Hello Monks,

This (long-ish) question is mainly about design. I have a simple "database". Basically it is only one table, with about 30 fields and a few hundred records. I would like to extract this data and post to the web via CGI.

One limitation of the server I am using is that I cannot install a real database -- I am stuck with plain-text. That shouldn't be a problem. Parsing this file on a per-request basis will be easy, especially given the low-traffic nature of the site.

What is the problem? Two things, actually. Let me specify first that I am now, and likely will be always be the only maintainer for this site. I set both the file-format and the CGI parsing code. Now, my two concerns:

  1. What format do I use for the text-file?
  2. How do I ensure that meta-characters in the text-file are properly inserted into the HTML?

I had initially thought that XML was the solution, but I have run into problems with both of the above points (I'm not posting code because I want to acertain if I should stick with XML or instead try something else).

Basically, my problems thus far have been: XML is slow, XML introduced bloat, as best as I could see I needed to escape everything to insert it into the XML, and I have *no* desire to start entering records using &xx; format for all my /\"'& and whatever other characters.

So, I am looking for suggestions on how to proceed. Am I struggling with the XML approach because I'm a novice with it, or choosing poor tools (XML::Parser and XML::Writer)? I have a lot of DBI, so I was surprised at having to handle my own escaping. Are there other ways around this?

One final thing: my current alternative is just a text-file with each line containing the field-name followed by value, and a record delimiter like '-' x 50, e.g.:

Field1: DATA
Field2: MOREDATA
#other fields#
-------------------------------
Field1: DATA
Field2: MOREDATA
#other fields#

[download]

This wouldn't allow easy stream-based parsing (e.g. no while (my @row = $dbh->fetchrow_array()) nice-ness), but otherwise seems refreshingly simple compared to XML. Any comments on that?

In reply to XML "Database" --> HTML by Anonymous Monk

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