Re: Simple XHTML (XML) parser/printer

[steve donovan <steve.j.donovan@...>]

On Sun, Mar 22, 2009 at 6:50 PM, Tuomo Valkonen <tuomov@iki.fi> wrote:
> I'm looking for a simple XML parser/printer for Lua, that
> would let me manipulate an (incomplete) XHTML document
> with little effort. I was thinking of lua-expat/etree,
> but they make dealing with character entities pain.
> The lua-expat parser seems to require DTDs and stuff
> to parse the character entities; and etree doesn't
> include support for converting the whole range back.

XML in Lua seems unnecessary complicated, which is why implementations
proliferate.  Lua for Windows has _two_ implementations, luaexpat and
luaxml, at last count.  And no DOM implementation, which is a pity.
(LOM is pretty cool, however, and it would be easy to put a DOM
interface on top of that)

XML has grown beyond being a data encoding standard, and become a
particularly messy religion. Personally I like it as a data format,
without worrying about DTDs and the like.  Maybe this should be called
Pointy-Bracket Data (PBD) since it probably isn't valid XML ;)

steve d.