Re: [xml-dev] Genx

[Joe English <jenglish@flightlab.com>]

Tim Bray wrote:

> At one point during the discussions about Atom and well-formedness, I
> offered to cook up some libraries for safely and efficiently writing
> guaranteed-well-formed XML; it seems that the world is well-provided
> with these for Java, but several people wrote me saying such a thing
> would be really handy at the C level; libxml2 being OK but too big and
> complicated for most people's purposes in this particular regard and
> also suspected of a memory leak.
>
> So I sketched out a design, see the write-up at
> http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2004/01/19/HeresGenx and have at
> it. -Tim


A couple small notes:

genx.h uses "//"-style comments, which are new in C99.
If you want to be compatible with C89 compilers (there
are still a lot of them out there), you might want to
change these.

The 'codePoint' typedef may be problematic:

    // Unicode code points (4-byte int on most systems)
    typedef wchar_t codePoint;

The C standard makes no useful guarantees about
the size or interpretation of 'wchar_t'.  On some
systems it's identical to plain 'char', and even
on systems where it's big enough to hold all of
Unicode, there's no guarantee about what encoding
the wcs* and *wcs functions use.  wchar_t should
not be used in programs that are meant to generate 
portable data and be portable themselves; you just 
don't know what you're going to get.


--Joe English

  jenglish@flightlab.com