[libxml++] HTML Parser Subclass (based on domparser.cc)

[Laurent H. <lau...@gm...>]

Hi all,

I discovered the cool libxml++ yesterday on my quest for the best C++
XML Parser (bindings, coz libxml2 seems to be the best C parser anyway
;). Libxml is not new to me though, I used it extensively in Perl thanx
to the very complete XML::LibXML CPAN Module.
Now one of my main motivations is to parse HTML Files into a DOM tree
where I can extract nodes with XPATH.
In perl that was easy , it has the html parser included.
Therefore after a thorough search in the API I was a bit disappointed
that there was no HTML Parser support in libxml++...
but thanks to the clean API's of  libxml(++)  and after a little reading
, I had no difficulties at all building my own subclass (based on
domparser.cc) except some little quirks (like extra encoding parameter
in some html parser functions) :)

In fact libxml2 has a really tolerant html parser (I used it in perl for
mirroring/parsing whole dynamic websites :D ), it even returns a good
XML Document when it had parser Errors, but to get a Doc returned in
such a case one has to turn off the 'wellformedness' check, which I did
in my temporary htmlparser Implementation.
( Unfort. there's always a segfault at the end of a run of my edited
'dom_xpath/main.cc' html parsing example app , when ignoring
'!context_->wellFormed'  ?!  experimenting done in
'HtmlParser::parse_context' method )

I hope HTML Parsing can be included in the main distr. ( maybe better
with wellFormed check on )...
To compile the whole library with my htmlparser class, I added the class
in all the files (Makefile.am files, libxml++.h...) containing 'domparser'.

Included are the c++ and include files of htmlparser class (or should
I've taken diffs from the domparser.cc/h originals ?) plus my html
parsing example, which shows all the //a[@href] links with their
attribute contents.

Hopefully the segfault can be easily solved with the knowledge of the
lead developpers ( I don't have yet ;).
I guess its just something I'm missing, else I'll try to find the
mem.leak using a debugger (or is there a better way ??)

Thanx,
Laurent