Best approach for XML parsing on the iPhone

Question

I\'ve familiarized myself with the NSXMLParser from the iPhone SDK but I find the event-driven nature of it awkward for my purposes. I just want to extract some element valu

Answer 1

Consider the following code snippet, that uses libxml2, Matt Gallagher's libxml2 wrappers and Ben Copsey's ASIHTTPRequest to parse an XML document.

The nodes instance of type NSArray* will contain NSDictionary* objects that you can parse recursively to get the data you want.

Or, if you know the scheme of your XML document, you can write an XPath query to get you to a nodeContent or nodeAttribute value directly.

ASIHTTPRequest *request = [ASIHTTPRequest alloc] initWithURL:[NSURL URLWithString:@"http://stackoverflow.com/"];
[request start];
NSError *error = [request error];
if (!error) {
    NSData *response = [request responseData];
    NSLog(@"Root node: %@", [[self query:@"//" withResponse:response] description]);
}
else 
    @throw [NSException exceptionWithName:@"kHTTPRequestFailed" reason:@"Request failed!" userInfo:nil];
[request release];

...

- (id) query:(NSString *)xpathQuery withResponse:(NSData *)respData {
    NSArray *nodes = PerformXMLXPathQuery(respData, xpathQuery);
    if (nodes != nil)
        return nodes;
    return nil;
}