working with lists is much much faster. XML is just plain flat text file with more text to process. If you have large and complex dataset with items, children items their relations and properties, then it is more efficient to use relational database for data storage and retrieval... XML suits best to present data stored elsewhere it is rather like "document on steroids" or "interactive document" or "communication/data exchange protocol" that can be formatted, trasformed or scripted itself (e.g. XHTML) to present data in different ways.

Although it is fashionable to use XML everywhere, including data storage, i would tolerate it only in those cases where you have relatively small amount of complex data. E.g. like rss feeds that are usually limited to 10-15 items. For large amounts of simple data in form of key-value pairs ordinary list is possibly the best solution. In all other cases use real databases.

The perfect delimiter is tab :-). If you use list and data already contains tabs, then before populating the list replace tab with some unlikely combination of symbol(s) like "\t" and replace those back to tab when retrieving data. Same can be done with multiline data - replace return with e.g "\n" for storage and then replace "\n" with return for displaying. If you go with relational databases (sqlite, valentina etc...) there will be no problems because you won't need to deal with any field delimiters then (except those cases where you have to import data from delimited text file).

All the best
Viktoras


Russell Martin wrote:
So, I've been reading up on Rev's XML features and I'm wondering if
that isn't a better route to go than using lists? Any thoughts?

Also, for those that use lists to store data, how do you handle placing
multiline data into your list structure?

And, what do you do to deal with data that might contain instances of
your delimiter before you place it in your list? Or, is there some
perfect delimiter that I just haven't thought of?

Thanks in advance for your responses.


      
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