On Mon, March 12, 2007 8:05 pm, Myron Turner wrote:
> Richard Lynch wrote:
>> For something that simple in PHP4, I didn't even bother with the
>> 50-line expat lib solution...
>>
>> A couple preg matches, or even just strtok and call it done...
>>
>> //assume file_get_contents is too "new"...
>> //probably wrong, but be safe
>> $xml = implode('',
>> file('www.librarytools.com/events/sampledata.txt'));
>>
>> preg_match_all('|<result i="[0-9+]">.*<f
>> n="eventname">([^<]*)</f>.*(f
>> n="eventnextoccurrencedate">([^<]*)</f>)?|msiU', $xml, $eventdata);
>>
>> var_dump($eventdata);
>>
>> I probably got the regex wrong -- I usually do...
>>
> Of course, there are all kinds of hacks which can be used for simple
> situations--even sometimes complex situations. I recently wrote a
> Perl
> script for a complex screen-scraping task which by-passed all of
> Perl's
> standard parsers and used Perl's regular expression facilities. But
> then I know how to use Perl's parsers if I have to, as well as when
> not
> to use them if I prefer. So now Rob Gould, who asked the original
> question, knows a few things about the expat parser which he didn't
> understand before and will be able to use it in the future. That seems
> to me worthwhile, and more useful in the long run than scratching out
> a
> few regular expression hacks that have limited local applicability.
In my experience, the pain of the expat library was worse more often
than it was useful, for the XML tasks I had to accomplish.
Certainly if you need a generic XML handling sort of thing in PHP4,
and upgrading is not an option, go with expat.
If you just need to parse some silly little XML file, a PCRE hack is
about 5 lines of code, and 5 minutes, instead of 5 days of typing.
YMMV
NOTE:
If you have any wiggle room at all, UPGRADE to PHP 5 for XML processing.
It's like night and day.
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I want you to buy a CD from some starving artist.
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