Hello,
During the course of our recent discussion, Jan Hidders said:
Have you seen the parsing code? There is nothing _very light_ about it, at the moment.
As soon as I had the opportunity, I located the current Wiki parsing code
(http://cvs.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/wikipedia/phpwiki/fpw/wikiPa ge.php?rev=1.44&content-type=text/vnd.viewcvs-markup)
It occured to me that while the current code is fine as an initial version, it should be optimized if we expect the Wikipedia traffic to grow significantly, since using PHP regular expressions and string management functions to process the markup is inefficient.
The obvious solution would be to write a "real" one-pass parser. Doing this stand-alone (or as CGI) would be quickest using C; I do not know whether an efficient solution exsits using PHP considering the way strings are implemented in it. However, executing C code from PHP is complicated in its own right (UNIX pipes being the simplest solution, in my opinion).
I could try to re-write the parser in either PHP or C, but I wanted to ask first the members of what do they think of the subject (the extent to which the code can be optimized, which language to choose, in what technique should the parser be written, which Wiki syntax changes should be made, etc.).
Sincerely yours, Uri Yanover