[LRUG] Reading a "large" spreadsheet

[Frederick Cheung]

On 15 Mar 2013, at 13:49, Graham Ashton <graham at effectif.com> wrote:

> On 15 Mar 2013, at 13:40, Andrew Stewart <boss at airbladesoftware.com> wrote:
> 
>> How can I read the 900 actual rows in a few seconds?  
> 
> I suspect you'll need a SAX parser. Rather than trying to load the whole thing into RAM, a SAX parser fires events as it reads a stream of bytes such as "found an opening <foo> tag" and "found a closing </foo> tag". You just need to write the code that responds to the events. They're much faster on large documents than XML parsers that attempt to load the entire document into memroy.
> 
> Nokogiri may be a SAX parser - I've never tried to look inside it. Maybe Roo is using Nokogiri to load everything before trying to operate on it. Again, I don't know.
> 
Nokogiri can do both

Fred