that don't need fancy formatting can just assign into
"output" and rely on automatic serialization into text format.

David Fifield
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