From: Sean Russell <ser@...>
Date: 2001-11-18T04:07:42+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:25722] RE:  Why not xmlparser?  (was: Re: XML support in the standard lib;whatexactly?)

James Britt (rubydev) wrote:

>> I don't see why 'xmlparser' is not perceived as the ideal candidate for
>> that task.
> 
> It does look good.

Except that it is based on expat, which we don't control, and which are C 
sources (making it more difficult to maintain).

>> I think that no one would seriously consider having "a pure ruby"
>> regular expression engine as the default regexp library.
....
>> The same should hold for XML processing. The default implementation
>> should be a _native_ one, to be as fast as possible, because that's the
>> only way to go when one wants to handle multi-megabyte documents in a
>> reasonable amount of time.

XMLParser isn't much faster than the native Ruby XML parsers, except in 
Stream parsing, and it is much slower in many other common XML tree 
operations.  I don't see any reason to take on the burden of maintaining 
the expat sources if we're not going to see a significant speed increase.  
I haven't investigated the memory usage of XMLParser compared to NQXML or 
REXML, so that may be a factor.

> I like REXML quite a bit, too, but having SAX is very handy for slurping
> huge documents that could never easily fit in memory.

Both REXML and NQXML do stream parsing.  NQXML does slurp the entire file 
into memory, but Jim has mentioned that he may change that.  REXML does not 
slurp the entire file into memory, but processes it 100 bytes (or so) at a 
time.

>>From the xmlparser readme file it looks like it provides the familiar SAX
>>callback methods (startElement,  endElement, character

NQXML uses blocks.  REXML uses methods that are similar to the Java SAX 
API.  As has been mentioned before in this newsgroup, there is no 
"standard" SAX API, so the familiarity you're seeing is artificial.

--- SER


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