iPhone Development - XMLParser vs. libxml2 vs. TouchXML

[ghulam.mustafa]

I cannot find comparison of these parsing technique. Which one is most commonly used? Which one is the best? Which one is recommended.

My findings are that people hate XMLParser, when they talk about implementation. But i need more information.

Regards.
Mustafa

[smasher]

Originally Posted by ghulam.mustafa

I cannot find comparison of these parsing technique. Which one is most commonly used? Which one is the best? Which one is recommended.

My findings are that people hate XMLParser, when they talk about implementation. But i need more information.

Regards.
Mustafa

XMLParser is.... different. I've used it in two apps, and it's not bad. It breaks down each tag in the document into a series of events, and for each event you can take action to save the data to your own data structure. It's memory efficient - you only save the data you need, and the rest gets tossed out. Great for scanning big docs without using a lot of memory. Annoying to have to specify each tag you want to save.

It looks like TouchXML loads an entire document at once, as a tree; then you can walk through it at your leisure and get data from the nodes you need. This is the way most people are used to dealing with XML in other environments - load the whole doc into a tree. It'll take a lot of memory if it's a large document, though.