An XML + Lua Project

There's been a few too many political posts lately. Not wanting to disappoint my (most probable) only reader, Tim, I've decided to get back on topic.


I will be using Lua to work on an upcoming project.
The project in question is a simple XML parser, which I will need later.
(Well, not need exactly. But it would be very helpful to have).


Here is a small snippet of code for the purpose of getting used to pattern matching (No, I'm not a World of Warcracker; but that is a very good reference).

function main()
    local string = "tagvalue"
    local match = string.gsub(string, "</?%a+>", "")
    print(match)  -- prints tagvalue
end
main()

Very simple stuff - here's the deal:

1. Look in string for matches for start and end tags.


2. Replace these tags with nothing.


3. Print out the value contained within the pair of tags.

That will pretty much handle (with some modification of course) getting a value from within a specified pair of tags. But of course, I have to consider more advanced tags such as those with attributes.

But I will be working on this stuff shortly.

Featured image courtesy of hub19 (CC-BY-NC-SA)