OPML for Cocoa

I wrote an OPML parser for Cocoa today. (I’ll release it with a BSD license after it gets more burn-in.)

This is the second time I’ve written an OPML parser: I did it in C for Frontier/Radio. That version was of course based on the original scripts (by Dave Winer, now home from the hospital, thank goodness).

Writing this parser in Cocoa was a very different exercise than when I did it for the Frontier kernel. In Frontier the object was to convert OPML text to an outline object—which is a user-interface object—while with Cocoa I’m working with pure data, just converting the OPML text to an array of arrays (and using dictionaries for the attributes).

Anyway, I’m reminded what a nice format OPML is. Easy for machines to parse, easy to implement.