Choosing the right IOS XML parser

Question

There are a million different XML parsers for the iPhone. I have a medium sized XML file that contains alot of duplicate tags (at different points in the hierarchy). I was thinking about TBXML but I was concerned about its lack of XPath support. For instance lets say my XML file looked like this.

<blog>
   <author> foo1 </author>
   <comments>

       <comment>
            <text>
                <![CDATA[ HTML code that must be extracted ]]>
            </text>
            <author>foo2</author>
       </comment>

       <comment>
          <text>
              <![CDATA[ Here is another post ]]> 
          </text>
          <author>foo1</author>
      </comment>

   </comments>
</blog>

Basically my requirements are that I need to be able to extract that cdata. And know whether it is the blog author a comment author.

Daniel Amitay · Accepted Answer · 2012-08-01T06:44:33.013

51

Best comparison I've seen on the subject:

http://www.raywenderlich.com/553/how-to-chose-the-best-xml-parser-for-your-iphone-project

The difference between the slowest and fastest parsers in his case was a factor of 2. Depending on your feature requirements, there are definitely parsers that can cut your parsing time in half.

edited Aug 01 '12 at 06:44

answered Nov 15 '10 at 06:26

Daniel Amitay

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1

Some of the stuff in the article is getting outdated, but overall still very helpful (just posting so people can see this answer is still valid as of the end of July) – Cameron Jul 28 '11 at 15:21
1

Note. KissXML moved to Github and still actively being updated. https://github.com/robbiehanson/KissXML – eonil Dec 19 '11 at 08:09
1

In case anybody wants to re-run the tests with updated parsers: https://github.com/jansanz/iOSXMLPerformance (I have also included 2 more that weren't originally in the test). – Jan S. Nov 23 '12 at 04:34
TouchXML is also good. – Gajendra K Chauhan Jul 01 '14 at 03:47

ZaBlanc · Answer 2 · 2012-04-20T15:42:52.553

31

Check out RaptureXML. It's not official XPath behavior, but it's pretty close. Your query would be:

[rxml iterate:@"comments.comment" with: ^(RXMLElement *e) {
    if ([[e child:@"author"].text isEqualToString:@"foo1"]) {
        NSLog(@"Blog Text is %@.", e.text);
    } else {
        NSLog(@"Comment Text is %@.", e.text);
    }
}];

UPDATE: RaptureXML now supports XPath!

edited Apr 20 '12 at 15:42

answered Sep 27 '11 at 14:41

ZaBlanc

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I have a new project to work on this year. This looks amazing. – endy Dec 14 '11 at 19:59
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RaptureXML is magnificent. Very easy to set up and use. – Steve HHH Feb 22 '12 at 03:58
even rapturexml sample is not working.. – dhaya Apr 22 '13 at 10:08

onmyway133 · Answer 3 · 2015-01-07T08:29:32.060

4

You should look at these libraries, in order :)

Ono, powered by libxml2
XMLDictionary
RaptureXML

Ono has the the cool AFOnoResponseSerializer which can be integrated with AFNetworking

edited Jan 07 '15 at 08:29

answered Jun 11 '14 at 07:03

onmyway133

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score 1 · Answer 4 · answered Oct 17 '14 at 12:03

I made this new simple and lightweight XML parser for iOS in Swift - AEXML

You can use it to read XML data like this:

let someValue = xmlDocument["element"]["child"]["anotherChild"].value

or you can use it to build XML string like this:

let document = AEXMLDocument()
let element = document.addChild("element")
element.addChild("child")
document.xmlString // returns XML string of the entire document structure

I hope it will be useful for someone.

score 0 · Answer 5 · edited Nov 05 '12 at 14:54

0

As you have requirement for medium sized XML

TinyXML could be an good choice for medium sized documents if you already have experience with the API and are comfortable with C as it ports quite easily over to the iPhone.

For More information you can go through this link

edited Nov 05 '12 at 14:54

Mark

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answered Oct 29 '12 at 07:39

Shan

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Choosing the right IOS XML parser

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