Re: [xml] loading concatenated documents

[Daniel Veillard <veillard redhat com>]

On Mon, Mar 29, 2010 at 10:25:30AM -0400, Ethan Tira-Thompson wrote:
> Hi Daniel, thanks for the feedback.
>
> > [1]     document       ::=       prolog  element  Misc*
> > ...
> >  NEVER STACK XML DOCUMENTS
>
> This is an unfortunate design decision.  I'm not going to close and reopen a network connection for each of 
> a series of short and frequently-sent XML documents just so the parser can verify the eof, it's pedantic.  
> The parser knows the document (or at least the root node) has ended, and by default it makes sense to 
> complain if there's extra characters afterward, but there should be a way to tell libxml to ignore it.  I'm 
> not trying to claim my entire stream is a valid XML document, I only claim each of the documents in the 
> stream is valid, and it would be nice to have better support for the situation.
>
> The direct workaround, to make the IO read callback duplicate the parsing functionality of looking for the 
> close tag for the root node, is error prone.  libxml is already doing this, I shouldn't have to reimplement 
> this functionality myself.
>
> If nothing else, since you already have the save-as-fragment functionality, it's odd you don't also have 
> the load-as-fragment... this situation also arises if you know you have some XML embedded in something else 
> (maybe more XML, maybe not) and you just want to parse just that chunk for efficiency.

There are function to parse well balanced fragments:

  http://xmlsoft.org/html/libxml-parser.html#xmlParseBalancedChunkMemory

  or 

  http://xmlsoft.org/html/libxml-parser.html#xmlParseInNodeContext

But you have to provide the boundaries.

Daniel

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