Abstract

Communication with XML often involves pre-agreed document types. In this paper, we propose an offline parser generation approach to enhance online processing performance for documents conforming to a given DTD. Our examination of DTDs and the languages they define demonstrates the existence of ambiguities. We present an algorithm that maps DTDs to deterministic context-free grammars defining the same languages. We prove the grammars to be LL(1) and LALR(1), making them suitable for standard parser generators. Our experiments show the superior performance of generated optimized parsers. Our results generalize from DTDs to XML Schema specifications with certain restrictions, most notably the absence of namespaces, which exceed the scope of context-free grammars.

Citations