Question

I’m parsing large XML document using pull parser (org.xmlpull.v1.XmlPullParser). When I reach specific node I want to grab it and all its children as chunk of text (or just children is OK too) and save as String. What would be efficient way of achieving this? Anything better than (in essence) buffer.append('<').append(xpp.getName()).append('>')?

Here’s an example

<root id="root">
    <node>
      <grab-all-inside>
          <!-- bunch of nodes, attributes etc. that needs to be saved as text -->
      </grab-all-inside>
    </node>
    <node>
      <grab-all-inside>
          <!-- bunch of nodes, attributes etc. that needs to be saved as text -->
      </grab-all-inside>
    </node>
    <node>
      <grab-all-inside>
          <!-- bunch of nodes, attributes etc. that needs to be saved as text -->
      </grab-all-inside>
    </node>
</root>

P.S. If you think I’m better off using some other parser or technique I’m open for suggestions. Just as a side note – these text chunks will be serialized to db with premise that at some point these will be extracted and parsed

Answer 1

I suspect your append() calls are as good as it gets. Those are each individual events in a pull parser.

If this is an XML resource, consider using string resources instead. I know that for Android 1.6+ they can contain light HTML markup, and it may be they can contain arbitrary markup, just treated as a string — haven’t tried it. Or, create raw resources for each node’s contents and read the whole thing in as a string.