From: Jim Menard <jimm@...>
Date: 2001-11-14T11:12:29+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:25132] Re: XML support in the standard lib; what exactly?

Sean Russell <ser@germane-software.com> writes:

> Bob Hutchison wrote:
> 
> >> AFAIK, all of the XML parsers available have event-based parsing.  NQXML
> ...
> > Thanks for clarifying this. Just to be sure though, they don't require the
> > whole document to be in memory first do they?
> 
> I know REXML doesn't.  It just reads the file in (about 100 bytes at a 
> time) and parses it, notifying you of events and discarding the text as it 
> goes.  I don't know about NQXML or XMLParser.

NQXML reads the file into a string and parses the string. I fooled around
with using a stream (an IO) once, but there was too much mess remembering
where I was in the stream, going back, needing to re-read the IO stream,
etc. that I decided it wasn't worth the bother.

Maybe it is.

> REXML Document tree parsing also doesn't *read* the whole document at once 
> (IE, it doesn't slurp the file), but it *does* hold the entire generated 
> document in memory.  I commented on this in the "Re: REXML behavior change 
> RF" (don't know the ref #, sorry).
> 
> -- 
> --- SER

Jim
-- 
Jim Menard, jimm@io.com, http://www.io.com/~jimm/
"Never anthropomorphize computers. They hate that." -- Ricdude on slashdot