Parse early, parse often
Steven Pemberton · Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI), the national research institute for mathematics and computer science in the Netherlands · 2016
Invisible XML, ixml for short, is a generic technique for treating any parsable format as if it were XML, and thus allowing any parsable object to be injected into an XML pipeline.Based on the observation that XML can just be seen as the description of a parse-tree, any document can be parsed, and then serialised as XML.The parsing can also be undone, thus allowing roundtripping.This paper discusses issues around grammar design, and in particular parsing algorithms used to recognise any document, and converting the resultant parse-tree into XML, and gives a new perspective on a classic algorithm.