RSS/XML Reader by FreePlay

After a couple hours of learning pattern matching, table functions, and strings functions in Lua, I've resolved a couple issues with the old version.
First, self-closing tags were not supported in the original LuaXML. This means that any RSS feed containing "
", "", or any such tag would cause the parser to spit out errors. I resolved this by tinkering a bit :P

Second, the old version simply gave information about the top-level elements. I made the parser spit out various information into a log file, "parse.log" .

As before, there's not really any documentation yet; it's still alpha software, after all.

I see a big future for this progam. It's already in a state where I could parse an RSS feed and display its contents; that's really simple, with the XML framework I have.

Next step: fix the downloading/connection issues!

Then, I can combine the RSS and XML programs into one, have it read in a list of RSS feeds from a config file, download them, and display them / save them in text format!

I've never really done much in the way of graphical programming before. I know it's not difficult, but it's something I have little experience with. Someone more experienced than me could probably build a web browser off of my preliminary work.

It's all done for you already; you can parse an HTML file into a Lua table, with entries for each element, their arguments, and their labels. I've tested this; my school web page (here) is properly-formed XHTML, and the parser has no trouble parsing it.

The biggest flaw so far is that the parser is completely inflexible. It will only parse a properly-formed XML document. One single glitch, and the whole thing goes up in smoke. If I can find a more flexible XML base for this project, I'll be happy, but this will have to do for now.