[thelist] XML parsing the homemade way

[J. Scott Johnson]

I strongly don't advise that you do it by hand.  Use the PHP xml stuff.  It
works quite well.  I haven't benchmarked performance but how much data do
you have?  If its not huge quantities then I would be surprised if the PHP
modules have performance problems.

The only thing that was hard about the php stuff was figuring out how to
access attribute values as opposed to tagged content.  I did and can email
it to you if you need it.

Scott

-----Original Message-----
From: thelist-admin at lists.evolt.org
[mailto:thelist-admin at lists.evolt.org]On Behalf Of Daniel Fascia
Sent: Sunday, April 14, 2002 10:08 AM
To: thelist at lists.evolt.org
Subject: [thelist] XML parsing the homemade way


In the next few weeks I have to design some Computer Learning packages for
my medical school. In a presentation I gave
them about it all, I promised them an Open XML based customisable interface
which would access learning modules based
on XML...

This is very convenient since they will be able to add new XML modules to it
and it should be a bit futureproof when Im no
longer around to maintain this...

I have looked at some of the XML parsers available in various languages and
it would seem simpler for my project to create
my own system as follows:

1) Open XML learning module as text file
2) Parse file using string handling regexpressions of PHP or ASP/Javascript
3) Fire parsed data into one of 5 body templates as defined in the XML file

I am wondering if this is significantly slower and what potential risks are
with this system vs a traditional database (which is
available) or using a language's inbuilt XML parser such as that in PHP?

Love some advice from anyone who has tried such a system


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