xml-dev - lex, yacc, and xml

[David Megginson <ak117@freenet.carleton.ca>]

Ward Harold writes:

 > <question name="why hand code parsers" class="potentially stupid">
 > Why is it that all of the XML parsers/processors I've seen appear to be
 > hand coded rather than generated via lex/yacc or flex/bison? I seem to
 > recall seeing something to the effect that yacc/bison can't handle the
 > class of grammar that XML falls into. Then again I'm not a compiler
 > constructor, opted for the AI sequence in graduate school, so I may be
 > imagining things. Even if there is a technical reason for eschewing
 > parser generation surely the basic lexing and scanning could be done
 > with lex/flex, no?
 > </question>

This is actually a very good question, but I will second most of Tim's
comments.  With Ælfred, I set out to produce an Java-based XML parser
under 20K (I missed by about 6K, but I'm still working on it).  A
hand-crafted recursive-descent parser seemed like the only reasonable
choice, and it turned out to be very fast as well.

In fact, it is not much harder to write a recursive-descent parser
than it is to write out EBNF productions, at least not once you get
into a rhythm and write a few helper methods for lexical scanning
(like "readName()").


All the best,


David

-- 
David Megginson                 ak117@freenet.carleton.ca
Microstar Software Ltd.         dmeggins@microstar.com
      http://home.sprynet.com/sprynet/dmeggins/

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