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RE: regular expression on xml

• From: "Michael Kay" <mike@saxonica.com>
• To: <ycao5@scs.carleton.ca>,<xml-dev@l...>
• Date: Tue, 26 Jan 2010 22:03:57 -0000

The overhead of sax/dom parser is large. So is it 
> reasonable to use regular expressions to parse xml?

NO, absolutely not. XML cannot be parsed correctly using regular expressions
because it is not a regular language. Parsing it incorrectly may be an
option for you, but is almost certainly a bad idea in the long term. Even if
it were an option, the overhead would be much higher than using a SAX
parser.
 
>Do jaxb or jaxp fit in my application?

JAXP offers an API to SAX and DOM parsers, so it's complementary to the
approach suggested.

JAXB is an alternative: it will have similar performance costs to DOM
parsing but (depending on the data structure) may be an easier way of
writing the application.

Regards,

Michael Kay
http://www.saxonica.com/
http://twitter.com/michaelhkay 

• References:
  • regular expression on xml
    • From: ycao5@scs.carleton.ca