xml-dev - Re: XML parser using lex & yacc

[Richard Tobin <richard@cogsci.ed.ac.uk>]

> I want to develop an XML parser in C or maybe C++ for an
> undergraduate university project. My approach will be to prototype
> the parser using flex and bison. As I understand it, flex won't be
> able to handle all of the character encodings required in the the
> 1.0 spec.

Using your own lexer may be the best approach, but all the "syntax
characters" of XML are plain ASCII, so it might well be possible to
use [f]lex to tokenise it.  For UTF-8 it is straightforward: the lexer
doesn't have to even know that the multibyte-characters are not just
multiple characters - the next level up can translate them.

Or you might be able to replace the lexer's input functions and change
its character type to integer (if it isn't already); this would work
for UTF-16 (the other required encoding) too.

The most obvious problem with using yacc/lex type tools for XML is
that keywords aren't always keywords.  For example, in some places
in the DTD "SYSTEM" is a keyword and in others it would just be
a name.  You can have the parser switch the lexer between states
but it's not pretty.

-- Richard

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