Fast XML

[tj1111]

Assuming I have this simple XML:

<book>
<Author>person</Author>
<Title>My Title</Title>
</book>

<book>
<Author>person2</Author>
<Title>My Title 2</Title>
</book>
etc...

What is the fastest way to parse this file and buffer lists of authors and titles assuming there is a very large amount of entries in the file?

[Arjay]

Why would you want to parse the file yourself?

[Shuja Ali]

By parsing if you mean reading the XML file then try Dataset's ReadXML method.

[tj1111]

I am simply looking for the computationally-fastest method of buffering this information. This could be manually parsing or using any of the built in XML reading methods in C#, I just want to know which would be the best choice for huge datasets.

[BigEd781]

I am simply looking for the computationally-fastest method of buffering this information. This could be manually parsing or using any of the built in XML reading methods in C#, I just want to know which would be the best choice for huge datasets.

Well, you will have to measure before you can know anything. I would try it first with the built in parsing classes and see if that won't do what you need. There is no sense in rolling your own XML parser (Chok-full of bugs and inefficiencies) if the built in stuff works just fine. Using compiled xml node iterators can be faster than the DOM (XmlDocument) model, but again, try the easy way first,.

[Mutant_Fruit]

XmlReader if the input file is huge. Otherwise XmlDocument would be just fine. The problem with XmlDocument is that it uses a chunk of memory because it essentially splits the input into a bunch of strings and keeps them all in memory. XmlReader is a forward-only reader and doesn't keep excess stuff in memory so if all you want to do is read the data once (and not query again) XmlReader is your friend.