Figure 2

A simplified example illustrating the differences in parsing XML and JSON syntax in Python. Numbers in italic indicate line numbers for each example. Python syntax is indicated in bold. The XML syntax requires more checks since XML tags can open or close (‘start’ or ‘end’ event, respectively) and properties can be indicated as tag attributes, here ‘seqtype’ as encountered in NCBI’s TinySeq XML. The JSON syntax facilitates data access and therefore reduces parsing complexity. Checks for the existence of the expected data have been omitted for simplicity.