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by ColdAsIce 5236 days ago
Yeah thats a nice xmldict you wrote there, except it doesnt do anything good at all. Try to parse this with it, <html>hello</lol>world</html>. So much for your A* search and algorithmic knowledge.

I am no good with algorithms but would know to stop at such an idea as to make my own xmldict parser in that way. I would instead learn about parsing and the algorithms for successful parsing, instead of a half-assed approach.
2 comments
irahul 5236 days ago
> Try to parse this with it, <html>hello</lol>world</html>.

Parsing invalid xml with a xml parser throws an error like it should.

I am using cElementTree for parsing and this is what will happen with your input.

    In [1]: import xml.etree.cElementTree as ElementTree

    In [2]: ElementTree.XML('<html>hello</lol>world</html>')
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    ParseError                                Traceback (most recent call last)
    /home/rahul/musings/python/<ipython-input-2-54e782b0af58> in <module>()
    ----> 1 ElementTree.XML('<html>hello</lol>world</html>')

    /home/rahul/musings/python/<string> in XML(text)

    ParseError: mismatched tag: line 1, column 13
> make my own xmldict parser in that way

What is that way you are talking about? There isn't a xmldict implementation for Python(at least I can't google it), I needed one, so I wrote a recursive descent parser. A recursive descent parser is a popular choice provided your grammar is LL(k) - Python, Perl et al run on hand-coded recursive-descent parsers. Also, recursive-descent parsers are easiest to handroll.

PS - There is a way to disagree. Your's isn't the right way.

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lutorm 5236 days ago
I don't know a lot about XML, but that doesn't look like (legal) XML to me. Is it?
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