Re: Using XML in GDB?

Paul Koning
2006-01-28T14:48:58Z

>>>>> "Jim" == Jim Blandy <jimb@red-bean.com> writes:

Jim> I believe XML has better support in Python and Perl and Ruby and
Jim> Java and that lot than ASN.1.

Maybe. I've done some battle with DOM::XML:: in Perl. It may be ok
if you want to parse XML-encoded documents; that's what it appears to
be for. But the documentation is very feeble, and I found it to be a
nightmare when I tried to use it to parse something that wasn't a
document. So I wouldn't necessarily say that XML Is "supported" in
Perl.

Maybe the Python XML package is better -- gotta try that one of these
days.

BER/DER is that it's very simple, so even if the support isn't there
yet that may not be a big issue.

Jim> Bob Rossi mentioned issues with null characters in XML: it
Jim> really is a text format; you're not supposed to put binary blobs
Jim> in there at all, except as CDATA (which makes the data much
Jim> bigger). If you're trying to put binary data in XML, you're on
Jim> the wrong train.

Exactly. Conversely, ASN.1 has good data type support, including
binary types of all kinds.

paul