ezXML 0.8.6 review

ezXML is a C library for parsing XML documents inspired by simpleXML for PHP

License: MIT/X Consortium License File size: 0K Developer: Aaron Voisine

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ezXML is a C library for parsing XML documents inspired by simpleXML for PHP. As the name implies, it's easy to use.

It's also fast and lightweight (less than 20k compiled).

Example Usage
Given the following example XML document:
< ?xml version="1.0"?>
< formula1>
< team name="McLaren">
< driver>
< name>Kimi Raikkonen< /name>
< points>45< /points>
< /driver>
< driver>
< name>David Coultard< /name>
< points>24< /points>
< /driver>
< /team>
< /formula1>
This code snippet prints out a list of drivers, which team they drive for, and how many championship points they have:
ezxml_t f1 = ezxml_parse_file("formula1.xml"), team, driver;
const char *teamname;

for (team = ezxml_child(f1, "team"); team; team = team->next) {
teamname = ezxml_attr(team, "name");
for (driver = ezxml_child(team, "driver"); driver; driver = driver->next) {
printf("%s, %s: %sn", ezxml_child(driver, "name")->txt, teamname,
ezxml_child(driver, "points")->txt);
}
}
ezxml_free(f1);
Alternately, the following would print out the name of the second driver of the first team:
ezxml_t f1 = ezxml_parse_file("formula1.xml");

printf("%sn", ezxml_get(f1, "team", 0, "driver", 1, "name", -1)->txt);
ezxml_free(f1);
The -1 indicates the end of the argument list. That's pretty much all there is to it. Complete API documentation can be found in ezxml.h.

Limitations:
ezXML is not a validating parser.

Loads the entire XML document into memory at once and does not allow for documents to be passed in a chunk at a time. Large XML files can still be handled though through ezxml_parse_file() and ezxml_parse_fd(), which use mmap to map the file to a virtual address space and rely on the virtual memory system to page in data as needed.

Does not currently recognize all possible well-formedness errors. It should correctly handle all well-formed XML documents and will either ignore or halt XML processing on well-formedness errors. More well-formedness checking will be added in subsiquent releases.

In making the character content of tags easy to access, there is no way provided to keep track of the location of sub tags relative to the character data. Example:
< doc>line one< br/>
line two< /doc>
The character content of the doc tag is reported as "line onenline two", and < br/> is reported as a sub tag, but the location of < br/> within the character data is not. The function ezxml_toxml() will convert an ezXML structure back to XML with sub tag locations intact.

What's New in This Release:
A bug was fixed in ezxml_add_child() that could occur when adding tags out of order.
For consistency, ezxml_set_attr() now returns the tag given.
ezxml_move() was added, along with its supporting functions ezxml_cut() and ezxml_insert().
A bug was fixed where parsing an empty file could cause a segfault.