Re: [PHP-XML-DEV] simple xml api

From reading through the notes, I think this Simple XML API is a great idea
and will make xml document parsing just as easy as parsing an associative
array.  A couple notes:

I think accessing attributes via associative arrays would be better only
because a node could have a attribute and a child node of the same name, so
if $simple->name->length was used, distinguishing them wouldn't be possible,
such as:

<simple>
    <name length="4">
        <length>2</length>
    </name>
</simple>

Also, I think it would be great if we could build up new xml structures
using this new API and then dump it back into a xml string.  I was
previously using domxml to build up new xml streams, but I recently switched
to string concats because I didn't need all the domxml features and I
noticed a slowdown in script execution under high loads with domxml - so
something like this Simple XML API that will take care of converting the
object back into valid xml would be perfect.

Ryan


"Sterling Hughes" <[email protected]> wrote in message
news:1044021310.15188.3222.camel@hasele...
> On Fri, 2003-01-31 at 05:55, Christian Stocker wrote:
> > On Thu, 2003-01-30 at 18:18, Sterling Hughes wrote:
> > > Sam Ruby sent me the following URL:
> > >
http://dev2dev.bea.com/articlesnews/discussion/thread.jsp?thread=JSchneider_
XML
> > >
> > > It looks really neat, and much in the PHP way of doing things.  Take
the
> > > following XML document, and I'll show you how easy parsing it is with
> > > the Simple API proposed above (ported slightly to PHP).
> >
> > IMHO, it's a nice way to approach XML documents which are relatively
> > shallow like the example below (data centric XML-docs). But I wouldn't
> > want to process something Docbook-style with that :) And how does it
> > handle attributes, comments, processing instructions, namespaces, etc.?
> >
>
> You would want to process something like docbook? :-)
>
> attributes and namespaces are just another level of indirection.  ie:
>
> <php.dev>
>  <php.dev.xml>cool</php.dev.xml>
> </php.dev>
>
> var_dump($php->dev->xml);
> // string (4) "cool"
>
> and
>
> <simple>
>  <name length="4">John</name>
> </simple>
>
> var_dump($simple->name->length);
> // int (4)
> var_dump($simple->name);
> // string (4) "John"
>
> Or we could make them associative array accesses:
>
> var_dump($simple->name['length']);
> // int (4)
>
> Processing instructions could be per node arrays.  Remember, since we're
> overloading we can do some magic here.  Comments could be in a "special"
> array $node->__comments.
>
>
> > So, it would be certainly a nice additon to DOM/SAX/XSLT, but it can't
> > provide a replacement for them (again IMHO...)
>
> Agreed.  But what I like about is that its a much simplified subset of
> 95% of what most people want to do.
>
> -Sterling
>
> --
> "The computer programmer is a creator of universes for which he
>  alone is responsible. Universes of virtually unlimited complexity
>  can be created in the form of computer programs."
>     - Joseph Weizenbaum
>