What's a good C/C++ XML library?

Message

Angrychile · Post by **Angrychile** » Mon Oct 18, 2010 2:21 pm

Just asking... Being C++ would be great.

aqu · Post by **aqu** » Mon Oct 18, 2010 2:44 pm

Xerces-C++ is a nice & easy to use parser
TinyXML is also nice if you seek for small package

Angrychile · Post by **Angrychile** » Mon Oct 18, 2010 3:44 pm

I was looking at TinyXML. If you don't mind, what is libxml like? (I know it's in C, but I don't dislike C at all).

And, just another random question, where can I find man pages for the STL (is there an thing on portage for that?

)

aqu · Post by **aqu** » Mon Oct 18, 2010 3:49 pm

I used libxml only a few times so i don't have really strong opinion about it.
About STL: they may be few man pages for functions but you can take a look at reference on this site http://www.cplusplus.com/

dmitchell · Post by **dmitchell** » Mon Oct 18, 2010 5:48 pm

For C++ man pages, compile gcc with the "doc" use flag. But they aren't very helpful. The various online references are better.

Da Fox · Post by **Da Fox** » Mon Oct 18, 2010 11:51 pm

I vote against libxml. I used it for a school project recently, but I didn't really like it. The documentation is horrible, they only have auto-generated doxygen and not the good kind, e.g. without useful comments on what a function does, how to call it, when to call it, etc. There are a few examples but they don't really show anything useful.
Also there were a few strange bugs I had (mainly with freeing objects, which I just gave up on in the end), likely because of the aforementioned documentation.

One thing I would ask however is, would please let us know how your choice of library (whichever you choose) works out? E.g. why did you (not) like it, how was the documentation, etc.

Letharion · Post by **Letharion** » Tue Oct 19, 2010 9:15 am

I use Xerces. It was fairly easy to get started with, with (IIRC) useful examples.
If you can, I'd recommend finding a parser generator however, it's so much easier to work with something like JAXB instead of SAX/DOM.
I need a pure C lib however, and haven't found one such. I would take a close look at this: http://www.codesynthesis.com/products/xsd/ if I had the C++ choice.

Potentially because I've been lazy with reading documentation, I've found myself writing a number of helper functions around the data parsing in Xerces.
This doesn't feel very good, as I kinda "fight" the lib, but it could very well be that Xerces provides methods for what I want, I just haven't found them.
The helpers functions do things like hide the transcoding, convert strings to floats and such.