c++ xml parser

[Mark Woodward]

The biggest problem I have with parsing XML in C/C++ is that there are 
no real standard objects to do so. You are confronted with not one but 
two basic problems: (1) the parser and (2) the object model.

There are lots of XML parsers, i.e. systems like expat work fine, that 
answers problem #1. The next problem is how do you represent the data in 
C++? How generic does it need to be? what attribute takes will you 
recognize? will a <tag value='abcedf'/> be sufficient? Or does it need 
to be <tag>abcdef</tag>? Can it be both? Where's your data type 
represented, in the tag or a type attribute?

XML's great strength is that it will represent anything. Its weakness is 
it doesn't say how. I ended up writing my own, using expat as the 
parser, and a sort of tree node structure to represent the OM. It ended 
up looking a little like libxml2.

So, in my system, it works something like this:

Node * n = xmlparse(xml);

Node *nat = n->get("attribute")

Node natChild = nat->getChild();

for(int i=0; natChild; i++)
     natChild = natChild->getNext();

and so on.

I have yet to see anything standard and generically applicable on C++ 
that doesn't require a lot of work and tailoring to a specific data 
source format and purpose.

> From: Stephen Adler<adler-wRvlPVLobi1/31tCrMuHxg at public.gmane.org>
> Subject: c++ xml parser
> To: "Blu unix (blu)"<discuss-mNDKBlG2WHs at public.gmane.org>
> Message-ID:<4DB0B6DD.7090900-wRvlPVLobi1/31tCrMuHxg at public.gmane.org>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
>
> Hi Blu'ers,
>
> I'm looking to write some code which needs to parse the contents of an
> xml file in c++. A quick search brings up xerces, rapidxml, tinyxml and
> a few other packages. Does anyone have a suggestions as to which one I
> should learn?
>
> Thanks. Steve