On Tue, 8 Jun 2010 15:19:56 -0700, Brent Arias <Brent.Arias@lumension.com> wrote:

How difficult is it to replace the RapidXML XML parser with another parser, such as pugiXML? Is this a change-case that has been planned and streamlined, and therefore a straight-forward effort, or is it a lengthy and detailed affair that requires intimate knowledge of PropertyTree internal workings?

I ask because my organization predicts we likely will change back-and-forth between competing implementations (RapdidXML, Kranf xmlParser, pugiXML) as time goes by, which implies that we should have some kind of wrapper around the XML parser. I am investigating how well boost's "property tree" could server as that wrapper. And, in fact, we currently want pugiXML because of it's wide-char

support<http://code.google.com/p/pugixml/source/browse/#svn/branches/unicode>,

and because it has XPath support (granted PropertyTree assuredly won't "wrap" the XPath capability, but we'll deal with that separately).

If you search the SVN history of Boost trunk, you'll find an implementation of read_xml using pugiXML. In fact, there were four different implementations of XML parsing in the old version. I kicked three of them out because I don't feel like maintaining more than one. You might have to adapt the old implementations slightly to the new interface, though. Sebastian