Thread: Parsing XML file into C structs

Sounds like mini-xml is what you need Mini-XML

I've use it before, it's great.

It doesn't say anywhere that MS Visual Studio DOESN'T work - it says that it WORKS with gcc. I'd give it a go.

--
Mats

Originally Posted by nonoob

Quick and dirty...

Yeah, but it's got so much potential for disaster. If any of those strstr()s fail, if there's some oddity like an entity, the XML isn't ascii, other tags, the id attribute contains an x, y or z, etc. (What's the char *p for?)
And z appears to be a float/double, btw.
But, like you said, quick and dirty.

I'd take the time to learn an XML library. If you've not compiled many libraries before, this is a good opportunity. (I've compiled libxml2 on Linux & Windows, granted, I used gcc both times... perhaps they have a binary download?) You'll run into full blown XML parsing sooner or later.
You could XSLT it into an easier format, perhaps too. (I'm learning XSLT at the moment... so it's at the top of my head...)

If all of your data follows such a strict layout -- i.e., one tag per line etc -- then you could use some scripting to convert the data into a more easily parseable form. Just a thought. I wouldn't do this if your program will be run often in the future because it's not very robust, but a simple script like this could make your life a lot easier in C:

Code:

$ cat input
  <node id="4700-Z$0" x="322" y="-505" z="0.0" />
  <node id="4701" x="356" y="-454" z="0.0" />
  <node id="4702-H" x="402" y="-456" z="0.0" />
  <node id="4704" x="400" y="-428" z="0.0" />
  <node id="4705" x="455" y="-426" z="0.0" />
$ perl -ne 'while(/\s(?:id|[xyz])="([^"]+)"/g) { print "$1 " } print "\n"' input
4700-Z$0 322 -505 0.0
4701 356 -454 0.0
4702-H 402 -456 0.0
4704 400 -428 0.0
4705 455 -426 0.0
$

That's in the spirit of even more quick and dirty solutions. If this program is actually going to be used more than once, for sure look into libmxml. I've used it before too (thanks to zacs7!) and would highly recommend it. libexpat is good too.