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All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

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XML::Tiny 8 Comments More | Login | Reply /

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  • That this isn't an XML parser. It is majorly broken in various ways. It's more of a tag-soup parser. I still think you should change the name of it.
    • "It is majorly broken in various ways" is not constructive criticism. Please try again. If you can find ways in which it is *actually* broken - ie, where it doesn't conform to the documentation, or the tests are inadequate - then I would prefer that you open a ticket using rt.cpan.org [cpan.org], although I will also accept submissions by email.

      As for "It's ... a tag-soup parser" - yes, well done, you spotted that it is a non-validating XML module. I know this may come as a shock, but such things are actually use

      • You're entirely missing the point. This is not about being a subset of the functionality or anything, this is not an XML parser. The problem is not about validation -- no one sane cares about that -- the problem is about well-formedness. There is a lot of perfectly good XML out there that this thing won't parse, and there is a lot of completely wrong XML that it won't flag as such.

        If you want to write and release a parser for "vague stuff that has angle brackets in it" and find it useful that's won

        --

        -- Robin Berjon [berjon.com]

        • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

          by Alias (5735)
          CSS::Tiny [cpan.org] does not parse the entire CSS specification.

          YAML::Tiny [cpan.org] does not support the entire YAML specification.

          Config::Tiny [cpan.org] does not support some elements of the Windows .ini specification.

          Taken literally, CSS::Tiny is not a CSS parser, YAML::Tiny is not a YAML parser and Config::Tiny is not a Windows .ini parser.

          In exchange for sacrificing some completeness and correctness, ::Tiny modules provide a single small .pm file you can drop onto any Perl you are likely to find in existance anywhere, copied in by

          • As I said, if people find this sort of thing useful, let them have it, I have no issue with that. Just don't call it XML. It's not. NotXML::Tiny or TagParser::Tiny would be fine. Furthermore the documentation is extremely misleading in that it claims to support a subset of XML -- that is not the case. It would support a subset of XML if every document it understood could also be successfully parsed by an XML parser, but didn't support some things that an XML parser would report. As it is, it supports all

            --

            -- Robin Berjon [berjon.com]

            • One excellent reason for calling it XML::Tiny rather than SomethingElse::Tiny which I've not mentioned yet is that that's what users will look for. Users who need to process simple XML documents will, obviously, look for XML stuff. If I were to call it SomethingElse::Tiny I wouldn't be able to help them. I suppose you could call that "banking on the holy trigraph" but given that I don't actually care whether anyone else uses it, it must be a very small bank.

              If you were to bother to tell me *what* it su

              • Although to be fair you did claim that you "decided to do XML right" and that might be why those that have "done XML right" got out of their pram.
                • I have to agree here. I can see the value of this module... if you have some tiny chunk of very simple XML, and you want something Tiny to just get it into a usable Perl structure, then sure this is a plausible solution. However, saying that you feel that you've done XML right and implemented (you feel) "the useful subset" of XML is obviously going to rile people who have dedicated time to actually implementing robust, if heavy, solutions. I tried the module, tossed an everyday XML file from my $work at it, and it did a decent job. This whole argument is stupid - you had an itch and released something that scratched it. That would have been awesome if you hadn't touted it the way you did, then did ridiculous things like suggesting people like Matt Sergeant and Sean M. Burke don't know what real world programming is like. When you present hubris and laziness, expect impatience.
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