use Perl

• Good luck with that (Score:2)

  by mir (51)

  Is there any reason why you could not switch from XML::XPath to XML::LibXML? The code should be portable, except for a few constants that need to be renamed, I think.

  In any case, if you have spotted improvements that can be made to the XPath engine of XML::XPath (as opposed to its DOM implementation) I would be interested to hear about it for XML::XPathEngine [cpan.org], which is a fork of that engine.

  Thanks

  --
  mirod
  • Re: (Score:2)

    by Ovid (2709)

    A quick switch of using XML::LibXML for Test::XML::XPath doubled the test time for one of our tests. Of course, that was a single test run and there could have been other issues involved.

    The major issues I saw for XML::XPath were getting rid of a lot of "shift" statements in favor of list assignments directly from @_. There is at least one wrapper function which should be an alias and a rather curious looking AUTOLOAD. Also, some of the C-style for loops can be worked on.

    Other than that, I haven't lo
    • Making XML::LibXML faster (Score:1)

      by arc (5008)

      [Sorry about the tardiness of this reply.]

      If XML::LibXML takes a lot longer than XML::XPath, there’s probably something bad going on.

      In this case, I’d guess that the “something bad” is that XML::LibXML (or rather, the underlying libxml2 library) is loading external DTDs over the network. I can parse an 18-megabyte XML instance from a file in a little under a second on my laptop, once I turn off DTD loading.

      Turning off the ”run very slowly” flag can be done like thi
      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Ovid (2709)

        You are correct that something was wrong. Turns out it was a completely unrelated error. Regrettably, we've discovered that we can't just switch over to XML::LibXML because we have two different namespaces and XML::XPath was letting us ignore this issue (this was in place long before I started). We have about 237 YAML documents driving our acceptance tests and they have multiple xpaths embedded which would presumably have to be changed to deal with this :/
        • Re:Making XML::LibXML faster (Score:1)

          by Aristotle (5147) <pagaltzis@gmx.de> on 2008.05.20 9:39 (#62950) Homepage Journal

          In the interest of correctness it should be pointed out that XML::XPath is in violation of the XPath spec here, and that matching namespaced elements in XPath always requires binding a prefix to the namespace.

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          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Ovid (2709)

            We are aware of this. We're just in a bad position with some legacy code and since it hadn't been addressed previously, we need to figure out the easiest way to move forward.