Should I use a class in this: Reading a XML file using lxml.

Posted by PulpFiction on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by PulpFiction
Published on 2010-06-15T12:25:02Z Indexed on 2010/06/15 13:02 UTC
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Hi everyone.

This question is in continuation to my previous question, in which I asked about passing around an ElementTree.

I need to read the XML files only and to solve this, I decided to create a global ElementTree and then parse it wherever required.

My question is:

Is this an acceptable practice? I heard global variables are bad. If I don't make it global, I was suggested to make a class. But do I really need to create a class? What benefits would I have from that approach. Note that I would be handling only one ElementTree instance per run, the operations are read-only. If I don't use a class, how and where do I declare that ElementTree so that it available globally? (Note that I would be importing this module)

Please answer this question in the respect that I am a beginner to development, and at this stage I can't figure out whether to use a class or just go with the functional style programming approach.

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