Like I said, read into a string, then parse that.  You can skip the garbage 
like CR/LF … in our case if it all goes into the string in one read then so 
what, we still parse them one at a time …  Eric

 

From: xml [mailto:xml-boun...@gnome.org] On Behalf Of Webb Scales
Sent: Monday, September 09, 2019 7:41 PM
To: Liam R. E. Quin <l...@fromoldbooks.org>; xml@gnome.org
Subject: Re: [xml] Recovering from errors in an XML "stream"

 

On 9/7/19 12:37 AM, Liam R. E. Quin wrote:



On Fri, 2019-09-06 at 01:57 -0400, Webb Scales wrote:

The first issue is that the XML parser seems to balk entirely at the 
fact that the document is preceded by a comment before the XML 
declaration.  (I'm less than shocked, but it is kind of
disappointing.) 

 
I'd be sad if it accepte it - it's not allowed.

Thanks for the BNF and the pointer to the specification.  However, the fact 
remains that I don't control the text that I'm trying to parse, and I still 
need to parse it, even though it's not "well-formed".





The next issue is that the XML parser reports an error near the end
of  the document, when it notices that the document is followed by an
XML declaration.  (I'm a little closer to shocked by this.)

 
Feed the parser XML without errors and this won't happen. Or are you
saying there are multiple documents in the same input stream?

I've got a stream of bytes; it contains text which is "XML-like".  I would love 
to break it up into chunks which are well-formed (or otherwise acceptable) XML 
documents and then feed it to a LibXML2 function, but I need to do so without 
making too many assumptions about the input and without having to teach my code 
too much about XML (otherwise, there'd be no point using LibXML2).

As it happens, there are newlines between the documents, so I tweaked my custom 
I/O handler to return only up to the next newline.  However, after receiving 
the text for a complete document, the TextReader still calls my handler again 
and then issues an error because there is text after the closing tag for the 
root...if it hadn't made the extra call, it wouldn't have been prompted to fail 
like that!





the offending text doesn't appear
until after the closing tag for the root.)

isn't that the point?

The point is that the TextReader is (I thought...) supposed to return the nodes 
or elements as they are parsed...so why does it report errors in text that is 
well beyond the current node (which, in fact, it had to issue an extra I/O 
request to get)??

Without that lookahead, I could have stopped the parse when it reached the end 
of the document, and started a new reader for the next document.  But, instead, 
the current reader consumes some of the text which belongs to the next 
document, and then goes into an endless cycle where it returns errors without 
advancing to the next node.





Is there some other approach which is better for my situation than
the xmlTextReader?

 
XSLT 3 provides a streaming mode which does what it sounds like you
might need, but libxml supports only XSLT 1. However, it, too, needs
well-formed XML input without errors. There's also STX. Or use a SAX
parser and keep only what you need, but again you need well-formed
input. By the time you've written a program to fix the input, your
program might well be able to do what you need anyway, no??

Yes, I'm trying to avoid reinventing the wheel:  if I write code which is able 
to transform my input into well-formed XML, I won't need LibXML to parse it for 
me.


I was hoping that there was a way to handle the errors encountered by the 
TextReader, recover from them, and continue with the parse, but it sounds like 
that's not practical.


            Webb



 

-- 

Webb Scales 
Principal Software Architect 
603-673-2306 
www.ursasecure.com <https://www.ursasecure.com>  
w...@ursasecure.com <mailto:w...@ursasecure.com>  



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