[JDEV] Java XML Parsers

[Al Sutton]

Daniel,

I think you may be a little confused. I think you'll find that there are
specs for SAX and DOM parsers for XML, but XML itself is (or at least
was originally) purely a data representation format, and as such didn't
include the detail of how to handle it's contents. I'm not claiming my
parser is SAX or DOM compliant, but mearly a library capable of parsing
XML.

I've called it an XML parser because it extracts information from an XML
document by parsing it into tags and data elements, and does what most
people need in about 90% of cases where they wish to simply extract
simple data from an XML document or stream.

I fully accept it doesn't support processing directives (such as the
<?xml element which is used to detail encoding), and that enforcing all
tags are pushed into lower case isn't ideal (and is something that is
optional on version I currently am working on), but it seems to fit a
need many people have for a small simple parser. 

Myself and others have used my parser in a number of products which
handle the jabber protocol and thought it may be of use to Matt.

Al.

On Sun, 2001-12-30 at 10:15, Daniel Veillard wrote:
> On Sun, Dec 30, 2001 at 09:38:56AM +0000, Al Sutton wrote:
> > I'm biased, but I prefer the one I wrote. It's available from
> > http://www.alsutton.com/ under the My Software link.
> > 
> > It's designed to be small, and isn't fully featured, but does enough to
> 
>   Then it's probably not an XML parser. 
>     tagName = data.substring(0,spaceIdx).toLowerCase();
> for example is very suspicious (XML Names are case sensitive),
> it doesn't seems to look at the XML Declaration to check encodings etc...
> In a nutshell, though it may be able to extract informations from a well
> formed XML document it doesn't look like an XML parser and you should
> not advertize it as such, sorry for being pedantic but it's not good.
> 
>   XML defines relatively precisely the processing model of the
> parser including error detection and signalling. The goal is to have
> interoperable implementations. Deviation from the spec makes thing
> harder for the users, for example a Jabber client based on your parser
> will not react similary to a client based on an XML parser.
> 
> Daniel
> 
> -- 
> Daniel Veillard      | Red Hat Network https://rhn.redhat.com/
> veillard at redhat.com  | libxml Gnome XML XSLT toolkit  http://xmlsoft.org/
> http://veillard.com/ | Rpmfind RPM search engine http://rpmfind.net/
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-- 
Al Sutton
Email: al at personalbuddy.com