XML APIs in C?

Question

Are they all this complex? : http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms766497(VS.85).aspx

Just need something basic to produce XML in C.

Answer 1

Xerces is known to be easy, give it a try

Answer 2

MiniXML might be what you're looking for, if you need something simple, easy, and C:

Mini-XML: Lightweight XML Library

Mini-XML is a small XML library that you can use to read and write XML and XML-like data files in your application without requiring large non-standard libraries. Mini-XML only requires an ANSI C compatible compiler (GCC works, as do most vendors' ANSI C compilers) and a 'make' program.

However, there are a ton of them ranging in complexity and needs. MiniXML is nice in that it doesn't require more than a simple Ansi C compiler. A lot of them require other libraries, or specific compilers.

Answer 3

The lightest way to produce XML in C is printf. There are definitely plenty of possible issues that could arise by doing it all yourself though, such as properly escaping xml entities.

Answer 4

The easiest way to make XML in C is the high-quality and free genx from Tim Bray: http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2004/02/20/GenxStatus

Answer 5

[link text][1]

[1]: http://xmlsoft.org/ "libxml2" is an extensive C API for XML. [link text][1]

[1]: http://www.aleksey.com/xmlsec/ "xmlsec" is a nice security compliment on top of libxml2.

Answer 6

I like libxml. Here is an example of use:

#include <libxml/parser.h>

int
main(void)
{

  xmlNodePtr root, node;
  xmlDocPtr doc;
  xmlChar *xmlbuff;
  int buffersize;

  /* Create the document. */
  doc = xmlNewDoc(BAD_CAST "1.0");
  root = xmlNewNode(NULL, BAD_CAST "root");

  /* Create some nodes */
  node = xmlNewChild(root, NULL, BAD_CAST "node", NULL);
  node = xmlNewChild(node, NULL, BAD_CAST "inside", NULL);
  node = xmlNewChild(root, NULL, BAD_CAST "othernode", NULL);

  /* Put content in a node: note there are special characters so 
     encoding is necessary! */
  xmlNodeSetContent(node, 
                xmlEncodeSpecialChars(doc, BAD_CAST "text con&tent and <tag>"));

  xmlDocSetRootElement(doc, root);

  /* Dump the document to a buffer and print it for demonstration purposes. */
  xmlDocDumpFormatMemory(doc, &xmlbuff, &buffersize, 1);
  printf((char *) xmlbuff);

}

Compiled with 'gcc -Wall -I/usr/include/libxml2 -c create-xml.c && gcc -lxml2 -o create-xml create-xml.o', this program will display:

% ./create-xml   
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<root>
  <node>
    <inside/>
  </node>
  <othernode>text con&amp;tent and &lt;tag&gt;</othernode>
</root>

For a real example, see my implementation of RFC 5388.