Re: Regular expressions???

[Ray Blaak <blaak@infomatch.com>]

Emmanuel Briot <briot@gnat.com> writes:
> It was noted earlier than an XML parser is much easier to program than a RE
> parser. Obviously, this is true. However, writing a parser from scratch is
> actually not so simple, since the XML standard is pretty extensive. Support
> for entities (&name;), DTDs, ... was kind of a time-consuming task :-)

True enough. However, a simple XML parser that ignores encodings, validation,
and entities is still useful enough to process a significant number of files
(i.e. most files are in ASCII, don't use &entities too much, and grammars
are irrelevant to final client side processing that needs the grammars "built
in" to the evaluation code anyway).

Certainly such a thing is good enough for educational purposes, and for
"private" application storage formats.

Regular expressions however, are quickly erroneous with the slightest
preturbation of the data, due to the free form nested nature of XML.

-- 
Cheers,                                        The Rhythm is around me,
                                               The Rhythm has control.
Ray Blaak                                      The Rhythm is inside me,
blaak@infomatch.com                            The Rhythm has my soul.