How to use backup keyword XML file?

Question

This morning a bunch of my Bridge keywords disappeared. I started to add a keyword, realized I was adding it in the wrong part of the tree, and hit "escape" to cancel out. When I did that, a whole bunch of keywords simply vanished.

The good news is that I have a backup of the XML file on my backup drive. The bad news is that it doesn't seem to be working. I deleted the XML file with the missing keywords and replaced it with the file from my backup drive. (I checked the backup file and it has the keywords that vanished this morning.) I restarted my computer and opened Bridge, but it doesn't seem to be reading the new XML file. They keywords that disappeared this morning are still missing.

I know that one of my option is this: Prepression: Bridge – Restoring a Lost Keyword XML File But why should I have to go that route to basically re-create my keyword tree when I already have a file with all the data? How do I get Bridge to read the replacement XML file from my backup drive? Is there a utility that will convert it into a plain text file so that I can manually import it into Bridge?

I'm running Bridge CC 2018 on Mac OS High Sierra 10.13.2.

peachyhill · Accepted Answer

What I ended up doing was uninstalling Bridge. With the backup XML file in place I reinstalled Bridge and that did the trick. There were all the keywords from the XML file.

Stephen Marsh · Answer

Compare the XML of the backup to the new file. Perhaps there is something that it does not like in the old file.

___________

There are online converters that can strip out the tags… however to retain a nested parent keywords + child sub-keyword structure I would use a plain text editor with search/replace leaving only the values ready for importing (being careful to replace with nothing or with one or more tab characters depending on the nesting level required).

So one find/replace to remove all of the common leading/opening tags, then a second find/replace to remove all of the common trailing/closing tags. A little bit of manual cleanup and you should be ready to go with a couple of minutes in the text editor.

You could use a regular expression capable text editor for a single leading + trailing tag search/replace step (rather than two separate steps), however it is not going to save too much time and is only listed for completeness:

Find:

<.+?"|".+?>|<\/.+>|<.+>>

Replace:

… or perhaps another regex for the same result, this time using a capture group reference in the replace –

Find:

(?:<\/set>)|(?:<.+?")(.+?)(?:".+>)|(?:<\/keywords>)

Replace:

$1

You will still need to delete the first two lines… and also deal with the extra leading tab character on each line, such as with the following regular expression search for a single tab at the start of a line:

Find:

^\t

Replace:

Example image of the original XML (upper) and the clean plain text version (below), ready for importing (invisible characters shown):

Edit – here is a animation of the regular expression based XML cleanup to produce a plain text import file:

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