Re: Representing XML in tables

[Scott Morgan <blumf@...>]

Andy Stark wrote:

> > Has there been any standerd way of representing a XML document in a lua 
> > table structure defined yet?
> >    
>
> Here's a way I would like to see standardised in all languages that could
> support it...
>
>  
>
> 	xmlRoot = {_tag_ = "person", version = "1.0";
> 			{_tag_ = "name", format = "normal";
> 				"Dougie Vipond",
> 			},
>
> 			{_tag_="occupation";
> 				"Ice Warrior",
> 			},
>
> 			"Some other text",
> 		}
>
> (Lua automatically adds the [0], [1]... sequentially if you don't specify
> an index explicity. The semicolon after the attributes allows you to mix
> the string and integer indexing as shown on page 10 of the 5.0 manual. ).
>  
I see a couple of problems here:

1) What happens if you have xml like <item _tag_="PITA">, not likely , 
but possible.

2) Getting at the value held by the table is a bit difficult, in the 
'name' and 'occupation' nodes it's at [1], but in the 'person' node it's 
at [3]. You could loop through the table looking for the first string, 
but what if you're using userdata to represent the text, or even worse a 
table (I can see situations where both would be useful for unicode 
support reasons). Idealy all values stored should not be assumed to be 
of type string.

> I agree that it would be great if this (or some better method) could be
> documented on the Lua website as a "standard"  way to handle XML in Lua.
> At least for simple tasks.
>
>  
This is exactly what I was thinking. We need a standard way to deal with 
this so we can create some helper functions to deal with it all.

Scott Morgan