C++: How to extract a string from RapidXml

Question

In my C++ program I want to parse a small piece of XML, insert some nodes, then extract the new XML (preferably as a std::string).
RapidXml has been recommended to me, but I can't see how to retrieve the XML back as a text string.
(I could iterate over the nodes and attributes and build it myself, but surely there's a build in function that I am missing.)
Thank you.

Answer 1

Althoug the documentation is poor on this topic, I managed to get some working code by looking at the source. Although it is missing the xml header which normally contains important information. Here is a small example program that does what you are looking for using rapidxml:

#include <iostream>
#include <sstream>
#include "rapidxml/rapidxml.hpp"
#include "rapidxml/rapidxml_print.hpp"

int main(int argc, char* argv[]) {
    char xml[] = "<?xml version=\"1.0\" encoding=\"latin-1\"?>"
                 "<book>"
                 "</book>";

    //Parse the original document
    rapidxml::xml_document<> doc;
    doc.parse<0>(xml);
    std::cout << "Name of my first node is: " << doc.first_node()->name() << "\n";

    //Insert something
    rapidxml::xml_node<> *node = doc.allocate_node(rapidxml::node_element, "author", "John Doe");
    doc.first_node()->append_node(node);

    std::stringstream ss;
    ss <<*doc.first_node();
    std::string result_xml = ss.str();
    std::cout <<result_xml<<std::endl;
    return 0;
}

Answer 2

rapidxml::print reuqires an output iterator to generate the output, so a character string works with it. But this is risky because I can not know whether an array with fixed length (like 2048 bytes) is long enough to hold all the content of the XML.

The right way to do this is to pass in an output iterator of a string stream so allow the buffer to be expanded when the XML is being dumped into it.

My code is like below:

std::stringstream stream;
std::ostream_iterator<char> iter(stream);

rapidxml::print(iter, doc, rapidxml::print_no_indenting);

printf("%s\n", stream.str().c_str());
printf("len = %d\n", stream.str().size());