Martin v. Löwis wrote: >> The background was parsing the XML dump of an entire web site, which I >> would expect to be larger than what minidom is designed to handle >> gracefully. Switching to cElementTree before major code gets written is >> almost certainly a good idea here. > > I think minidom is designed to handle the very same documents taht > cElementTree is designed to handle (namely, documents that fit into > memory).
I do not doubt that a machine running a cElementTree application can handle exactly the same documents as a machine with, say, ten times as much memory that runs a minidom application. However, when deciding which library to choose for a new application, it does matter what hardware you want to use it on. And if you can handle multiple times larger documents on the same hardware, that might be as much of reason to choose cElementTree as the (likely) shorter and more readable code (which usually translates into shorter development and debugging times) and the higher execution speed. Honestly, I haven't seen a reason in a while why preferring minidom over any of the ElementTree derivates would be a good idea when starting a new application. Stefan -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list