Read a binary dictionary's XML with a reader built for it

dist/datamodel/parser/DictionaryXmlFast.d.ts

@@ -0,0 +1,17 @@
+/**
+ * Read a dictionary XML part, or decline.
+ *
+ * `null` means "I did not read this" — never "this is broken". The caller must fall back to the
+ * general engine, which owns every judgement about damaged input.
+ *
+ * HOW THE STATE IS HELD, and why it is seven arrays instead of a stack of objects.
+ *
+ * The obvious shape is a `Frame` object per open element, pushed and popped. It works and it
+ * was the first version, and it cost one object plus one attribute array for every element in
+ * the file — 13.8 M allocations on the corpus's largest dictionary, all of them dying
+ * immediately. Dictionaries nest shallowly (single digits), so the arrays below are indexed by
+ * DEPTH and reused: a `<P>` at depth 3 writes over the state of the previous `<P>` at depth 3.
+ * The element's own object (`kids[d]`) is of course fresh each time, because it is the output.
+ */
+export declare function readDictionaryXmlFast(input: string): Record<string, unknown> | null;
+//# sourceMappingURL=DictionaryXmlFast.d.ts.map

dist/datamodel/parser/XmlReader.d.ts

@@ -8,6 +8,18 @@
  * caller already does.
  */
 export declare function readDictionaryXml(text: string): unknown;
+/**
+ * The same document through the general engine, with no fast path consulted.
+ *
+ * NOT for callers — `readDictionaryXml` is the reader, and reaching past it would give up the
+ * speed for nothing. This exists because the fast reader's entire contract is "identical to the
+ * general engine or `null`", and a test of that cannot go through `readDictionaryXml`: that
+ * would compare the fast reader against itself. The alternative was for the test to build its
+ * own `XMLParser` with a copy of the options above, which passes just as happily when the copy
+ * has gone stale — the one failure that would let the two readers diverge in production while
+ * the test stays green.
+ */
+export declare function readDictionaryXmlGeneric(text: string): unknown;
 /**
  * One part of a `.slx` or `.mdl` package. Engine defaults: text is trimmed, and a lone
  * child stays an object, so a walker over one of these has to coerce to an array itself.

package.json

@@ -66,7 +66,8 @@
   },
   "dependencies": {
     "fast-xml-parser": "^5.8.0",
-    "fflate": "^0.8.3"
+    "fflate": "^0.8.3",
+    "strnum": "^2.4.1"
   },
   "devDependencies": {
     "@types/node": "^26.2.0",