XML vs Arrays

rulian

Okay, i'm not neccessarily new to PHP, i've been doing it for personal projects for a few years now, and have even done some extensive professional projects. I've been trying to expand my php abilities and finally decided to look into xml. I know what xml is, and how to format it. Unfortunately, I dont have quite the grasp on what xml is capable of or what, if any distinction it has from arrays. Basically, so far I have found nothing I can do with xml that I cant do with arrays. It could be because I'ms till learning xml but I have yet to see any advantages.

So am I missing something, or is xml simply a way to handle what can sometimes be a very abstract comcept of array nesting?

bpat1434

XML (as I see it) is more for times when you need to store data between sessions, but can't necessarily use Sessions and Cookies. It's a very extensible way to save data. It's also good for having a standardized output of information from your site (i.e. RSS feeds).

XML can take on a style, and be shown through the browser without HTML, through the use of XSL(T).

Honestly, XML's more than nested arrays; however, they have plenty of similarities.

Those are just my opinions and observations though....

MarkR

XML is only useful if you need to store (and normally transmit) extensible structured data. This usually means it's going from one application to another, often from one administrative domain to another (for example, to a third party company's server).

XML also has the advantage of being (potentially) human-readable. XML has solutions for some of the common problems with storing textual data (extensibility, character encodings etc).

But it's just a tool. If you're storing data that is entirely private to an application, do not use XML. XML is not useful for storage of large documents, it can't be searched efficiently or updated. Use a database management system for that.

Mark

Weedpacket

MarkR wrote:
XML is not useful for storage of large documents, it can't be searched efficiently or updated.

I'm not sure "documents" is the word you meant to use here. Quite a few applications these days use a dialect of XML for their native document format (and still others offer it), and they seem to do quite well out of the idea.

I'd use XML for storage of structured documents sooner than I'd use a DBMS. In no small part because the XML would be easier to search (XPath) and update (DOM). Especially once the docs get big and complex.