Thanks - you should have replied to the list, because I think I did your package a dis-service. I've just been looking at the Haskell XML Toolbox, and comparing the two, and now that I understand a little more it seems like either will be fine for me. In fact I will copy this to the list, hope that's OK, because maybe someone will find this info via Google one day and find it useful. Cheers, Andrew Malcolm Wallace said:
"andrew cooke" <andrew@acooke.org> writes:
- HaXml looks like it might do what I want, but (1) seems tricky to install (needs "make", which isn't that cool for Windows);
Until the general Haskell Library Infrastructure project is sufficiently mature, I'm afraid 'make' is going to be pretty de rigeur for any build-from-source library.
Having said that, in the case of HaXml I reckon it would be pretty straightforward to dispense with 'make' and issue a couple of 'ghc --make' commands by hand. Especially since you seem only to want a few of HaXml's facilities, not the complete set.
Another alternative is simply to copy the small number of modules you need into your local build tree, and ignore the standard package mechanism altogether.
(2) has a load of fancy-schmancy combinator stuff, when all I want is a stream of tokens (something like the Java SAX interface);
If you really want only a stream of tokens, have a look at Text.XML.HaXml.Lex. For an error-correcting parse into a generic tree-like XML data structure, use Text.XML.HaXml.Html.Parse. You don't need the Combinators, Haskell2Xml, Xml2Haskell stuff at all.
(3) doesn't seem that solid on the basics (doesn't seem to handle namespaces (maybe they appear as part of the attribute name?)
Namespaces are transparent, in the sense that the namespace is part of the element or attribute name, but there is no further automatic processing of it. So basically HaXml doesn't do anything fancy with namespaces, but it doesn't crash, or discard them either.
(and I haven't yet worked out what it does about other "esoteric" things like character entities, XML declarations, CDATA, comments, etc)).
All of these are stored in the 'generic' XML data structure representation, so you can use them or discard them as you wish.
data Element = Elem Name [Attribute] [Content] type Attribute = (Name, AttValue) data Content = CElem Element | CString Bool CharData -- bool is whether whitespace is significant | CRef Reference -- character and entity references | CMisc Misc -- comments, processing instructions, etc.
(No offense implied - it's a cool piece of work, just doesn't seem to be what I'm looking for;
None taken. I'm sure it looks complicated from the outside, but really it is just a collection of individual pieces that can be mixed and matched to suit the needs of any particular application.
I'd write it myself, but (X)HTML is deceptively complex, ... HTML isn't XML,
HaXml's special error-correcting HTML parser deals with most of this stuff, for instance self-closing tags (IMG), implicitly closed tags (P), improperly nested tags, and so on.
typical malformed pages (unescaped "<" in text; unescaped data in URLs inside links (eg "&"), etc)
These two examples of error situations might be beyond the current capability of the error-correcting parser, but I haven't checked in a long while.
So in summary, I think HaXml will get you a long way towards your goal, but you will probably want to be selective about what you use, and there may be extra things you need to code for yourself on top.
Regards, Malcolm
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