On Sun, 1 Jan 2012, Arved Sandstrom wrote:
On 01/01/2012 06:33 AM, Stefan Ram wrote:
But an XML file needs to have one single root element that has an
end tag at its end. A process that is being terminated abnormally
might not write such an end tag.
And let's face it, the <log> document element in this case is useless.
It conveys zero information. It would better to regard each record as
a separate well-formed XML document, and the file is merely physical
storage for a bunch of log records.
What happens if you throw such a file into a normal XML parser?
I would imagine that if you're using StAX, you can stop parsing when
you hit the end of a root element, and then either carry on to the next
one, or perhaps wrap a fresh parser round the underlying input stream.
I have no idea what a SAX parser would do; i don't know how much
well-formedness checking they do.
What would a DOM parser do?
You might need to interpolate a layer between the parser and the
FileInputStream to notionally split the file into substreams, one per
document. That would require some sort of framing format for the file,
i think.