[hansel]

Originally Posted by ericshliao

It seems that tolua++ is a fork of tolua.
What is the use case of of tolua (or tolua++)? I don't understand. Suppose I have some lib written in C, then can I use tolua to generate lua binding for the lib?

Yes and no . Basically you have to

1. write a file that decribes the functions you wand to be available in Lua (this looks very much like a C include file)
2. use tolua++ to generate C file (this handles the interface betwwen C and Lua)
3. compile and link this C file (+ your own code if you want) to a Lua module (a .so file).

This is easy for simple C libraries, and quite some work for C++ libs with lots of classes and types. If you google around, you will find some examples.
If I have some spare time (and no projects that are more fun ) I wil use tolua++ to do a Lua binding for some Iliad libraries...

Originally Posted by ericshliao

I want to use libxml2 with lua, and currently I only found lua binding for the part of xmlreader of libxml2 (http://asbradbury.org/projects/lua-xmlreader/). I need xmltree part. Can I use tolua to generate lua binding automatically?

Any interesting project in the pipeline? Depending on your needs, you might:

• expand http://asbradbury.org/projects/lua-xmlreader/
• do it with tolua++ (probably quite some work, since libxml2 is not a small simple C library
• use expat (basicaly sax, but easy to use to generate a DOM-like representation in Lua) see http://www.keplerproject.org/luaexpat/examples.html. Libexpat is installed on all Iliads, and a Lua binding is included in my LuaIliad package
• for simple things (if you only want to parse simple xml files), you might try my poor man's xml parser 'xl' which I use for Glade4Lua (see http://www.hpelbers.org/lua)

Have fun!