xml format of event files

Asked by Rikkert Frederix

Hi guys,

Just to tell you that Stefano and I just got a request to have a careful check to exclude all possible xml-sensitive characters in the header of the (aMC@NLO) event files. In particular we have some ">" and "<" in the header. Of course, these are in the comments, but a general xml reader will still pick them up. I'll update the writing of the aMC@NLO event files; maybe one of you could check the same for the LO ones.

Cheers,
Rik

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MadGraph5_aMC@NLO Edit question
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Rikkert Frederix
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Olivier Mattelaer (olivier-mattelaer) said :
#1

Hi Rik,

Could you give more details, since we have '>' in all header since this is part of the proc_card.dat

Cheers,

Olivier

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Johan Alwall (johan-alwall) said :
#2

Hello Rikkert,

As Olivier points out, it's clearly impossible to remove all ">" from the header. If an xml reader picks up these when they are not part of a tag, that definitely means that the reader is not written correctly. The important part should be to avoid "<" immediately followed by a character (which would indicate the start of a tag) or "-->" (which indicates the end of a comment). We will check that none of these combinations are present in the MG header.

Thanks,
Johan

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Rikkert Frederix (frederix) said :
#3

Hi Johan, Olivier,

It's was somebody from CMS and he told me that their XML reader for the header of the event file failed. I also found it a bit surprising, because the '>' is always there. It might have been that in the aMC@NLO event files there are also '<', '&' and quotation marks, which might be more sensitive. Also, I'm not sure that all the information in the <header> is actually a comment (with proper <---! tags) in the aMC@NLO events. So, that might also have been the problem. It was just to inform you that we got this request for the NLO events.

Cheers,
Rik