how to convert your savegame file to xml, for easy viewing

[iceiceice]

Recently I was doing something where I had to poke around in save game files. Doing this in a text editor can get annoying because they can get very long, a lot of information is repeated, some tags like [replay_save] repeat inside of themselves, so it's very easy to get confused where you are. (I also work on a netbook so I can't see as many lines at once.)

I decided it would be easier if I could view it as an xml file since then you can click on tags to collapse / expand them. Xml syntax is pretty similar to wml syntax so I wrote a shell script that does this, attached. This script will work most likely on any linux / mac / unix. To use it, unzip your save file, in same folder as script, then type e.g. "./wml2xml mysavegame > mysavegame.xml". (Make sure you used "chmod +x wml2xml" to give it permission to be executed.)

There are a ton of xml viewers out there, but also basically any modern web browser will render xml if you just drag an xml file into it. I found that chrome did a fine job. Edit: If you have access to the debian/ubuntu package "treeline" I find that this program is the best for this and is my tool of choice now.

Most likely you might be interested in this if you are trying to examine large replays to figure out why your add-on is not working, or trying to fix a broken replay. In principle you could also write something that goes back from xml to the save game file, so that you could use an xml editor to do the repairs, but it would require a lot more work and its probably not that helpful.

Hope someone finds this useful,
~iceiceice~

Edit: Even though the script is a mere 400 bytes, I am compressing it to circumvent forum attachment rules.

Technical details

Spoiler:

Saying that it "converts it to xml" is a bit generous, all it really does is escape some characters and replace all the square bracket tags with angle brackets . This was already helpful to me I found. It does not take the step of converting all keys of wml objects to xml attributes.

The script gives the file to the sed utility with instructions to modify it in the following ways.

1. Characters <, > , &, " are escaped in your file using the standards described here. I didn't escape the single quote because I don't think it could cause a problem.
2. Characters 0x01 and 0x03 are escaped, which are used in wesnoth team names for some reason.
3. All lines of the form [X] are changed to <X> where X is lowercase letters, underscore, and slash (/).
4. At the top and bottom a tag pair "<savefile>" and "</savefile>" are created. Although not corresponding to any wml my web browser seemed to get pissy if I didn't have an enclosing tag.

Output on stdout.

[gfgtdf]

if i remember correcty there are also some wml editors out there wich support collapse / expand wml tags.

a toplevel is not just something your browser requires is is something that must be there according to the xml standart.

at third i realy think if you do something like this, a xml2wml would also be useful, for example if you want to fix a broken replay (i actualy think that is to much work even if they are in xml) you have to convert the xml back to the savegame format.

but thinking about this i realy wonder why the developers decided to use their own makrup language istead of using xml for wich there are already a thousand libraries.

EDIT: maybe the translatable strings are the reason.

[iceiceice]

I will say it is not clear to me why the *savegames* are in wml rather than xml, iirc the translator program happens just after preprocessor, I don't think there are any translatable strings in save games files. Maybe they can hang around in lua somehow but I don't think I have ever seen a replay on the replay server with translatable strings in it.

Probably they already had an wml parser around so they just use it for everything

[Iris]

Saved games (of which replays are just a particular case) do contain translatable strings in their original _ "foo" form.

[iceiceice]

Hmm, it seems that some strings are left untranslated as you say and some appear in translated form. Anyways, yes, it definitely makes it harder to go to xml reverseably and simply.

[JaMiT]

but thinking about this i realy wonder why the developers decided to use their own makrup language istead of using xml for wich there are already a thousand libraries.

Not sure if you noticed the tense conflict in this statement: "decided", past tense, as in over 10 years ago, versus "are", present tense. I rather doubt Dave had the ability to peer a decade into the future when making design decisions. A better statement would assess the number of good XML libraries from the time the decision was made.

[Max]

http://forums.wesnoth.org/viewtopic.php ... =0#p295012

[amir]

I've written a tool that successfully converts wml files to xml. Internally it uses the wesnoth parser code. https://github.com/kallaballa/WML2XML

[josteph]

Thanks for sharing that, amir.

Another way:

Code: Select all

zcat ~/.local/share/wesnoth/1.14/saves/DiD-Saving_Parthyn_replay.gz > foo
/usr/share/games/wesnoth/1.14/data/tools/wesnoth/wmlparser3.py -j -i foo

That outputs json. It's possible to convert json to xml but I generally just deal with it as is.