Manipulating various formats of files - XML, JSON, YAML, and EDN

There are many formats available to exchange data between different systems these days, but the most important ones seems to be quite stable for some time with a list of XML, JSON, YAML, and, more recently, MessagePack and EDN, a subset of the Clojure notation.

Each of these formats has some strong points, so this recipe will show us how to read and parse data through those different formats, and also when you might want to use each of them.

Getting ready

This recipe will make use of the standard libraries in the Clojure world to parse the different data formats. These are the full set of dependencies that we will need in our projects.clj file:

[clj-yaml "0.4.0"] ; parse yaml 
[cheshire "5.5.0"] ; parse json 
[org.clojure/data.xml "0.1.0-beta1"] ; parse xml 
[com.cognitect/transit-clj "0.8.285"] ; library for both json and msgpack 
[org.clojure/tools.reader "1.0.0-alpha2"] ; EDN...