On Dec 1, 2009, at 06:39 , Cyrus Harmon wrote:

Marco,

Maybe the problem isn't that the liveness of the list (although, yes, it isn't particularly active), but rather the phrasing of your question:

"Am I correct in assuming that CXML would be able to forgo the DTD if it could access the www.sbml.org site and find a DTD or a XSD there?"

What are you suggesting CXML should do by ignoring (if that's what you mean by forgo) a DTD that it may or not find at some site?

Do you have a URL to a SBML file with which the folks at home can try to convince CXML to forgo the DTD (whatever that means)?

thanks,

you are right. I am not very well versed in XML stuff, so my question is not really well phrased.

Let's recapitulate: AFAIU, there is a way to tell CXML to use a particular DTD in order to make the CXML:WHITESPACE-NORMALIZER work as expected. I.e., drop the extra TEXT elements corresponding to newlines and indentation. There is also a way to tell CXML to use a "resolver" downloaded from the net using DRAKMA (or another HTTP client library).

Now, in the case of SBML I do not have a DTD. I have a file that starts as

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

AFAIU, using the xmlns="http://www.sbml.org/sbml/level1" should make it possible for CXML to get such document (which eventually is a .xsd) maybe using DRAKMA, and therefore make it parse the rest of the file automagically dropping the TEXT elements. In this sense this would make CXML "ignore" the DTD.

So my questions are

1 - Is this a correct assumption?

2 - since this is not CXML default behavior, is there a way to get CXML to do the "obvious" thing?

I know that I could possibly remove the TEXT elements by hand, after having built the internal structure; but it does not feel right.

If reading a XSchema file results in a DTD then CXML would not really "ignore it". I am just wondere if it is possible and where exaclty to look in the code base.

Thanks

Marco

Cyrus

On Nov 30, 2009, at 3:53 PM, Marco Antoniotti wrote:

Well... Any ideas on this or the list is dead?

Cheers

Marco

On Nov 25, 2009, at 14:09 , Marco Antoniotti wrote:

Hi

months ago I posted this problem and I still do not have a solution for it.

Note that I do not have a DTD for the file I want to parse (and I don't want and cannot write it).

The SBML XML files I want to read start like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<sbml xmlns="http://www.sbml.org/sbml/level1" level="1" version="1">

Am I correct in assuming that CXML would be able to forgo the DTD if it could access the www.sbml.org site and find a DTD or a XSD there?

Note that my problem is to get rid of the spurious TEXT elements.

The http://www.sbml.org/sbml/level1 points to a xsd file.

Cheers
--
Marco

On Feb 6, 2009, at 16:34 , Marco Antoniotti wrote:

On Feb 6, 2009, at 10:21 , David Lichteblau wrote:

Quoting Marco Antoniotti (marcoxa@cs.nyu.edu):
I get all my actual RUNE-DOM::ELEMENTs interleaved with "bogus" TEXT
elements containing just #\Newline and #\Tab (or more #\Tab).
This is obviously an artifact of parsing. (See attached figure from a
15 minutes CXML browser I whipped up)

What I do not know it's (1) whether this makes sense or not, or (2)
whether it is dependent on my platform (LWM).

Certainly -- XML preserves whitespace in character data, except for CRLF
to LF normalization.

There are no universally correct rules for whitespace normalization in
XML, and in general, any change to whitespace could change the meaning
of the document.

One rule that is relatively common is to consider whitespace
insignificant in "element content", e.g. in places where no
non-whitespace text nodes are allowed by the DTD.

This rule is implemented by CXML:MAKE-WHITESPACE-NORMALIZER
(see http://common-lisp.net/project/cxml/sax.html#misc), which may be
helpful in your case.

However, note that the limitation to element content means that you
actually need to write or find a DTD that matches your document.
Without a DTD, this approach doesn't work.

Ok. I think I understand this. I'll try the CXML:MAKE-WHITESPACE-NORMALIZER (I need to understand how to use it first).

However, let me ask you this too. The SBML XML files start like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<sbml xmlns="http://www.sbml.org/sbml/level1" level="1" version="1">

Am I correct in assuming that CXML would be able to forgo the DTD if it could access the www.sbml.org site and find a DTD or a XSD there?

Pardon the naïveté of my questions, but I really do not know enough about XML.

Cheers
--
Marco

Other approaches are to use HTML rules for whitespace normalization
(which are a more tricky to get right though, and cxml does not provide
a ready-to-use function for this) or to discard all whitespace. It
really depends on the schema and application.

(Note that we would like to have some support for this in cxml, because
whitespace rules also matter for indentation, and at some point we would
like to have more flexible/correct/useful indentation modes in our
serializer. Whitespace stripping could be considered as a form of
indentation, in the sense that it is a "removal of all indentation".
But so far, I haven't found the time to implement anything in this
direction.)

d.

--
Marco Antoniotti

--
Marco Antoniotti

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Marco Antoniotti

Marco Antoniotti