helium

What on earth?

This is an exercise in rewriting libxml2 in its entirety in Go. Why? I've run into performance blockers while using cgo and libxml2, and I couldn't squeeze out that last drop of performance out of it. Also, there was also this, which I thought was a shame to not be able to handle XML using pure Go.

So I started -- and I still have a long way to go.

SYNOPSIS

Parsing XML into a DOM model, then dumping it:

import "github.com/lestrrat-go/helium"

func main() {
    doc, err := helium.Parse(`.... xml string ....`)
    if err != nil {
        panic("failed to parse XML: " + err.Error())
    }

    // Dump this XML
    doc.XML(os.Stdout)
}

Using command line helium-lint (very under developed right now):

helium-lint xmlfile ...

cat xmlfile | helium-lint

Get it

go get github.com/lestrrat-go/helium

Test it

go test

In order to get helpful debug messages:

go test -tags debug

Current status

• Good news: parse/dump basic XML with some DTDs are now working.
• Bad news: I have run out of tuits. I intend to work on this from time to time, but I REALLY need people's help. See "Contributing" below.
• While XML declaration is parsed, encoding is ignored, and assumed to be UTF-8

Contributing

I won't have much time to discuss: let the code talk: Give me PRs that are self-explanatory! :)

The goal for the moment is to "port" libxml2. That means that where possible, we should just steal their code, even if things aren't too go-ish. We'll polish after we have a compatible implementation. So don't debate for optimal go-ness unless it's a really low hanging fruit.

Help in forms for PRs is better, but if you insiste, Amazon gift cards to lestrrat at gmail is appreciated ;)

To get started, see notes on test structure below. Grab some files from libxml2, and see if things work. If it doesn't work, fix it! :)

Test structure

As of this writing, dump_test.go and sax_test.go both look for the presence of XML files under test directory, and parse+dumps appropriate output after seeing that there's a corresponding *.dump or *.sax2 files.

For SAX tests, do note that letter casing and such are different from that of libxml2.

What's with the naming?

I thought it sounded cool. Not set in stone, so we may change it later.