I am joining @christhekeele here – f.ex. using :xmerl is maddening because it has a nice low-level streaming interface (among others!) because on the one hand, 95% of the code is exactly the same… but the other 5% vary every frakkin time. This really makes it very difficult to extract out libraries. I entertained the idea but ultimately concluded it would add too little value for what would basically be just one instance of a SAX parser with the ability to pass “callbacks” to it… something everyone can roll in literal one hour maximum.

As the efficiency maniac that I will always be, I’d use Erlang’s :xmerl even if I know no XML content would ever be more than 20KB.

But I am not aware of a library that directly adds a custom Ecto.Type for it, no.

Roger, thank you. I’ll have to sculpt something out of it. I didn’t say it’s not possible but that nothing I found is “full-fledged” as in “handles all both ways”. Things are scattered, and there are bits and pieces here and there. Even with your suggestions – where you surely have done these type of things before – it’s still three different libs, including an Erlang one. I’d dream of something like e. g. JSON.decode, JSON.encode, as XML.de/encode, augmented with XML.validate and XML Ecto type. Anyway - it is what it is.

Hehe… Yes, I know. Been there, seen that. Not in Elixir though