Re: XML parser with DOM-like API

[Michal Kottman <k0mpjut0r@...>]

On 10 October 2011 22:30, Florian Weimer <fw@deneb.enyo.de> wrote:
>> On 10 October 2011 09:13, Eike Decker <zet23t@googlemail.com> wrote:
>>> I am not aware of an xml lib that provides a simple access in Lua. What you
>>> could consider however is to use Lua Expat [1] and use this to create a dom
>>> like access pattern that matches exactly your needs. I think the required
>>> code for this would be acceptably short and simple. It would probably come
>>> closer to your actual needs than any existing library.
>>>
>>
>> http://matthewwild.co.uk/projects/luaexpat/lom.html - I'm not sure it
>> can get much simpler (except something like XPath maybe...).
>
> I would use a different encoding: node[0] for the tag, node[1] to
> node[#node] for the children, and node[attr] for the value of the
> attribute attr (a string).  This works because the order of attributes
> does not matter.

This is very similar to what I use in my little utility module WDM
(Web Data Mining) [1]. It helps to save a lot of (IMHO unnecessary)
tables.

I use the following "encoding":
* node[1] - node[#node] - children of the node
* node[attr] - the node attribute (like div.style or link.href)
* node.tag - the HTML tag, because 'tag' is not used as an attribute
in (X)HTML, could be modified to 'xml' in case of XML files

[1] https://github.com/mkottman/wdm