iOS XML writer class

Question

I want to create a game, that will use a level system. So i want to store my levels and to be able to change them during the game (to save the state). So i decided to use XML for storing levels. I found NSXmlParser class for reading from XML, but i can't find a writer to save the level state. In my game the level state and the level are very similar ( i have a lot of movable objects), so i don't wan't to store the level state data separated from the level it belongs. The problem is that i can't find a way to easily modify XML files on iPhone. Maybe i'm using a bad approach.

Answer 1

If you throw the data in an NSDictionary, you could do (with caveats):

[myDictionary writeToFile:pathToPlist atomically:YES];

Answer 2

Try the open source XML stream writer for iOS:

• Written in Objective-C, a single .h. and .m file
• One @protocol for namespace support and one for without

Example:

// allocate serializer
XMLWriter* xmlWriter = [[XMLWriter alloc]init];

// start writing XML elements
[xmlWriter writeStartElement:@"Root"];
[xmlWriter writeCharacters:@"Text content for root element"];
[xmlWriter writeEndElement];

// get the resulting XML string
NSString* xml = [xmlWriter toString];

This produces the following XML string:

<Root>Text content for root element</Root>

Answer 3

I would recommend using KissXML. The author started in a similar situation as you and created an NSXML compatible API wrapper around libxml. He discusses the options and decisions here on his blog.

Answer 4

You can use the C libary libxml2 to read and write XML. Here's a quick intro: Cocoa Samurai: Getting Some XML Love with libXML2.

However, have you considered using CoreData or implementing the NSCoding protocol? NSCoding would be easier to add to existing classes.