Steven Engelhardt

Quick quiz: What is the behavior of the following code:

#include <stdio.h>

int main(int argc, char* argv[])
{
    try
    {
        *((char*) 0) = 1;
    }
    catch (...)
    {
        printf("Caught exception.\n");
    }

    return 0;
}

The answer is below the fold.

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To retrieve the list of macros that gcc predefines, execute the following command:

gcc -E -dM - < /dev/null

While I had originally planned on stretching out my Implementing IXmlWriter series of posts into at least three or four more posts, I’ve decided to end it here. Here is a list of the posts in the series:

• Implementing IXmlWriter Part 1: The Basics
• Implementing IXmlWriter Part 2: Escaping Element Content
• Implementing IXmlWriter Part 3: Supporting WriteElementString()
• Implementing IXmlWriter Part 4: Collapsing Empty Elements
• Implementing IXmlWriter Part 5: Supporting WriteAttributeString()
• Implementing IXmlWriter Part 6: Escaping Attribute Content
• Implementing IXmlWriter Part 7: Cleaning Up
• Implementing IXmlWriter Part 8: Supporting WriteStartAttribute() and WriteEndAttribute()
• Implementing IXmlWriter Part 9: Supporting WriteStartDocument() and WriteEndDocument()
• Implementing IXmlWriter Part 10: Supporting WriteComment()
• Implementing IXmlWriter Part 11: Supporting Namespaces
• Implementing IXmlWriter Part 12: Supporting Pretty-Printing
• Implementing IXmlWriter Part 13: Putting IXmlWriter Behind A Pimpl Firewall
• Implementing IXmlWriter Part 14: Supporting Writing To A Stream

Off the top of my head, here are a few things left to implement:

• Processing instructions
• Doc type declarations
• CDATA declarations
• Entity references
• Character entities
• Character encodings (e.g. UTF-8, UTF-16, etc.)
• Robust error handling, such as throwing an exception if WriteAttribute() is called with an illegal character

Update: 2007-07-11 10:58 PM: Microsoft’s XmlLite provides all this and more for Windows developers.

Today I will add support for writing the generated XML to a C++ stream to last time’s IXmlWriter.

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