How to parse the AndroidManifest.xml file inside an .apk package

Question

This file appears to be in a binary XML format. What is this format and how can it be parsed programmatically (as opposed to using the aapt dump tool in the SDK)?

Answer 1

I found the AXMLPrinter2, a Java app over at the Android4Me project to work fine on the AndroidManifest.xml that I had (and prints the XML out in a nicely formatted way). http://code.google.com/p/android4me/downloads/detail?name=AXMLPrinter2.jar

One note.. it (and the code on this answer from Ribo) doesn't appear to handle every compiled XML file that I've come across. I found one where the strings were stored with one byte per character, rather than the double byte format that it assumes.