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From: Ben Bacarisse <ben.usenet@bsb.me.uk>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.php
Subject: Re: parsing print_r() output with preg_match_all()
Date: Thu, 07 Jan 2016 20:24:14 +0000
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Jerry Stuckle <jstucklex@attglobal.net> writes:

> On 1/7/2016 9:05 AM, Ben Bacarisse wrote:
>> Jerry Stuckle <jstucklex@attglobal.net> writes:
>> 
>>> On 1/7/2016 4:03 AM, R.Wieser wrote:
>>>> Jerry,
>>>>
>>>>> XML comes to mind. Human readable and made to
>>>>> be easily parsed.
>>>>
>>>> Its also like shooting a cannon at a musquito. :-)
>> <snip>
>>>
>>> Not really.  It's exactly the type of job XML was designed for.  And it
>>> is easily created and read.
>> 
>> These things are all relative.  If, as I now suspect, a simple
>> json_encode and json_decode call will do the job, XML is going to look
>> over the top unless there's an xml_encode and xml_decode pair that can
>> serialise standard PHP types (I'm not up-to-date with the latest PHP but
>> I could not find such functions).
>
> There are any number of ways to implement XML in PHP.  Encoding is as
> simple as a loop and/or recursive function.  The result is a document
> compatible with the DOM and XML libraries.

If there are no XML equivalents of json_(en|de)code then it's harder.
How much harder is governed by more than just how simple it is in XML --
the other part of the calculation is how very simple it is with JSON.
To use a naive measure (don't take this too literally) if it's 2 lines
using XML, it's twice as hard as it using JSON.  I don't know for sure
because, whilst I've now checked how it works using JSON, I've not done
it with XML but I'd bet it's more than a line or two each way.

<snip>
-- 
Ben.