Would a lack of line breaks in a doc cause parsing problems ?

[charliefortune]

I am fetching some product feeds with PHP like this

$merch = substr($key,1);
$feed = file_get_conten ts($_POST['data_url'.$mer ch]);
$fp = fopen("./feeds/feed".$merch.". txt","w+");
fwrite ($fp,$feed);
fclose ($fp);

and then parsing them with PHP's native parsing functions. This is
succesful for most of the feeds, but a couple of them claim to be
empty when I know they are not. On inspection, the thing these failing
feeds have in common is that they contain no line breaks at all.
Should this cause a problem ?

[Joseph Kesselman]

Richard Tobin wrote:

Matching up brackets in huge strings is supposed to be just the sort
of thing computers are good at!

But humans aren't, and in my experience CDATA Sections tend to get used
because humans are creating the file or are expected to edit it.
--
Joe Kesselman / Beware the fury of a patient man. -- John Dryden

[Richard Tobin]

In article <46fbc796$1@kcn ews01>,
Joseph Kesselman <ke************ @comcast.netwro te:

>Matching up brackets in huge strings is supposed to be just the sort
of thing computers are good at!

>But humans aren't, and in my experience CDATA Sections tend to get used
because humans are creating the file or are expected to edit it.

Yes, but the CDATA sections in this particular file are correct, so
there is no reason why they should cause problems for a parser.
Having lots of correct CDATA sections is not a plausible reason for a
parser to fail.

-- Richard
--
"Considerat ion shall be given to the need for as many as 32 characters
in some alphabets" - X3.4, 1963.

[Joseph Kesselman]

Having lots of correct CDATA sections is not a plausible reason for a

parser to fail.

Having taken a quick look, I see no plausible reason for a parser to
fail on that file, period. So we're stuck with looking for non-plausible
reasons... or saying "check your code, check with the parser's authors;
either you did something wrong or they did or both."

--
Joe Kesselman / Beware the fury of a patient man. -- John Dryden

[Peter Flynn]

Joe Kesselman wrote:

Took a quick look. That is one gawdawful long line (about 4MB, .5MB of
which is wasted on the CDATA Section delimiters).

I suspect you've overloaded some buffering limit in your parser.

Test this by turning all space characters into newlines, eg

get http://fcshirtshop.com/feeds/feed1058.txt | tr '\040' '\012' | parse

or whatever syntax your system uses.

///Peter