Fastest ruby xml parser -- FreeBSD 6.2

Rails
1

Hi,

I’m trying to find the fastest XML parser for FreeBSD 6.2. I tried to
install the gem for libxml, but it doesn’t install on FreeBSD 6.2. I
also tried the FreeBSD port for libxml-ruby, but it appears to be very
buggy.

I’m taking several xml feeds, 100k or less, parsing them, and putting
them into a database. rexml is slow. The word on the net is to use a
C parser – is there a good one I can use, with understandable
documentation for a newbie?

Thanks,

Charlie

2

Hi, please define what you mean by slow. What times are you seeing
during
the parsing of the XML?

-Conrad

3

charlie caroff wrote:

documentation for a newbie?
You could try Hpricot.

–
Michael W.

4

Conrad T. wrote:

Thanks,

Charlie

I use the expat library - one of the samples that comes with the code is
simple enough to extend if you know C. My suggestion would be to parse
off the XML quickly and convert it into another format that can then be
used by your Ruby code.

It would be good if you could explain how often you need to do this and
if it’s only in the backend or in response to a user-loaded XML file.

Cheers,
Mohit.
8/15/2007 | 11:39 PM.

5

Hpricot is extremely slow on large documents (> 50 MB) but should work
fast on the size you are looking at. libxml would still be the
fastest option if you get it working (I had to strip all tags from the
root node to get it working for me, but I am dealing with 5-10 GB
files so I had no other choice but to go with libxml-ruby).

Craig