Re: [xml] how do I...

[Eric Haszlakiewicz <erh+libxml nimenees com>]

On Tue, May 24, 2005 at 06:01:00PM -0400, Daniel Veillard wrote:
>   By the definition of XML this is not possible. Packing multiple
> XML document on a single stream without out of band markers is a frequent
> but huge design flaws. The demonstration is obvious for anybody who
> read the 2 first pages of the XML standard:
>
>    http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml/#sec-well-formed
>
>    First production of the XML specification:
>    [1] document ::= prolog element Misc*
>
>  Misc* means there is no potential limit to the number of Misc element at 
> the end, and not finding one is a fatal error. 
        And the definition of Misc is:
Misc       ::=          Comment | PI | S

i.e. either a comment (<!-- ... -->), a processing instruction (<? ... ?>) or
white space.  That PI is further defined to _exclude_ <?xml ... ?>.

So it seems that is IS possible to determine where the next xml doc starts
just by looking for the next xml declaration or the next actual element.

> On Tue, May 24, 2005 at 02:47:12PM -0600, Sebastian Kuzminsky wrote:
> > I've got a couple of processes that trade XML messages over the network.
> > The sender writes each XML message on a single newline-terminated line.
> > The receiver uses select and read, and reads until it gets a '\n',

        While I wouldn't necessarily call a design that tried to intuit where
the next doc starts broken, using a delimeter between docs does sound like
a better idea.  As others have said, using \0 instead of \n will probably
work better, at least until you do something like switch to UTF-16 encoding.

eric