[flexcoders] Interesting XML performance discovery

[polestar11]

Hi there

I'm busy crunching through xml data, stripping out nodes that don't
have children. Perhaps its not the best way to do things, but I use a
for loop that checks and deletes any item with no children. I've
always found XML delete tricky and to do this I reference the parent
which finds the child index and deletes the child.
On a file of 10000+ items execution time is 600ms without the delete.
With the delete execution time is 52919ms!

I'm off to find another delete function ...

for each(span in body.span) {
        if(span.children().length() == 0) {
                delete span.parent().children()[span.childIndex()];
        }
        else {
                [EMAIL PROTECTED] = SPAN_PREFIX + id++;
                [EMAIL PROTECTED] = "itemClicked('"[EMAIL PROTECTED]"', 
AIR.itemSelected)";
                [EMAIL PROTECTED] = span.attribute("class");
        }
}