On Wed, 2005-06-29 at 15:39 -0400, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > I cannot figure out how to use xPath without loading the entire XML into > memory.
This is an implementation-specific question, and for libxml2 the answer is usually that you will need the whole document in memory. If this is a problem (e.g. very large documents) there are other approaches, especially with XPath 2.0 -- XSLT 2.0 and XQuery which both use XPath 2.0 can operate over indexed collections of documents, although there are not yet many implementations of that feature, and none I think using libxml2. The problem is that XPath expressions can easily be written that rely on the entire document, e.g. count(//*) or section[position() = last()] or using the ancestor axis to navigate around. A lot of research has been done on optimising XPath, some of it in the database community, especially in conjunction with XQuery (www.w3.org/XML/Query). Hope this helps although it might not be very encouraging! Liam -- Liam Quin, W3C XML Activity Lead, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin Pictures from old books: http://www.holoweb.net/~liam/pictures/oldbooks/ IRC (chat) programs: www.ircreviews.org/clients/ _______________________________________________ xml mailing list, project page http://xmlsoft.org/ [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/xml
