XOM API for Processing XML with Java

[Elliotte Harold <elharo AT metalab.unc.edu>]

Luca Passani wrote:
> Hi Guys
>
> here is another question which will probably irritate some of you, as 
> usual, but which is relevant to those who need to make XML do something 
> useful. Is there a way to ask an element how big it and all of its 
> children are (in bytes)?

No, for several reasons. Among them XML is defined in terms of 
characters not bytes, there are multiple representations of the same 
infoset in character sequences of different lengths, and different VMs 
have different per-object overheads.

> I can think of asking the element to render itself as a string, and 
> measure the size of that, but it sounds like this would not be very 
> efficient performance wise. Is there a way for me to create a new field 
> to the Node() class and traverse the Object model bottom-up to assign 
> the right value to the field?

Short of forking the code, you can't do that.

--
Elliotte Rusty Harold  elharo AT metalab.unc.edu
XML in a Nutshell 3rd Edition Just Published!
http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/xian3/
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0596007647/cafeaulaitA/ref=nosim