From: Kevin Smith <sent@...>
Date: 2001-02-27T01:26:22+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:11597] Re: A design/implementation question

Dave Thomas wrote:
>To do that with the current scheme would require that every client
>have the Ruby xmlparser module installed, which in turn requires Jim
>Clark's expat library. This seems onerous!
>
>So, I initially started hacking together yet another flat file
>representation of the data. I'd ship it with ri, and when you type
>'ruby install.rb', the installer would read it and generate the
>marshaled classes. Then that little alarm bell started ringing that
>said "there has to be a better way". Unfortunately, the battery ran
>down before it got around to telling me what that better way is.

How complex is your XML? As I mentioned, I was 
able to write a very simple, focused XML parser 
in C++ in a couple hours. To use the class, you 
would create your own subclass. You would call:
  Parse(inputstream)

Each time a tag was encountered in the stream, a 
virtual method named tag was called, passing the 
string containing "<...>". For all non-tag info, 
a virtual method named output was called with an 
arbitrary chunk of text. I also had beginComment 
and endComment calls, that allowed you to know 
when commented text was being passed to output.

Would something like that allow you retain your 
XML?

Kevin