[Python-Dev] XML codec? (original) (raw)

"Martin v. Löwis" martin at v.loewis.de
Sun Nov 11 18:56:40 CET 2007

First, XML-RPC is not the only mechanism using XML over a network connection. Second, you don't want to do this if you're dealing with several 100 MB of data just because you want to figure out the encoding.

That's my original claim/question: what SPECIFIC application do you have in mind that transfers XML over a network and where you would want to have such a stream codec?

If I have 100MB of XML in a file, using the detection API, I do

f = open(filename) s = f.read(100) while True: coding = xml.utils.detect_encoding(s) if coding is not undetermined: break s += f.read(100) f.close()

Having the loop here is paranoia: in my application, I might be able to know that 100 bytes are sufficient to determine the encoding always.

Again, I don't see the use case. For XML-RPC, it's very feasible and standard procedure to have the entire document in memory (in a processed form). You may not see the use case, but that doesn't really mean anything if the use cases exist in real life applications, right ?!

Right. However, I' will remain opposed to adding this to the standard library until I see why one would absolutely need to have that. Not every piece of code that is useful in some application should be added to the standard library.

Regards, Martin

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