Re: Re: Best X-delimited format?

XML is a bit of overkill, isn't it? I mean, a delimiter is usually one byte, whereas XML tags are much larger in bytes by comparison.

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Comment on Re: Re: Best X-delimited format?

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Re: Re: Re: Best X-delimited format? by anithri (Beadle) on Sep 18, 2002 at 18:17 UTC
XML does result in larger files. That said though, larger files are very rarely a problem at this stage. If you are involved in flat files that would be so large that XML encoding them would be prohibitive, then the flat files are probably too big already. Also, XML allows much flexibility in adding, moving, and rearranging the data. It's obvioiusly not the one answer for every situation, but it's the best answer for most situations.	[reply]
Re^4: Best X-delimited format? by Aristotle (Chancellor) on Sep 18, 2002 at 20:16 UTC
XML allows much flexibility in adding, moving, and rearranging the data. That's just hype. Perl will allow you to do the same things on CSV files just as easily. I see no reason at all to use a difficult to parse and bloated XML representation over named-column CSV files, provided the data is strongly tabular. Makeshifts last the longest.	[reply]