On Tue, Mar 17, 2015 at 12:52 PM, Hans-Juergen Rennau <hrennau@yahoo.de> wrote:
> Dear BaseX team,
>
> if I understand the documentation correctly, the processing of standard
> input is currently restricted to "-i-", that is, reading standard input as
> an XML document providing the context item, e.g. so:
>
> myCmd | basex -i- -q //foo
>
> Nice, but how about standard input which corresponds, for example, to a JSON
> document or a CSV document? Wouldn't it be useful to be able to apply
> functions to standard input,. e.g. json:parse, csv:parse or simple
> fn:unparsed-text? Example use case: NAGIOS commands piping the output of a
> command into BaseX.
>
> Whereas the context item can have any item type, the command line option -i
> accepts only documents, and that is the problem. I experimented with the
> "declare context item" declaration, but it did not work. And, at any rate, I
> would appreciate the conciseness of using an atomic context item without
> having to add the "declare context item" declaration.
>
> One solution were a new command line option (e.g. -j) which represents the
> context item as xs:untypedAtomic, and which also understands "-" to denote
> standard input. Then one could do this:
>
> myCmd | basex -j- json:parse(.)//foo
>
> That would be very nice and broaden the scope of BaseX again by a meter or
> two.
>
> Cheers,
> Hans-Jürgen
>