Simple XML Subset Parser

The “GMarkup” parser is intended to parse a simple markup format that’s a subset of XML. This is a small, efficient, easy-to-use parser. It should not be used if you expect to interoperate with other applications generating full-scale XML, and must not be used if you expect to parse untrusted input. However, it’s very useful for application data files, config files, etc. where you know your application will be the only one writing the file.

Full-scale XML parsers should be able to parse the subset used by GMarkup, so you can easily migrate to full-scale XML at a later time if the need arises.

GMarkup is not guaranteed to signal an error on all invalid XML; the parser may accept documents that an XML parser would not. However, XML documents which are not well-formed (which is a weaker condition than being valid. See the XML specification for definitions of these terms.) are not considered valid GMarkup documents.

Simplifications to XML

The simplifications compared to full XML include:

• Only UTF-8 encoding is allowed
• No user-defined entities
• Processing instructions, comments and the doctype declaration are “passed through” but are not interpreted in any way
• No DTD or validation

The markup format does support:

• Elements
• Attributes
• 5 standard entities: & < > " '
• Character references
• Sections marked as CDATA

An example parser

Here is an example for a markup parser: markup-example.c