Arabica is an XML and HTML processing toolkit, providing SAX, DOM, XPath, and XSLT implementations, written in Standard C++.
- SAX is an event-based XML processing API. Arabica is a full SAX2 implementation, including the optional interfaces and helper classes. It provides uniform SAX2 wrappers for the Expat parser, Xerces, Libxml2 and, on Windows, for the Microsoft XML parser.
- The DOM is a platform- and language-neutral interface which models an XML document as a tree of nodes, defined by the W3C. Arabica implements the DOM Level 2 Core on top of the SAX layer.
- XPath is a language for addressing parts of an XML document. Arabica implements XPath 1.0 over its DOM implementation.
- XSLT is a language for transforming XML documents into other XML documents. Arabica builds XSLT over its XPath engine.
- In addition to the XML parser, Arabica includes Taggle, an HTML parser derived from TagSoup.
Arabica is written in Standard C++ and should be portable to most platforms. It is parameterised on string type. Out of the box, it can provide UTF-8 encoded std::strings or UTF-16 encoded std::wstrings, but can easily be customised for arbitrary string types.
Arabica is available for download under a BSD-style license.
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Wednesday 30 January, 2008
#Taggle: And there it is ... Taggle, Arabica's port of the TagSoup HTML parser, now builds and runs. It dodges pretty much every encoding issue on the planet, but as a first go it's really quite pleasing. Give it this -
This is <B>bold, <I>bold italic, </b>italic, </i> normal text
and get this
<html>(Ok, you have to squint a bit at the indenting, but that's a separate issue.)
<body>This is
<b>bold,
<i>bold italic, </i>
</b>
<i>italic, </i>
normal text
</body>
</html>
If you want to have a play, check out the tagsoup-port branch from subversion:
svn co svn://jezuk.dnsalias.net/jezuk/arabica/branches/tagsoup-portIn
examples/Taggle, there's a little command line application that read HTML documents and prints the corrected markup to the console.I'll merge this back into the trunk in the next few days.
zcorpan [e], 1st Feb 2008Time and inclination. Porting TagSoup to C++ took me a few hours. It was fun, and quite an easy win. Having done it, I'm surprised that nobody's done it before.
Writing an HTML5 parser needs rather more time than I have - not only in writing the code, developing the test suite, but then tracking the standard as it emerges. Even if I had the time, I don't actually have the inclination, because it's not something that really interests me enough right now. Sorry :)
jez, 2nd Feb 2008Thank you, this is precisely what I wanted.I've been HTML coding since 3.2. Long after HTML8.0 has formally broken and obsoleted HTML5.3 and previous, tag-soup still works.
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Get in touch Your questions, requests, updates and patches are all welcome. I can be contacted at jez@jezuk.co.uk.