Article:		Non-Extractive Parsing for XML
Subject:		Wrong approach
Date:		2004-05-28 16:00:36
From:		Michael Maron
One simple question: why would anybody want to fight with basic ideas of XML in the first place? As far as C++ and especially C are concerned, the answer is obvious: working with XML in C/C++ world is not particularly convenient, so one can look for simpler alternatives to standard parsers - like one considered in this article. From the other side, regular expressions actually can provide a reasonable alternative to full-scale parsing. Unfortunately, regexps are not common for C/C++ as well, so this is hardly a way out. But in Perl and in Java regexps are ceratinly very useful for simple XML manipualtions. For example, some XML converters can produce non-valid XML documents which can be transformed to valid ones using Perl or Java regexps. Another serious alternative to XML DOM and SAX is JDBC in Java.

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• Wrong approach
  2004-05-29 11:43:18 jimmy_z [Reply]
  
  Thanks for the posting.

  
  The concept of non-extractive parsing is meant to be a general-purpose alternative to extractive parsing; in other words, it is one layer below reg expression and is not tied to any specific language.
  
  

• C++ / .NET
  2004-05-29 06:39:35 Michael Maron [Reply]
  
  Sure, one can use C++ to work with XML - in .NET environment.

  
  Another point is that C++ and even C certainly can be used to generate new XML documents from scratch, for example, by simple sprintf(). As for extraction, no, using string manipulation functions is a really miserable solution.