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Hello Stéphane,<br>
<br>
<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 2021-11-04 19:35, Stéphane Charette
wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote type="cite" cite="mid:CA+HxBUJHibwPpW-iJiJYnNLher5Si4_a=y4q2B=ExfjMZsVQaA@mail.gmail.com">
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<div>[...] First get the list of VM UUIDs with "VBoxManage
list vms", and then get the detail information you need
with "VBoxManage showvminfo uuid --machinereadable". The
output of the latter should be a lot easier to process.</div>
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<div>The irony here (to me anyway) is that the XML file should
be very easy to read and parse by machine. Other than
having a database, file formats like XML and JSON are meant
to be used that way.</div>
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<br>
Yes, XML is machine parseable.<br>
<br>
However, the XML files containing the VirtualBox VM registry and the
VM configuration have by now evolved for about 17 years. Showing all
kinds of human imperfection, i.e. various forms of misdesign which
survived more or less long. The current XML parser code used in
VirtualBox is supposed to understand config files back to VirtualBox
2.0 (covering 13 years).<br>
<br>
If one wants to extract only very specific information (more or less
just VM names and groups) then it is probably little effort, but a
complete parser is much work (and due to our policy of upgrading the
XML representation to a newer version only if a new feature is
actually used one simply can't ignore the past).<br>
<br>
VM groups were introduced with VirtualBox 4.2, and if one didn't
actively use them then the attribute may not be there.<br>
<br>
If Bernard decides to go for XML parsing it could be actually much
less effort than picking the few needed bits of information from the
output of VBoxManage. At the same time efficient and a good chance
to be future proof since the attributes needed are in very stable
areas of the XML. Of course there are details to take care of (like
finding VirtualBox.xml for VirtualBox installs which existed for a
long time, before it moved to the .config/VirtualBox directory and
how to interpret relative paths for machine config files (relevant
if someone kept his VM organization from the old days when we didn't
have per-VM subdirectories).<br>
<br>
Klaus<br>
<br>
<blockquote type="cite" cite="mid:CA+HxBUJHibwPpW-iJiJYnNLher5Si4_a=y4q2B=ExfjMZsVQaA@mail.gmail.com">
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<div>Stéphane</div>
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-- <br>
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