pre-alpha: PiXPull.pmod, PiXTree.pmod - Pike-devel

23 Apr 2003


      Hello,
I thought I would make these two toys available for your perusal,
even though they are hardly finished. If by some chance they
survive scrutiny by thoughtful Pike developers (and maybe gain
some improvements|bugfixes as a result), I may follow up with
a more "public" announcement (freshmeat maybe), produce some
usage samples, test cases,... (and profit ;-) Brief descriptions
follow.
In addition, the sources include some AutoDoc markup, and before
setting up a dedicated webpage I hope to figure out how to extract
and format API docs from standalone .pmod's.
* PiXPull.pmod aims to be a Pike implementation of an API not unlike
the one described and advocated at http://xmlpull.org/ (which is
designed for Java). In brief, it is a streaming XML parser, based on
the "pull" parsing model rather then the more usual event-callback
scheme (SAX, etc.). Currently it neither validates nor parses DOCTYPE
declarations (merely skips them), and is not fully compliant with the
XML
spec in detecting violations of well-formedness (many checks are
missing
that are too expensive to do in Pike). XML Namespaces are not
implemented
(this is optional in the XMLPull API), but shouldn't be too hard to
add.
Other bugs/omissions:
- input encoding detection isn't quite there (but at least utf-8,
utf-16 and
8-bit encodings supported by Pike should work)
- attribute value normalization is buggy
- error reporting needs improvement
It does however seem to work OK for about all XML input files I tried
;-)
Being written entirely in Pike, PiXPull is not lightning-fast... but
it does not
seem to be significantly slower than pure Java implementations (but is
of
course no match for compiled native code...)
* PiXTree.pmod is a rough sketch of an interface for generating XML
output. If PiXPull is pre-alpha, this is just an experimental
prototype.
Your feedback (if any ;-) will tell me whether this is at all a good
idea.
Basically, you can do like:
import .PiXTree;
...
Element html = Element("html");
html( Element("head")(Element("title")("This is the title.")));
Element body = Element("body")(Element("h1")("The Title."));
html << Comment("The <body> starts below.");
html << "\n";
body << Element("p")("Here is some text in a paragraph.");
write( html(body)->toString() );
// defaults to utf-8 encoding
// or a number of different permutations ;-)
write( Doc(html)->toString("iso8859-1") );
// ..to produce an xml header and use the provided encoding;
// note the body has already been attached to html,
// you don't want to do it again.
The two modules are temporarily to be found at
http://bobo.fuw.edu.pl/~rjb/STUFF/PiXPull.pmod
http://bobo.fuw.edu.pl/~rjb/STUFF/PiXTree.pmod
Enjoy! (or otherwise ;-)