Parsing NSXMLNode Attributes in Cocoa

Question

Given the following XML file:

Answer 1

There are two options. If you continue to use NSXMLDocment and you have an NSXMLNode * for the a movie element, you can do this:

if ([movieNode kind] == NSXMLElementKind)
{
    NSXMLElement *movieElement = (NSXMLElement *) movieNode;
    NSArray *attributes = [movieElement attributes];

    for (NSXMLNode *attribute in attributes)
    {
        NSLog (@"%@ = %@", [attribute name], [attribute stringValue]);
    }
}

Otherwise, you can switch to using an NSXMLParser instead. This is an event driven parser that informs a delegate when it has parsed elements (among other things). The method you're after is parser:didStartElement:namespaceURI:qualifiedName:attributes:

- (void) loadXMLFile
{
    NSXMLParser *parser = [NSXMLParser parserWithContentsOfURL:@"file:///Users/jkem/test.xml"];
    [parser setDelegate:self];
    [parser parse];
}


// ... later ...

-      (void)         parser:(NSXMLParser *)parser
             didStartElement:(NSString *)elementName
                namespaceURI:(NSString *)namespaceURI
               qualifiedName:(NSString *)qualifiedName
                  attributes:(NSDictionary *)attributeDict
{
    if ([elementName isEqualToString:@"movie"])
    {
        NSLog (@"%@", [attributeDict objectForKey:@"a"]);
        NSLog (@"%d", [[attributeDict objectForKey:@"b"] intValue]);
    }
}