Roll your own XML parser / XML parsing algorithm?

Question

So, just as a fun project, I decided I\'d write my own XML parser. No, not to parse a specific document, and no, not using an XML parser library. I mean writing code to pars

Answer 1

http://expat.sourceforge.net/

Expat is an XML parser library written in C. It is a stream-oriented parser in which an application registers handlers for things the parser might find in the XML document (like start tags). An introductory article on using Expat is available on xml.com.

Answer 2

Antlr offers a tutorial on parsing XML. It breaks the process down into phases: lexing, parsing, tree parsing, etc. Looks pretty interesting.

Answer 3

I don't know if it would be "cheating" in your book, but you could try parsing your XML with a ready-built all-purpose language parser like ANTLR. The result would be a list of tokens (if you just use the lexer) or a parse tree (if you include the parser) and you could then re-build the parse tree almost 1:1 into an XML structure.

Maybe. I haven't thought about the ways in which XML might be different from "normal" ANTLR fodder like programming languages, and whether you would be able to define a suitable grammar.

Answer 4

VTD-XML is probably the simplest parsing technique possible...