[Info-vax] Any Way to Pass Arrays of Strings from C to Basic?

[Craig A. Berry]

On 11/7/19 10:36 PM, Dave Froble wrote:

> A while back we looked at several XML parsers.  When done looking, we 
> looked at each other and basically said WTF?  The products would test 
> some XML for matching tag pairs, but nothing else we could see.  One 
> thing they didn't do was parse out the actual data that we needed. That, 
> we still had to custom program.  Have to wonder just what these 
> bloatware products are good for?  Nothing we could see or justify.
> 
> Note, perhaps there may be products that actually extract your data, but 
> we never saw one.

All of them do if you know how to use them.  For example, expat will
fire an event when it encounters an element, but it will also fire an
event when it encounters CDATA; if you want the content, you have to
define a callback that processes that event.  Some other processors have
similar behavior, and some have different models for how the processing
is done.

If you have an extremely shallow and simple data-oriented schema, it's
true that finding "matching tag pairs" is about all there is to it, but
this assumes that you are just using XML as CSV with funny-looking
delimiters.  If you have any of: deep nesting, a document-oriented
rather than a data-oriented schema, a data-oriented schema where the
data types matter, the need to expand entity references to their values,
processing instructions, XIncludes, XPointers, the need to query your
data via XPath or XQuery or other means, the need to transform your data
via XSLT or other means, the need to do full-text indexing/searching of
both content and document structure, or a bunch of other things, then
you need real XML tools.