Re: [GSoC] Candidate on NSE Script Development and my first scripts

[David Fifield <david () bamsoftware com>]

On Wed, May 01, 2013 at 02:53:26AM +0300, George Chatzisofroniou wrote:
> > I would prefer a library that uses an event- or pull-driven model over
> > one that parses an entire document at once and gives you nested tables.
> > Please see http://seclists.org/nmap-dev/2011/q3/25 and
> > http://seclists.org/nmap-dev/2011/q2/1281 for a previous prototype. I
> > want to avoid with the XML parser the bug we have with the http library:
> > you have to buffer a huge document in memory in order to do anything
> > with it.
>
> I agree with the point that you make. From what i've seen our current
> scripts perform some simple cases of XML parsing. The Pico XML library 
> [2] would probably work fine for cases like these and it could also work 
> for HTML documents.
>
> So, first, we should make sure that Pico XML API (or something similar) 
> provides the functionality we want and then create the C module to Nselib.
> [2]: http://kd7yhr.org/bushbo/pico_xml.md

I quite like the design of Pico XML and I think it's a good model for an
NSE XML parser. Embedding a C module is fine but it may even be easier
to port the library to Lua. What I like is that it is a memory-efficient
basic parser that can be used to implement nested tables or other
alternative interfaces.

David Fifield
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