Anonymous user
Talk:XML/Input: Difference between revisions
Character encoding iso-10646-utf-1 question
(→Interpreting XML?: still the task does not require real xml parsing at all...) |
(Character encoding iso-10646-utf-1 question) |
||
| (7 intermediate revisions by 4 users not shown) | |||
Line 13:
:::::::: ... then the task should be something like: show how to use a full featured XML parser to parse this doc, rather than <cite>extract the list of student names using whatever means desired</cite>. Only brand new AWK and Vedit macro language would be broken, as far as I can understand other codes. --[[User:ShinTakezou|ShinTakezou]] 23:18, 2 June 2009 (UTC)
::::::::: ... But who decides what one of those is? I think it best to leave the task as given and leave it up to the languages on how they parse it. I have used XML pretty-printers followed by an AWK script to extract quite detailed info from XML - it can work, why bother? --[[User:Paddy3118|Paddy3118]] 07:18, 3 June 2009 (UTC)
:::::::: Kevin, why not simply add a requirement that everybody must use your favorite language? No, there is no point creating tasks that require using some specific language or library. The tasks should require solving some specific problem. That is what programming languages are used for in the real world. The requirements of "conformant XML parser" have nothing to do with Rosetta Code tasks, and not with real world problems either. It is the '''customer''' who sets the requirements. If the task is to extract student names from an XML file, then a program that extracts students names is the correct solution. There is nothing "misleading" or "half baked" in a correct solution that performs the required tasks. "Processing" character references has nothing to do with this task. When the task is to extract the data, the character references have to be extracted just like any other characters, there is nothing to process. --[[User:PauliKL|PauliKL]] 07:54, 3 June 2009 (UTC)
::::::::: If your job required you to extract names from XML, and your solution didn't handle the gamut of XML possibilities (for instance, translating either "&#x00C9" or "&Eacute;" to É), you'd eventually have your code sent back with a bug. Let's not have buggy code on this site; folks are coming here to see best-practice in programming languages, not ad-hoc hackery. --[[User:IanOsgood|IanOsgood]] 15:01, 3 June 2009 (UTC)
:::::::::: '''Wrong'''. If the job requires to extract names from XML, a program that extracts names from XML is exactly the correct solution. It does ''not'' have a bug. In fact, if you ''do'' the conversion when that is not requested, ''then'' your program has a bug and the customer will complain. Why on earth should the characters be converted? And converted to what? UTF-8? UTF-16? ISO 8859-1? If numerical references are used, there is a reason for that, so they must not be converted to something else when such conversion is not requested. --[[User:PauliKL|PauliKL]] 16:27, 3 June 2009 (UTC)
::Donal, the problem is that AWK implementation does not interpret the structure at all. It is quite possible to do some parsing even if there are no ready-made library routines for that. But that does not mean that we should implement a full XML parser. The task should be kept relatively simple.
::I notice that the XML input file has now been changed. But the the task description needs to be changed, too. --[[User:PauliKL|PauliKL]] 09:14, 2 June 2009 (UTC)
::Being the poster of the AWK solution, I have to admit it was a bit tongue-in-cheek - but also true to the XP rule "do the simplest thing that might possibly work", which the original code did for the original task. But rather than implement an XML parser in AWK, I'm rather ok with withdrawing the AWK code. --[[User:Suchenwi|Suchenwi]] 10:17, 2 June 2009 (UTC)
:Please '''don't''' withdraw the AWK code. People who cut-n-paste code without a thought for its applicability deserve what they get. We write tasks, with give solutions to those tasks. Their is no way that we can cater for all unwritten problems of this type that a potential cut-n-paste user may have and we shouldn't pander to them. For some users with the awk solution might be fine - why penalise them? --[[User:Paddy3118|Paddy3118]] 15:33, 3 June 2009 (UTC)
:I changed the task description slightly so that it now requires list of ''student names''. Maybe this is enough to specify the task? --[[User:PauliKL|PauliKL]] 14:32, 2 June 2009 (UTC)
Line 22 ⟶ 27:
Unluckly the task specifications do not talk about full XML parser or what... it says: <cite>using whatever means desired</cite>... this means that a proper (set of) regular expression(s) in AWK can extract the list of the student names properly... still without knowing too much of the structure of an XML document, and without pretending to be a full featured XML parser... --[[User:ShinTakezou|ShinTakezou]] 22:05, 2 June 2009 (UTC)
: Yeah, fix that task description. Examples should be parsing XML. --[[User:IanOsgood|IanOsgood]] 15:03, 3 June 2009 (UTC)
== Character encoding ==
The Emily encoding, Émily, is it iso-10646-utf-1 ? My code works when I assume that this is the case, but it is not mentioned anywhere.
[[User:bengt]] Sun Dec 8 22:35:02 CET 2013
| |||