Thank you, but my question was not about how to read XML files (even
though I do this for the first time in Squeak). As I pointed out, I am
aware of the possibility to use FileStream to read the file contents
into a string (and then do the parsing).

After getting the contents in a Workspace window by dragging the file
into the image, I hoped there were some interactive facility to bind
that text to a variable. In my experience, Squeak is full of useful,
but sometimes hidden, functionality and I silently wished more than
once to create such a variable from an inspected object without
abusing the object explorer as my surrogate Workspace.

2016-03-14 15:51 GMT+01:00 H. Hirzel <hannes.hirzel at gmail.com>:
> Hello Jakob
>
> Does this
> http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/6338
> and this
> http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/6342
>
> help for zour problem?
>
> Regards
> Hannes
>
> On 3/14/16, Jakob Reschke <jakob.reschke at student.hpi.de> wrote:
>> Hi all,
>>
>> is there a convenient way to bind some object (e. g. one that I
>> inspect at the moment) to a variable in a new or existing Workspace?
>>
>> Use Case: I would like to read something from an XML file and have
>> never done that before in Squeak. After installing the XMLParsers
>> stuff from SqueakMap I dragged my XML file into the image. It shows
>> the file content in a Workspace, great! Now I want to get that content
>> as a string object to later supply it to an appropriate parser. I
>> found the string by inspecting the morphs of the Workspace (is there
>> an easier way?), but now I would like to have a new workspace where I
>> can work with that string.
>>
>> Printing the string in the inspector and copy&pasting would be an
>> option, but the XML file is quite large and performance issues already
>> arise when I navigate around in the Workspace where the content was
>> loaded. For the sake of having tried it out, I attempted to print the
>> #fullPrintString of the string, but my VM crashed... So, is there a
>> way to bind arbitrary objects at hand to a Workspace, other than
>> copying and pasting serialized representations around or fiddling with
>> "global variables"?
>>
>> Of course, I could have done the file reading myself with FileStream
>> etc. to obtain a string, but I wondered if there is a more "tangible"
>> approach.
>>
>> Best regards,
>> Jakob
>>
>>
>