Hi Folks,
Here's the number that separates large from huge:
8K
Allow me to explain.
An XML lexer breaks up into tokens the stream of characters comprising an XML document. For example, this stream of characters that we recognize as an XML document:
<Document>Hello, world</Document>
might be broken up into these tokens:
'<'
Document
'>'
Hello, world
er perhaps put perhaps more likely
H
e
l
l
o
,
w
o
r
l
d
In the XML infoset representation of the parse for example each character generates a character information item
and in streaming and other implementations you can't wait until you see the end tag before starting the lexical analysis.
'</'
Document
'>'
All of those tokens are very short. But there are some XML documents with very long tokens.
How long should your tokens be? What are large tokens? What are huge tokens?
Practically speaking, if an XML element contains a string, how long should you allow the string to be?
The answer is 8K.
If using a particular unspecified parsing strategy and a flex generated parser.
Tokens less than 8K are large. They are of acceptable length and won't incur performance penalties in the lexer.
Tokens greater than 8K are huge. They will incur performance penalties in the lexer.
Don't create XML documents with elements containing strings longer than 8K.
I don't see that follows.
David
