Add new command line flag -ds / --document-separators

[jappaleinen]

Problem Statement

When sending multiple documents to the command line, the documents are not separated with line feeds. In fact, line-feeds between documents are removed. One use case when working with multiple xml documents streamed to console is to get each document on a single line, allowing to pipe result to standard command line tools of interest such as simple grep for selecting / filtering documents.

Adding a new flag -ds / --document-separators with a numeral 0-n (default 0 for backwards compatibility) in a similar way as --indent is currently working.

Expected Result

# Current
➜ echo $'  <element/>  <element/>  ' | xq
<element/><element/>

# Expected
➜ echo $'  <element/>  <element/>  ' | xq
<element/><element/>

➜ echo $'  <element/>  <element/>  ' | xq -ds 1
<element/>
<element/>

➜  echo $'  <element/>  <element/>  ' | xq -ds 2
<element/>

<element/>

# Current
➜ echo $'  <?xml version="1.0"?><element></element>  \
  <?xml version="1.0"?>  <element/>  ' | xq
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<element/><?xml version="1.0"?>
<element/>

# Expected
➜ echo $'  <?xml version="1.0"?><element></element>  \
  <?xml version="1.0"?>  <element/>  ' | xq -ds 1
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<element/>
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<element/>

➜ echo $'  <?xml version="1.0"?><element></element>  \
  <?xml version="1.0"?>  <element/>  ' | xq -ds 2
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<element/>

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<element/>

[sibprogrammer]

In the case of multiple separate files the outer for loop should do the trick:

for FILE in test/data/xml/unformatted*
do
    cat $FILE | xq
    echo "---separator---"
done

[jappaleinen]

Yes, in the case you send a single document to the xq command every time and are in control of the document separation outside of the command invocation this can be solved outside the xq tool.

However, if eg a file contains multiple xml-documents (don't ask why, but we have a scenario where this is the case) its harder.

Therefore, a suggestion to be able to instruct xq to separate documents in the the output...