Re: Problems with xml-parse-string

[Wojciech Meyer <wojciech.meyer@googlemail.com>]

On Fri, Sep 24, 2010 at 2:09 AM, Chong Yidong <cyd@stupidchicken.com> wrote:
> Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org> writes:
>
>> Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> writes:
>>
>>>> As for the :foo node names, we can map them to anything else if
>>>> required.  Pick an invalid XML character -- any one will do, if this is
>>>> important.
>>>
>>> How 'bout =foo ?
>>
>> Looks good to me.
>
> If we're going to make a clean break with the old xml.el parse tree
> format, I think it makes more sense to go with sxml.  Is there any
> technical reason not to?  (Aside from the obnoxious all caps, which we
> can safely omit.)

Thanks.
I've read all the other messages and here I'm proposing solutions for
both problems:
- for ':' or any other special Emacs prefix character only we can
  generate a string. The drawback of this solution is that no-longer the
  output is consistent and conforming to Sxml, but the advantage is that
  it handles all the corner cases, and I cannot think about better
  solution.  We'd need a special handling code, abstracting access to it
  (but that's a good idea anyway, and it would happen anyway with the
  `prefix|replacement' solution).  Another advantage of trying keeping
  symbols, is that we can possibly eval code directly, without any
  transformation, and the data is more natural and expressive. Also, there
  could be functions, xml-valid-smxlp, xml-can-evalp, for testing
  various properties.

- for the problem with polluting obarrays with random interned symbols,
  David's solution would work.

Wojciech