nestable C/C++ XML parser?

Vilya Harvey vilya at nag.co.uk
Tue Dec 7 18:17:00 GMT 1999


Lars Marius Garshol wrote:
> 
> * Lars Marius Garshol
> |
> | The only application I see for this sort of thing is to be able to
> | work around XML syntax rules,
> 
> * Toby Speight
> |
> | I see a demand for parsing a document with SAX, but using some
> | start-tags to switch to building DOM (or DOM-like) objects, returning
> | to stream-oriented processing afterwards.
> 
> Sure, I too see a need for this, and I've even implemented it.
> However, this is something completely different from doing parsing on
> behalf of the parser. Parsing is turning a stream of bytes (or
> characters) into something higher-level, but this is not what you are
> talking about.

Not exactly right. Parsing deals with a sequence of *tokens*; in the
programming world these tokens are usually the result of lexical analysis
of a sequence of characters, but they don't *have* to be. The tokens in
question could be XML entities, for example...

> As far as I understood him, the original poster wanted to do the
> parsing (that is, the reading and interpretation of bytes/chars) on
> behalf of expat.

I think there has been some miscommunication due to the fact that there
are really two distinct levels of parsing that can take place with XML.
There is the parsing which turns a sequence of characters in some encoding
into a particular XML entity or sequence of entities; and then there is
the parsing which interprets a sequence of XML tokens to derive some
application- or domain-specific meaning. I suspect it may have been the
second type of parsing that the original poster was referring to.

Bye,
Vil.
(Not speaking for my employer.)
-- 
Vilya Harvey  <vilya at nag.co.uk>    Wilkinson House  Mob: +44  961 106 505
Computational Mathematics Group   Jordan Hill Road   Wk: +44 1865 511 245
NAG Limited                    Oxford  UK  OX2 8DR  Fax: +44 1865 311 205

xml-dev: A list for W3C XML Developers. To post, mailto:xml-dev at ic.ac.uk
Archived as: http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/xml-dev/ and on CD-ROM/ISBN 981-02-3594-1
To unsubscribe, mailto:majordomo at ic.ac.uk the following message;
unsubscribe xml-dev
To subscribe to the digests, mailto:majordomo at ic.ac.uk the following message;
subscribe xml-dev-digest
List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (mailto:rzepa at ic.ac.uk)





More information about the Xml-dev mailing list