begin quoting boblq as of Wed, Oct 26, 2005 at 11:49:22AM -0700: > On Tuesday 25 October 2005 08:59 am, Stewart Stremler wrote: > > > > Writing your own XML parser that tries to put out meaningful error messages > > is (a) seen as a waste of time as you're writing a redundant parser and > > (b) is apt to be buggy and error-prone itself, making it worse than what > > you have to deal with already. > > UH, duh. Isn't that one of the reasons why Open Source exists? Depends on who you are. Most folk want open-source because it results in all software being (essentially) free-as-in-beer.
> There are pretty decent parsers out there already, e.g. > > expat http://expat.sourceforge.net/ > > SAX http://www.saxproject.org/ > > You could contribute to these projects by improving the > error reporting ... I haven't looked at these, but most of the time when I look into contributing to an open-source project, I end up first reformatting all the code, correcting the spelling, adding some basic comments, all of which results in an every-file diff and my contributions are rejected with prejudice or just ignored. After a few times, it just isn't worth the effort anymore. Poking at 'em for a bit looks interesting, until I hit a sourceforge bug (in a .py script). Oh, well, so much for that. > Why would you need to write your own XML parser? Often, good error reporting isn't something that can be bolted on to a system afterwards. -Stewart -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-lpsg
