parsing git log output, preferably as xml

Question

I want to parse the output from git log. My current tool does this for svn by parsing the --xml option that svn log has. I can't seem to figure out how to output git log as xml. If xml is not an option, what is the best way to parse this output? I would really like to avoid parsing it as raw text, looking for "author" and "date" ect.

thanks

Answer 1

You could build your own simple xml output by using the formatting options.

git log --pretty=format:"<entry><author>%an</author><commit_date>%cd</commit_date><message_body>%b</message_body></entry>"

Just add whatever fields you want. (You'll need to script a bit if you want proper xml header etc.)

See man git-log PRETTY FORMATS section the list of fields you have access to.