2010/10/13 Paul Houle <paul(a)ontology2.com>
Don't be intimidated by working with the data dumps. If you've got
an XML API that does streaming processing (I used .NET's XmlReader) and
use the old unix trick of piping the output of bunzip2 into your
program, it's really pretty easy.
When I worked into it.source (a small dump! something like 300Mby unzipped),
I used a simple do-it-yourself string python search routine and I found it
really faster then python xml routines. I presume that my scripts are really
too rough to deserve sharing, but I encourage programmers to write a "simple
dump reader" using speed of string search. My personal trick was to build an
"index", t.i. a list of pointers to articles and name of articles into xml
file, so that it was simple and fast to recover their content. I used it
mainly because I didn't understand API at all. ;-)
Alex