E4X

ShockScript implements a modified version of the ECMA-357 2nd edition (E4X) standard, which facilitates XML processing and manipulation.

XML literals

By default XML literals evaluate to one of the XML and XMLList types.

package zero.information.generator {
    public function retrieve(a : string) : XML {
        return (
            <information>{a}</information>
        );
    }
}

Note: XML literals ignore beginning and end whitespace on character sequence tokens regardless of the active XMLContext. Interpolation or the XML or XMLList constructors may be used instead where applicable with a XMLContext whose ignoreWhitespace option is set to false.

Depending on the inference type, XML literals may be used for constructing implementation-defined objects, which apply implementation-specific verification rules.

package zero {
    import whack.ds.UIComponent;
    import s = spark.components.*

    public class Main extends UIComponent {
        public function Main() {
            super()
            final = (
                <s:Application>
                    <s:Label>Hello World!</s:Label>
                </s:Application>
            )
        }
    }
}

Attributes

<t a/> is equivalent to <t a={true}/>. Accessing XML attributes can be directly done by the @ operator, as in xnode.@x.

Event handlers

Inline event handlers may be expressed as eventName&={statementList} as a shortcut to eventName={function(event){statementList}}, as in:

<button click&={trace("clicked!")}>Click me</button>

If the event has no parameters, then the attribute above is equivalent to eventName={function(){statementList}}.

Interpolation

<div {rest}>
    {undefined}
    {null}
    {node}
    {node_list}
    {plain_text}
    {number}       <!-- The Number union -->
    {boolean}
</div>

Filtering

XML and XMLList implement the filter operator.

people.(*.@name == "John")

Note: Unlike E4X 2nd, ShockScript does not clutter the lexical scope; the test variable is a wildcard * binding.

Descendants

XML and XMLList implement the descendants operator.

xnode..tag

Lexical contexts

The default xml namespace statement sets the default Namespace used in XML literals and name lookups during runtime.

default xml namespace = n

Note*: Unlike E4X 2nd, ShockScript makes the default xml namespace statement block-scoped, and not necessarily activation-scoped.

In addition, instead of E4X 2nd XML settings self-attached to the XML class, ShockScript includes an use xml pragma that acts similar to default xml namespace, but used for specifying a XMLContext object.

use xml ctx