Best open XML parser for C++

Question

Looking for a simple, clean, correct XML parser to use in my C++ project. Read and write my own..extension? You know what I mean.

Thanks

Answer 1

Try TinyXML.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/tinyxml

Answer 2

Expat

Answer 3

Try TinyXML or IrrXML...Both are lightweight XML parsers ( I'd suggest you to use TinyXML, anyway ).

Answer 4

TinyXML can be best for simple XML work but if you need more features then try Xerces from the apache project. Go to the following page to read more about its features.

http://xerces.apache.org/xerces-c/

Answer 5

I like the Gnome xml parser. It's open source (MIT License, so you can use it in commercial products), fast and has DOM and SAX based interfaces.

http://xmlsoft.org/

Answer 6

TiCPP is a "more c++" version of TinyXML.

'TiCPP' is short for the official name TinyXML++. It is a completely new interface to TinyXML (http://www.grinninglizard.com/tinyxml/) that uses MANY of the C++ strengths. Templates, exceptions, and much better error handling. It is also fully documented in doxygen. It is really cool because this version let's you interface tiny the exact same way as before or you can choose to use the new 'ticpp' classes. All you need to do is define TIXML_USE_TICPP. It has been tested in VC 6.0, VC 7.0, VC 7.1, VC 8.0, MinGW gcc 3.4.5, and in Linux GNU gcc 3+

Answer 7

TinyXML, and also Boost.PropertyTree. The latter does not fulfill all official requirements, but is very simple.

Answer 8

Do not use TinyXML if you're concerned about efficiency/memory management (it tends to allocate lots of tiny blocks). My personal favourite is RapidXML.

Answer 9

How about RapidXML? RapidXML is a very fast and small XML DOM parser written in C++. It is aimed primarily at embedded environments, computer games, or any other applications where available memory or CPU processing power comes at a premium. RapidXML is licensed under Boost Software License and its source code is freely available.

Features

• Parsing speed (including DOM tree building) approaching speed of strlen function executed on the same data.
• On a modern CPU (as of 2008) the parser throughput is about 1 billion characters per second. See Performance section in the Online Manual.
• Small memory footprint of the code and created DOM trees.
• A headers-only implementation, simplifying the integration process.
• Simple license that allows use for almost any purpose, both commercial and non-commercial, without any obligations.
• Supports UTF-8 and partially UTF-16, UTF-32 encodings.
• Portable source code with no dependencies other than a very small subset of C++ Standard Library.
• This subset is so small that it can be easily emulated manually if use of standard library is undesired.

Limitations

• The parser ignores DOCTYPE declarations.
• There is no support for XML namespaces.
• The parser does not check for character validity.
• The interface of the parser does not conform to DOM specification.
• The parser does not check for attribute uniqueness.

Source: wikipedia.org://Rapidxml

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Depending on you use, you may use an XML Data Binding? CodeSynthesis XSD is an XML Data Binding compiler for C++ developed by Code Synthesis and dual-licensed under the GNU GPL and a proprietary license. Given an XML instance specification (XML Schema), it generates C++ classes that represent the given vocabulary as well as parsing and serialization code.

One of the unique features of CodeSynthesis XSD is its support for two different XML Schema to C++ mappings: in-memory C++/Tree and stream-oriented C++/Parser. The C++/Tree mapping is a traditional mapping with a tree-like, in-memory data structure. C++/Parser is a new, SAX-like mapping which represents the information stored in XML instance documents as a hierarchy of vocabulary-specific parsing events. In comparison to C++/Tree, the C++/Parser mapping allows one to handle large XML documents that would not fit in memory, perform stream-oriented processing, or use an existing in-memory representation.

Source: wikipedia.org://CodeSynthesis XSD

Answer 10

Nobody said Xerces. Wonder why ;).

Answer 11

How about gSOAP? It is open source and freely available under the GPL license. Despite its name, the gSOAP toolkit is a generic XML data binding tool and allows you to bind your C and C++ data to XML automatically. There is no need to use an XML parser API, just let it read/write your data in XML format for you. If you really need a super-simple C++ XML parser then gSOAP may be an overkill. But for everything else it has worked well as testimonials show for many industrial applications since gSOAP was introduced in 2001.

Here is a brief list of features:

• Portable: Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, Unix, VxWorks, Symbian, Palm OS, WinCE, etc.
• Small footprint: 73KB code and less than 2K data to implement an XML web service client app (no DOM to limit memory usage).
• Fast: do not believe what other tools claim, the true speed should be measured with I/O. For gSOAP it is over 3000 roundtrip XML messages over TCP/IP. XML parsing overhead is negligible as it is a simple linear scan of the input/output while (de)serialization takes place.
• XML support: XML schema (XSD) import/export, WSDL import/export, XML namespaces, XML canonicalization, XML with attachments (MIME), optional use of DOM, many options to produce XML with indentation, use UTF8 strings, etc.
• XML validation: partial and full (option)
• WS support: WS-Security, WS-ReliableMessaging, WS-Addressing, WS-Policy, WS-SecurityPolicy, and other.
• Debugging: integrated memory management with leak detection, logging.
• API: no API to learn, only "soap" engine context initialization, then use the read/write interface for your data, and "soap" engine context destruction.

For example:

class Address { std::string name; std::vector<LONG64> number; time_t date; };

Then run "soapcpp2" on the Address class declaration above to generate the soap_read_Address and soap_write_Address XML reader and writer, for example:

Address *a = new Address(); a = ...; soap ctx = soap_new(); soap_write_Address(ctx, a); soap_end(ctx); soap_free(ctx);

This produces an XML representation of the Address a object. By annotating the header file declarations with XML namespace details (not shown here), the tools also generate schemas. This is a simple example. The gSOAP tools can handle a very broad range of C and C++ data types, including pointer-based linked structures and even (cyclic) graphs (rather than just trees).

Hope this helps.

Answer 12

pugixml - Light-weight, simple and fast XML parser for C++ Very small (comparable to RapidXML), very fast (comparable to RapidXML), very easy to use (better than RapidXML).

Answer 13

try this one: http://www.applied-mathematics.net/tools/xmlParser.html
it's easier and faster than RapidXML or PUGXML.
TinyXML is the worst of the "simple parser".

Answer 14

I am a C++ newbie and after trying a couple different suggestions on this page I must say I like pugixml the most. It has easy to understand documentation and a high level API which was all I was looking for.