Choosing the right IOS XML parser [closed]

Question

There are a million different XML parsers for the iPhone. I have a medium sized XML file that contains alot of duplicate tags (at different points in the hierarchy). I was thinking about TBXML but I was concerned about its lack of XPath support. For instance lets say my XML file looked like this.

<blog>
   <author> foo1 </author>
   <comments>

       <comment>
            <text>
                <![CDATA[ HTML code that must be extracted ]]>
            </text>
            <author>foo2</author>
       </comment>

       <comment>
          <text>
              <![CDATA[ Here is another post ]]> 
          </text>
          <author>foo1</author>
      </comment>

   </comments>
</blog>

Basically my requirements are that I need to be able to extract that cdata. And know whether it is the blog author a comment author.

Answer 1

Best comparison I've seen on the subject:

http://www.raywenderlich.com/553/how-to-chose-the-best-xml-parser-for-your-iphone-project

The difference between the slowest and fastest parsers in his case was a factor of 2. Depending on your feature requirements, there are definitely parsers that can cut your parsing time in half.

Answer 2

Check out RaptureXML. It's not official XPath behavior, but it's pretty close. Your query would be:

[rxml iterate:@"comments.comment" with: ^(RXMLElement *e) {
    if ([[e child:@"author"].text isEqualToString:@"foo1"]) {
        NSLog(@"Blog Text is %@.", e.text);
    } else {
        NSLog(@"Comment Text is %@.", e.text);
    }
}];

UPDATE: RaptureXML now supports XPath!

Answer 3

You should look at these libraries, in order :)

1. Ono, powered by libxml2
2. XMLDictionary
3. RaptureXML

Ono has the the cool AFOnoResponseSerializer which can be integrated with AFNetworking