As someone who's not very experienced with xml, I'd say to do what you've been doing - have what's in the body tag be some sort of "foreign key" that can be used to retrieve the body when you want to, but that won't get in the way of parsing your xml file when you don't want it to. Someone else might have a better solution, but here's a vote for your current process.
Daniel > i have a question for all of you xml parsers. > > i have an xml file like... > > <data> > <document> > <id></id> > <title></title> > <subtitle></subtitle> > <date></date> > <author></<author> > </document> > <document> > ...etc... > </data> > > > ...that has many entries. as you can see, this xml file is acting like > a database of documents. the information in the xml is what i will call > the "title" information for the document. my question is... what is the > best way to put in the "body" of the document? > > the reason that i ask is because, putting it all in a tag, like this... > > <data> > <document> > <id></id> > <title></title> > <subtitle></subtitle> > <date></date> > <author></<author> > <body>Since every penny I earn depends on copyright protection, > I'm all in favor of reasonable laws to > do the job. > > But there's something kind of sad about the > recording industry's indecent passion to punish > the "criminals" who are violating their rights. > > Copyright is a temporary monopoly granted by > the government -- it creates the legal fiction that a > piece of writing or composing (or, as technologies > were created, a recorded performance) is > property and can only be sold by those who have > been licensed to do so by the copyright holder. > </body> > </document> > <document> > ...etc... > </data> > > > ...doesn't seem to make much sense, because... > > 1. it is so much bigger than the other content > > 2. you'd have to put a <br> in there for it to display correctly... > or perhaps a "\n" would work... or something... ? > > 3. if i want to parse the entire directory... it'll get really big if > the > "body" tags contain more than a sentence or two > > > How should i approach this? The best thing that I have come up with is > to use the info in the "id" tag to reference a text file by the same > name ($id . ".txt"). So, the xml file would then a list of the > documents "title" info while the "body" data is in separate text files. > > Although everything isn't in the same "database," it seems like a good > idea because I want to be able to use the data in the xml file for both > displaying one document at a time and also displaying a listing of all > of the "titles." > > If all of the data was the same size (ie: one sentence or less), this > would be easy, but, hey... it's never easy. For those of you that have > done an XML parsing project like this before, with data that requires a > hard return within data that is within a tag... > > how have you done it? > > does xml have a special character for end-of-lines like this? > > does this approach (separate txt files for the "body") sound good? > > > eager for you input, > > wade > > > > ____________________ > BYU Unix Users Group > http://uug.byu.edu/ > ___________________________________________________________________ > List Info: http://uug.byu.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/uug-list > ____________________ BYU Unix Users Group http://uug.byu.edu/ ___________________________________________________________________ List Info: http://uug.byu.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/uug-list
