Re: [Boost-users] spirit and xml

From: Cory Nelson (phrosty_at_[hidden])
Date: 2007-02-12 07:58:22

On 2/12/07, abir basak <abirbasak_at_[hidden]> wrote:
>
> Hi,
>   I am at present using spirit for parsing unipen file as specified in
> http://www.unipen.org/dataformats.html . That is great and quite easy to
> parse, thanks to spirit.
>  Now I am looking to use spirit for parsing an specific xml file ( w3c
> inkml file). So my intension is not to have a generic xml parser, rather
> than a specific xml parser (which also have some BNF grammar) . Anyone
> had used spirit for domain specific xml parsing?
>  I believe using spirit will make it faster. Also I am interested to
> parse only a portion of the whole document at a time, and generate data
>  from that portion only, rather generating data for whole DOM (The
> files are large, 4-20 MB typically)

Spirit is a great parser but if what you are aiming for is speed it's
probably not for you.  It can be quite slow compared to hand-written
parsers (especially with complex grammars).  If you still want to use
it though, I think I remember one of the spirit examples involving
parsing some basic XML.

Libxml2's xmlreader gives a forward-only reader that doesn't generate
any DOM, with speed that will be hard to beat.  It can also validate
using a schema, which can be useful if your app ever has a chance of
being given an invalid inkml file.

-- 
Cory Nelson