[thelist] XML parsing

Michael Mell mike at nthwave.net
Mon Oct 7 16:43:01 CDT 2002


I must have dropped a nut :-)
just to recap -
Option 1 is siblings all as children of the root element.
Option 2 is infinitely nested siblings. The younger brother nested inside the
elder.

Option 2 is more complicated to parse, will take longer and drain more memory.
Option 1 is the way xml is intended to be used.

Using Option 1 using Python minidom, you can gather all the topics in our
example with:
categoriesDom = xml.dom.minidom.parse('someFile.xml')
categoriesNodes = categoriesDom.documentElement.childNodes
for category in categoriesNodes:
      if category.nodeType == xml.dom.minidom.Node.ELEMENT_NODE:

There is also the imminently handy getElementsByTagName(tagName)
m


Brian W King wrote:

> Personally speaking, I try to always follow Option 2 formatting.  Some of
> the systems that I have to code around inherently interpret nested tags as
> parent and child, whereas I would have to set the receiving system up so
> that it understood option #1.  Not all parsers are created with all of the
> compliance parsing information in them.  If they are just simply importing
> data for a specific reason, why go through the expense of paying someone to
> code in all of the bells and whistles unless you needed them.  I guess I am
> trying to say that I see simple parsers use option two inherently, more
> often than option 1.
>
> Brian
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: thelist-admin at lists.evolt.org [mailto:thelist-admin at lists.evolt.org]On
> Behalf Of David.Cantrell at Gunter.AF.mil
> Sent: Monday, October 07, 2002 12:27 PM
> To: thelist at lists.evolt.org
> Subject: RE: [thelist] XML parsing
>
> >Option 2 seems to be logically incorrect -- each topic is not a subtopic
> >of the topic id=1.
>
> But when you create a topic with a parent attribute of parent=1 pointing to
> the topic with id=1, then you are creating a subtopic of id=1. You are just
> manually doing it instead of letting the XML parser handle it for you.
>
> -dave
>
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--

mike[at]nthwave.net





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