I need a XML library for constructing simple XML messages. I come from a Java background. I've found some suggestions pointing at Xerces-C++ XML library as it was transferred.
Other suggested libraries have their advantages in memory in speed, but all of this is none of my needs. I need an API which supports an easy construction.
Furthermore I would like to ask when sending XML via sockets, do I have to pay attention on serialization or can I send plain xml texts?
Overall the focus is on building xml and none parsing at all.
A simple XML library would be TinyXML, see http://www.grinninglizard.com/tinyxmldocs/tutorial0.html for an example (under section 'Building Documents Programatically')
edit:
If the XML is really simple, you can also just output the XML tags from your code. Something like:
std::stringstream s;
s << "<tag>" << var << "</tag>\n";
std::cout << s.str();
My suggestion tinyxml Excellent performance and easy to use.
Usage : TinyXML Tutorial
or libtinyxml The TinyXML library provided with a CMake Build System.
RapidXML
RapidXml is an attempt to create the fastest XML parser possible, while retaining useability, portability and reasonable W3C compatibility.
You will build your XML file in RAM, and at any time you can convert it to a string and from that, an array of chars, meaning you will send the XML file as an array of bytes.
It seems like pugixml library is fastest though fullyfunctional, object-oriented C++ library, with support of XPath queries.
Related
I am working in Ubuntu. I have a .h file with a class and a lot of nested classes. I would like to create an XML file from an object. Can someone please give me a library that creates XML files, serializes, and deserializes objects? I am compiling with g++.
Try libxml2.
But it seems like you want to serialize and desirialize an object from and to XML. Boost::serialization might come in handy. it also supports serialization from and to XML.
Here you can find an example for Boost::serialization with XML.
If you want to handle XML in C++ you may have a look at these projects
http://xmlsoft.org/
http://www.grinninglizard.com/tinyxml/
http://xerces.apache.org/xerces-c/
It doesn't serialize with XML (which I consider a feature, personally), but Google protocol buffers does a good job of serializing (in a binary format) objects that are defined in the .proto language.
You may want to explore the XML Data Binding. The main idea is that given an xml schema the data binding software generates a class hierarchy corresponding to the schema, and the code to serialize / unserialize (called marshal / unmarshal). There are several tools that can do this, gsoap is a free one, xmlSpy is one of the commercial ones.
What you describe is an XML data binding for C++. There are several tools for what you want to do, see e.g. XML Data Binding Tools. I've used gSOAP for several C++ projects, including starting from C++ files with classes which is really nice (other tools force you to start from XML schemas or WSDLs). With gSOAP I have been able to generate XML schemas and XML, see e.g. map C/C++ types to XML schema.
A super-lightweight, simple xml library is pugixml.
Though keep in mind that C++ does not have the reflection capabilities that .NET has. No library will generate the serialization/deserialization code for you (which I guess you hoped for).
Well a lot of questions have been made about parsing XML in C++ and so on...
But, instead of a generic problem, mine is very specific.
I am asking for a very efficient XML parser for C++. In particular I have a VERY VERY BIG XML file to parse.
My application must open this file and retrieve data. It must also insert new nodes and save the final result in the file again.
To do this I used, at the beginning, rapidxml, but it requires me to open the file, parse it all (all the content because this lib has no functions to access the file directly without loading the entire tree first), then edit the tree, modify it and store the final tree on the file by overwriting it... It consumes too much resources.
Is there an XML parser that does not require me to load the entire file, but that I can use to insert, quickly, new nodes and retrieve data? Can you please indicate solutions for this problem of mine?
You want a streaming XML parser rather than what is called a DOM parser.
There are two types of streaming parsers: pull and push. A pull parser is good for quickly writing XML parsers that load data into program memory. A push parser is good for writing a program to translate one document to another (which is what you are trying to accomplish). I think, therefore, that a push parser would be best for your problem.
In order to use a push parser, you need to write what is essentially an event handler for parsing events. By "parsing event", I mean events like "start tag reached", "end tag reached", "text found", "attribute parsed", etc.
I suggest that as you read in the document, you write out the transformed document to a separate, temporary file. Thus, your XML parsing event handlers will need to be written so that they are stateful and write out the XML of the translated document incrementally.
Three excellent push parser libraries for C++ include Expat, Xerces-C++, and libxml2.
Search for "SAX parser". They are mostly tokenizers, i.e. they emit tag by tag without building a tree.
SAX parsers are faster than DOM parsers because DOM parsers read the entire file into memory before building an in-memory representation of the XML document, whereas a SAX parser behaves like an event listener and builds the document as it reads in the file. Go here for an explanation.
As you mentioned Xerces is a good C++ SAX parser.
I would recommend looking into ways of breaking the XML document into smaller XML documents as that seems to be part of your problem.
Okay, here is one off the beaten track, I looked at this, but haven't really used it myself, it's called asmxml. These boys claim performance bar none, downside, you need x86 assembler.
If you really seek high performance XML stream parser then libhpxml is likely the right thing for you.
I’m convinced that no XML library exists that allows you to modify a file without loading it first. This simply isn’t possible because files don’t work that way: you cannot insert (or remove) in the middle of a file. You can only overwrite a block of identical size, or append at the end. But your request would require to append or remove in the middle of the file.
Reading only parts of an XML file may be possible. But writing … no way.
Go for template libraries as much as possible, like Boost::property_tree or Boost::XMLParser or POCO::XML and Folly has XML Parser in it.
Avoid old C libraries, it all old code designs.
someone say QtXML module is high performance for huge XML files.
(Not sure if this should be CW or not, you're welcome to comment if you think it should be).
At my workplace, we have many many different file formats for all kinds of purposes. Most, if not all, of these file formats are just written in plain text, with no consistency. I'm only a student working part-time, and I have no experience with using xml in production, but it seems to me that using xml would improve productivity, as we often need to parse, check and compare these outputs.
So my questions are: given that I can only control one small application and its output (only - the inputs are formats that are used in other applications as well), is it worth trying to change the output to be xml-based? If so, what are the best known ways to do that in C++ (i.e., xml parsers/writers, etc.)? Also, should I also provide a plain-text output to make it easy for the users (which are also programmers) to get used to xml? Should I provide a script to translate xml-plaintext? What are your experiences with this subject?
Thanks.
Don't just use XML because it's XML.
Use XML because:
other applications (that only accept XML) are going to read your output
you have an hierarchical data structure that lends itself perfectly for XML
you want to transform the data to other formats using XSL (e.g. to HTML)
EDIT:
A nice personal experience:
Customer: your application MUST be able to read XML.
Me: Er, OK, I will adapt my application so it can read XML.
Same customer (a few days later): your application MUST be able to read fixed width files, because we just realized our mainframe cannot generate XML.
Amir, to parse an XML you can use TinyXML which is incredibly easy to use and start with. Check its documentation for a quick brief, and read carefully the "what it does not do" clause. Been using it for reading and all I can say is that this tiny library does the job, very well.
As for writing - if your XML files aren't complex you might build them manually with a string object. "Aren't complex" for me means that you're only going to store text at most.
For more complex XML reading/writing you better check Xerces which is heavier than TinyXML. I haven't used it yet I've seen it in production and it does deliver it.
You can try using the boost::property_tree class.
http://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_43_0/doc/html/property_tree.html
http://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_43_0/doc/html/boost_propertytree/tutorial.html
http://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_43_0/doc/html/boost_propertytree/parsers.html#boost_propertytree.parsers.xml_parser
It's pretty easy to use, but the page does warn that it doesn't support the XML format completely. If you do use this though, it gives you the freedom to easily use XML, INI, JSON, or INFO files without changing more than just the read_xml line.
If you want that ability though, you should avoid xml attributes. To use an attribute, you have to look at the key , which won't transfer between filetypes (although you can manually create your own subnodes).
Although using TinyXML is probably better. I've seen it used before in a couple of projects I've worked on, but don't have any experience with it.
Another approach to handling XML in your application is to use a data binding tool, such as CodeSynthesis XSD. Such a tool will generate C++ classes that hide all the gory details of parsing/serializing XML -- all that you see are objects corresponding to your XML vocabulary and functions that you can call to get/set the data, for example:
Person p = person ("person.xml");
cout << p.name ();
p.name ("John");
p.age (30);
ofstream ofs ("person.xml");
person (ofs, p);
Here's what previous SO threads have said on the topic. Please add others you know of that are relevant:
What is the best open XML parser for C++?
What is XML good for and when should i be using it?
What are good alternative data formats to XML?
BTW, before you decide on an XML parser, you may want to make sure that it will actually be able to parse all XML documents instead of just the "simple" ones, as discussed in this article:
Are you using a real XML parser?
I have a couple of questions about XML.
Can XML be used for normal c++ application instead of using a text file ?
If so, does this method have advantages?
and finally, how can I use XML to store data? what tools are needed?
Regards.
You can use XML for storing information - it's less Human readable than a text file, but can be more easily communicated with other systems and coding languages.
If all you need is a few text/numeric properties, stick to a property file.
If you need a mix of configuration options, and you want to use validation (can be accomplished using XML schema), automatic modification (e.g. XSL transformations) or communicate it easily with Web Services, than XML is useful.
If you want to store binary data, XML is probably not that answer. Though you can store it in a filesystem and use the XML for the metadata (i.e. where each file is located).
Take a look at Apache Xerces-C for C++ XML code - http://xerces.apache.org/xerces-c/
XML can be parsed as a text file by your application. There are libraries available.
Advantage: the files can be exchanged with other applications more easily, especially if you provide an XML-schema file.
Storing data in XML can be done with boost.serialization
It depends of the kind of data you want to read/write, but XML is generally a good way to go for storing structured and hierarchical datas.
You can use librairies such as TinyXML to easily parse and write XML files in C++.
The main drawback is that XML is verbose ; that's why you can also use an alternative such as JSON to store your datas.
I am using C++ from Mingw, which is the windows version of GNC C++.
What I want to do is: serialize C++ object into an XML file and deserialize object from XML file on the fly. I check TinyXML. It's pretty useful, and (please correct me if I misunderstand it) it basically add all the nodes during processing, and finally put them into a file in one chunk using TixmlDocument::saveToFile(filename) function.
I am working on real-time processing, and how can I write to a file on the fly and append the following result to the file?
Thanks.
BOOST has a very nice Serialization/Deserialization lib BOOST.Serialization.
If you stream your objects to a boost xml archive it will stream them in xml format.
If xml is to big or to slow you only need to change the archive in a text or binary archive to change the streaming format.
Here is a better example of C++ object serialization:
http://www.codeproject.com/KB/XML/XMLFoundation.aspx
I notice that each TiXmlBase Class has a Print method and also supports streaming to strings and streams.
You could walk the new parts of the document in sequence and output those parts as they are added, maybe?
Give it a try.....
Tony
I've been using gSOAP for this purpose. It is probably too powerful for just XML serialization, but knowing it can do much more means I do not have to consider other solutions for more advanced projects since it also supports WSDL, SOAP, XML-RPC, and JSON. Also suitable for embedded and small devices, since XML is simply a transient wire format and not kept in a DOM or something memory intensive.