Re: [9fans] OT: DTD to yacc spec?

[David Tolpin <dvd@davidashen.net>]

> >
> > I guess I am looking for a tool that can convert a DTD into
> > a good old yacc grammar spec (I would still need to provide
> > actions, though). Does anybody know of such a tool?
>
> Oh, how great it is to know that I'm not alone.  Ever since I have
> been exposed to XML and its parsers have I wondered about their
> weirdness.  They never looked like parsers to me, more like toolkits
> to help write a generic XML editor or display system.
>
> I would absolutely love to have a parser generator that takes a DTD or
> schema and produces a parser to read XML only for that one definition.
> All I have encountered so far are "validating" parsers that seem to
> make XML file interchange even harder, as the DTD or schema has to be
> provided from the outside.

An XML parser is like lex(1), it performs tokenization on the level
of XML. When you want a grammar-driven processing of an XML file,
you can convert DTD to a yacc grammar with awk and use an XML parser
to implement yylex.

Additionally a number of tools exists to generate code from schemata,
such as RelaxNGCC (http://relaxngcc.sourceforge.net/). Since Relaxб═NG
can be generated from DTD by Trang,
http://thaiopensource.com/relaxng/trang.html , it solves your problem.

One of many tools in C which match your description is at
http://flexml.sourceforge.net/ . There are also many others around.

David Tolpin
http://davidashen.net/