Any wisdom would be appreciated.

Switch to XML :) Let somebody else parse the c++ :)

There is a GCC-XML but it has been succeeded by CastXML is a C-family abstract syntax tree XML output tool. It reads c/c++/cpp/cxx... and outputs xml , xml is easy to read with XML::LibXML, xpather.pl , Re: XML::LibXSLT ignoring namespace on some Win32 machines (libxslt-1.1.27 bug), Re^5: Xpath not working, Re^8: How to parse xml with namespase vale in XMl:LibXML? (autoRegisterNs ), Re: XML::LibXML and namespaces, Re^2: Namespaced XML::LibXML XPath query (not a bug)