Editor's note:
Programmers often take awk "as is", never thinking to use it as a lab in which
they can explore other language extensions.
An alternate approach is to treat the Awk code base as a reusable library
of parsers, regular expression engines, etc etc and to make modifications
to the lanugage. This second approach is taken in the Awk A*
project and, as shown here, in XMLgawk.
IMHO,
XMLgawk is one of the most exciting new innovations
seen in Gawk for many years.
It shows that Awk is more than "just" a text processor: rather
it is also a candidate technology for modern XML-based web applications.
)
Purpose
Extends standard gawk with built-in XML processing.
Developers
Main developers: Jurgen Kahrs and Andrew Schorr.
Conceptual guidance: Manuel Collado.
MS Windows build expert: Victor Paeza.
Contributor of ideas for new features: Peter Saveliev.
Domain
XML processing, plus libraries for other extensions to Gawk.
Description
XMLgawk is an experimental extension of the GNU Awk interpreter.
It includes a small XML parsing library which is built upon the
Expat XML parser. The parsing library is a very thin layer on top
of Expat (implementing a pull-interface) and can also be used without
GNU Awk to read XML data files.
Both, XMLgawk and its XML puller
library only require an ANSI C compatible compiler (GCC works, as
do most vendors' ANSI C compilers) and a 'make' program.
XMLgawk provides the following functionality including:
AWK's way of reading data line by line is supplemented by reading XML files node by node.
XMLgawk can load .awk file as as well as shared libraries.
Adds support for an @include directive in the source code. This is the same feature provided by the current igawk script.
