libstudxml: A modern XML API for C++
libstudxml is an XML library for modern, standard C++. It has an API that I believe should have already been in Boost or even in the C++ standard library.
The API was first presented at the C++Now 2014 conference. Based on the positive feedback and encouragement I received during the talk, I've decided to make the implementation generally available.
As an example, we can parse this XML:
<person id="123"> <name>John Doe</name> <age>23</age> <gender>male</gender> </person>
With the following C++ code, which performs all the validation necessary for this XML vocabulary:
enum class gender {...};
ifstream ifs (argv[1]);
parser p (ifs, argv[1]);
p.next_expect (parser::start_element, "person", content::complex);
long id = p.attribute<long> ("id");
string n = p.element ("name");
short a = p.element<short> ("age");
gender g = p.element<gender> ("gender");
p.next_expect (parser::end_element); // person
The API has the following interesting features:
- Streaming pull parser and streaming serializer
- Two-level API: minimum overhead low-level & more convenient high-level
- Content model-aware (empty, simple, complex, mixed)
- Whitespace processing based on content model
- Validation based on content model
- Validation of missing/extra attributes
- Validation of unexpected events (elements, etc)
- Data extraction to value types
- Attribute map with extended lifetime (high-level API)
libstudxml is compact, external dependency-free, and reasonably efficient. The XML parser is a conforming, non-validating XML 1.0 implementation that is based on tested and proven code. The library is released under the MIT license.
More information, documentation, and source code are available from libstudxml project page. Or, you can jump directly to the API description with examples.