h1. AQXMLParser

h2. Overview

This is an extract of AQXMLParser from "AQToolkit":http://github.com/AlanQuatermain/aqtoolkit/.

h2. Usage

5 easy steps:

Add AQXMLParser.m and AQXMLParser.h to your project.

Add @$(SDKROOT)/usr/include/libxml2/@ to your @header search path@

Add @-lxml2@ to your @other linker flags@

Add @CFNetwork.framework@ to the exsisting frameworks.

Replace the word NSXMLParser with AQXMLParser, and add #include "AQXMLParser.h" in affected sources

h2. Contents

It revolves around a new event-based XML parser, designed to function in nearly the same manner as NSXMLParser, with the same delegation routines. The main difference is that AQXMLParser is a streaming parser and it provides data in discrete blocks to the libxml2 parser library. This means significant memory savings for large XML documents - this can be especially important on iPhone. It also allows NSInputStream/NSURLRequest as its data source - in addition to NSData and NSURL.

It is initialized, setup, and used in the same way as a standard NSXMLParser. Note that, for compile-time type checking, the delegate routines for AQXMLParser are declared again here, with AQXMLParser replacing NSXMLParser. These routines are now also declared inside a protocol using the @optional keyword, to match the new delegation API constructs used in the iPhone SDK. Also the use AQXMLParserDelegate protocol is optional.

AQXMLParser is fully gc-compliant, or can be used in a managed-memory environment.