> ...doesn't seem to make much sense, because... > > 1. it is so much bigger than the other content > > 2. you'd have to put a <br> in there for it to display > correctly... or perhaps a "\n" would work... or something... ? > > 3. if i want to parse the entire directory... it'll get > really big if the "body" tags contain more than a sentence or > two I'm not sure I see the problem with body being big. If having a big xml file really is a problem, then you could probably do something like <body filename="body1.txt"/>. If you want to do that sort of thing the xml way you might have a look at XLink, but I'm not familiar enough with it to know whether it fits here.
You need to think about what's being stored in this body tag. If it's HTML, then the < and & (at least) should be escaped as < and > and you can store <br> and any other tag you feel like. If the body is well-formed xml (say XHTML) then you wouldn't even have to escape the <br/>. If it's plain text, you have the choice to care about whitespace or not, in which case your newlines can be preserved. I don't think your issue is really about XML supporting the formatting of your data but you knowing how to properly encode it. * Wade Preston Shearer [Tue, 16 Sep 2003 at 18:04 -0600] <quote> > i have a question for all of you xml parsers. > > i have an xml file like... > > <data> > <document> > <id></id> > <title></title> > <subtitle></subtitle> > <date></date> > <author></<author> > </document> > <document> > ...etc... > </data> > > > ...that has many entries. as you can see, this xml file is acting like > a database of documents. the information in the xml is what i will call > the "title" information for the document. my question is... what is the > best way to put in the "body" of the document? > > the reason that i ask is because, putting it all in a tag, like this... > > <data> > <document> > <id></id> > <title></title> > <subtitle></subtitle> > <date></date> > <author></<author> > <body>Since every penny I earn depends on copyright > protection, I'm all in favor of reasonable laws to > do the job. > > But there's something kind of sad > about the > recording industry's indecent > passion to punish > the "criminals" who are violating > their rights. > > Copyright is a temporary monopoly > granted by > the government -- it creates the > legal fiction that a > piece of writing or composing (or, > as technologies > were created, a recorded > performance) is > property and can only be sold by > those who have > been licensed to do so by the > copyright holder. > </body> > </document> > <document> > ...etc... > </data> > > > ...doesn't seem to make much sense, because... > > 1. it is so much bigger than the other content > > 2. you'd have to put a <br> in there for it to display > correctly... > or perhaps a "\n" would work... or something... ? > > 3. if i want to parse the entire directory... it'll get really > big if the > "body" tags contain more than a sentence or two > > > How should i approach this? The best thing that I have come up with is > to use the info in the "id" tag to reference a text file by the same > name ($id . ".txt"). So, the xml file would then a list of the > documents "title" info while the "body" data is in separate text files. > > Although everything isn't in the same "database," it seems like a good > idea because I want to be able to use the data in the xml file for both > displaying one document at a time and also displaying a listing of all > of the "titles." > > If all of the data was the same size (ie: one sentence or less), this > would be easy, but, hey... it's never easy. For those of you that have > done an XML parsing project like this before, with data that requires a > hard return within data that is within a tag... > > how have you done it? > > does xml have a special character for end-of-lines like this? > > does this approach (separate txt files for the "body") sound good? > > > eager for you input, > > wade > > > > ____________________ > BYU Unix Users Group > http://uug.byu.edu/ > ___________________________________________________________________ > List Info: http://uug.byu.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/uug-list </quote> -- Hans Fugal | De gustibus non disputandum est. http://hans.fugal.net/ | Debian, vim, mutt, ruby, text, gpg http://gdmxml.fugal.net/ | WindowMaker, gaim, UTF-8, RISC, JS Bach --------------------------------------------------------------------- GnuPG Fingerprint: 6940 87C5 6610 567F 1E95 CB5E FC98 E8CD E0AA D460
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