Question

I use XSLT to convert this:

1)

<fruit>
  <apple count="2"/>
  <banana count="3"/>
</fruit>

into this:

2)

Apple: 2
Banana: 3

Is there a library that serves as a parser for text data which allows descriptive declaration of the expected tokens (think both Extended Backus–Naur Form |EBNF| and Lex/Yacc regex-based hints) and builds an XML DOM from it?

Answer 1

Is there a library that serves as a parser for text data which allows descriptive declaration of the expected tokens (think both Extended Backus–Naur Form |EBNF| and Lex/Yacc regex-based hints) and builds an XML DOM from it?

Yes. FXSL 2.0 has a function f:lr-parse() which does exactly that. This is written in pure XSLT 2.0 and implements a general (table-driven) LR-1 parser, that accepts as input an XML file containing the parse tables and a text file containing the “sentence” to be parsed.

I have used this function for a number of parsers, ranging from a toy arithmetic expressions to medium-sized — JSON, to very large — XPath 2.0 — languages.

See for example this article in my blog: Transforming JSON