xmlparsing(3)							       Coin							     xmlparsing(3)

NAME

       xmlparsing - XML Parsing with Coin For Coin 3.0, we added an XML parser to Coin. This document describes how it can be used for generic
       purposes.

       Why another XML parser, you might ask? First of all, the XML parser is actually a third-party parser, expat. Coin needed one, and many
       Coin-dependent projects needed one as well. We therefore needed to expose an API for it. However, integrating a 3rd-party parser into Coin,
       we can not expose its API directly, or other projects also using Expat would get conflicts. We therefore needed to expose the XML API with
       a unique API, hence the API you see here. It is based on a XML DOM API we use(d) in a couple of other projects, but it has been tweaked to
       fit into Coin and to be wrapped over Expat (the original implementation just used flex).

       The XML parser is both a streaming parser and a DOM parser. Being a streaming parser means that documents can be read in without having to
       be fully contained in memory. When used as a DOM parser, the whole document is fully parsed in first, and then inspected by client code by
       traversing the DOM. The two modes can actually be mixed arbitrarily if ending up with a partial DOM sounds useful.

       The XML parser has both a C API and a C++ API. The C++ API is just a wrapper around the C API, and only serves as convenience if you prefer
       to read/write C++ code (which is tighter) over more verbose C code.

       The C API naming convention may look a bit strange, unless you have written libraries to be wrapped for scheme/lisp-like languages before.
       Then you might be familiar with the convention of suffixing your functions based on their behaviour/usage meaning. Mutating functions are
       suffixed with '!', or '_x' for (eXclamation point), and predicates are suffixed with '?', or '_p' in C.

       The simplest way to use the XML parser is to just call cc_xml_read_file(filename) and then traverse the DOM model through using
       cc_xml_doc_get_root(), cc_xml_elt_get_child(), and cc_xml_elt_get_attr().

       See also:
	   XML related functions and objects, cc_xml_doc, cc_xml_elt, cc_xml_attr

Version 3.1.3							  Wed May 23 2012						     xmlparsing(3)