If SAX == lex, then what == yacc?

[James Tauber]

> A thought that struck me (and probably struck many of you before me) is
that
> the event stream from a SAX parser is much like the token stream from a
lexical
> analyser, like 'lex'.  This made me wonder what the equivalent to 'yacc'
would
> be in this picture; an application that help you construct the logic for
dealing
> with event streams.  Is there such an application?

FOP (and I suspect a lot of XML applications) takes SAX events and builds a
tree structure out of objects that belong to a class depending on the
element type or attribute. This tree building is handled through a largely
generic builder and the mappings from element and attribute name to class
name are provided to the builder at run-time. In the case of attributes (and
perhaps eventually elements), the actual classes themselves are generated
from XML schemas.

I don't know if it is the equivalent of "yacc" but it seems to be a fairly
generic way of dealing with event streams that still allows
application-specific tailoring.

James Tauber


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