Hi wise monks,

What is the fastest way to go from XML to perl? I have 16MB+ XML files that are taking many seconds.

I have tried XML::Simple XML::Fast and XML::Bare, but all are surprisingly slow. Normalised its: Simple 1.0, fast 0.55, bare 0.4. But even then, that seems rediculously slow, with 3GHz machines still taking 10+ seconds.

In comparison, I wrote a dodgy C program that takes the XML and outputs a eval'able perl literal structure of nested array/hashes. Running the program and eval'ing the output is nearly 3x faster than xml::bare!

However I feel like I am re-inventing the wheel here (my dodgy program doesn't support attributes) and people must know a fast way to go from xml to perl already?

My other question is: Since eval is where most of the processing time is, is there some sort of 'direct' memory format for perl? For example: I would like my C program to output a 'memory blob' of nested arrays/hashes/scalers that would go straight into Perl, without having to 'parse'/'eval' anything.

The structures I want to put in are mostly like this:

{'elements' => [ 
  'element' => 
    { 'item' => 'value', 'item2' => 'value' } , 
  'element2' => { 'item' => 'value', 'item2' => 'value' } , 
] , 

'elements2' => [ 
  'element' => { 'item' => 'value', 'item2' => 'value' } , 
  'element2' => { 'item' => 'value', 'item2' => 'value' } , 

] }
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