How to Parse XML File using xmlparsing on iphone?

Question

How do I access following XML file using xmlparsing on an iphone?

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1"?>
<chapter>
 <TITLE>Title &plainEntity;</TITLE>
 <para>
  <informaltable>
   <tgroup cols="3">
    <tbody>
     <row><entry>a1</entry><entry morerows="1">b1</entry><entry>c1</entry></row>
     <row><entry>a2<<?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1"?>
<ADDRESS>
        <CONTACT>
        <NAME FIRST="Fred" LAST="Bloggs" NICK="Bloggsie" TITLE="Mr" />
        <STREET HOME="5 Any Street" WORK="Floor 24, BigShot Tower" />
        <CITY HOME="Little Town" WORK="Anycity" />
        <COUNTY HOME="Anyshire" WORK="Anyshire" />
        <POSTAL HOME="as plain text" WORK="text" />
        <COUNTRY HOME="UK" WORK="UK" />
        <PHONE HOME="as text" WORK="text" />
        <FAX HOME="none" WORK="555" />
        <MOBILE HOME="444" WORK="333" />
        <WEB HOME="www.codehelp.co.uk" WORK="" />
        <COMPANY>Full name of company here</COMPANY>
        <GENDER>male</GENDER>
        <BDAY>Add tags for year, month and day to make this more useful</BDAY>
        <ANNI>some date long forgotten :-)</ANNI>
        <SPOUSE>angry</SPOUSE>
        <CHILDREN>Make sure this tag is one of the ones allowed to repeat in the DTD</CHILDREN>
        <COMMENT>comments here</COMMENT>
        <EMAILONE>Either use fixed tags like this, or change to a repeating tag</EMAILONE>
        <EMAILTWO>second email line</EMAILTWO>
        <EMAILTHREE>third</EMAILTHREE>
        <EMAILFOUR>fourth</EMAILFOUR>
        </CONTACT>
</ADDRESS>/entry><entry>c2</entry></row>
     <row><entry>a3</entry><entry>b3</entry><entry>c3</entry></row>
    </tbody>
   </tgroup>
  </informaltable>
 </para>
 &systemEntity;
 <section id="about">
  <title>About this Document</title>
  <para>
   <!-- this is a comment -->

  </para>
 </section>
</chapter>

score 4 · Answer 1 · answered Apr 19 '11 at 11:15

The SDK provides two ways to parse XML: libxml2 and NSXMLParser. libxml2 is the fastest. To use it in your project, go to the build settings for your iPhone App project and set the following:

Other linker flags = -lxml2
Header Search Paths: $(SDKROOT)/usr/include/libxml2

Then download XPathQuery.m and XPathQuery.h from this page: Using libxml2 for XML parsing and XPath queries in Cocoa, which also provides a tutorial on how to use it. That XPathQuery class is a simplified way to parse XML. I recommend it unless you want to write the same code yourself, which doesn't seem the case.

With that on place, do

NSString *string = nil; // put your html document here

NSData *htmlData = [string dataUsingEncoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding];
NSString *xpath = @"//row"; // any standard XPath expression
NSArray *nodesArray = PerformHTMLXPathQuery(htmlData, xpath);
NSDictionary *dict;
if (0<[nodesArray count]) {
    dict = [nodesArray objectAtIndex:0];
}

At this point the elements from your document should be inside the dict dictionary.