Richard Lynch wrote:
> 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.
yeah but don't forget your sunglasses, and never stare directly into the sun
>
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