what’s the easiest way to generate xml in c++?

by

I recently reviewed a bunch of XML libraries specifically for generating XML code.

Executive summary: I chose to go with TinyXML++.

TinyXML++ has decent C++ syntax, is built on the mature TinyXML C libraries, is free & open source (MIT license) and small. In short, it helps get the job done quickly. Here’s a quick snippet:

Document doc;
Node* root(doc.InsertEndChild(Element("RootNode")));
Element measurements("measurements");
Element tbr("TotalBytesReceived",  12);
measurements.InsertEndChild(tbr);
root->InsertEndChild(measurements);

Which produces:

<RootNode>
    <measurements>
        <TotalBytesReceived>12</TotalBytesReceived>
    </measurements>
</RootNode>

I’ve been quite happy with it.

I reviewed many others; here’s some of the better contenders:

Xerces: The king-daddy. Does everything (especially when combined with Xalan) but is heavyweight and forces memory management onto the user.

RapidXML: Great for parsing (it’s an in-situ parser and is fast) but not good for generation since adding nodes to the DOM requires memory management.

Boost.XML (proposal): Looks great – powerful, excellent C++ syntax. However it hasn’t yet gone through the review process, is unsupported and the interface may well change. Almost used it anyway. Looking forward to it’s acceptance into Boost.

Libxml(++): Very good; powerful, decent syntax. But it’s large-ish if all you’re doing is generating XML and is tied to the glibmm library (for ustring). If we were only on Linux (like yourself?) I would seriously consider.

XiMOL: Unique stream-based library. This was a little too simplistic for our needs but for basic XML generation you may find it quite useful. The stream syntax is quite neat.

Hopefully there’s something in there of some use!

More Related Contents:

  1. How to Deserialize XML document
  2. How do you serialize an object in C++?
  3. What is the best open XML parser for C++? [duplicate]
  4. Is it possible to serialize and deserialize a class in C++?
  5. Serializing a class which contains a std::string
  6. Serializing private member data
  7. How to implement serialization in C++
  8. Boost C++ Serialization overhead
  9. Portability of binary serialization of double/float type in C++
  10. Can you specify format for XmlSerialization of a datetime?
  11. How to deserialize XML if the return type could be an Error or Success object
  12. XML Deserialization of collection property with code defaults
  13. Wrap properties with CData Section – XML Serialization C#
  14. Using Boost to read and write XML files
  15. XmlSerializer – There was an error reflecting type
  16. How can I serialize internal classes using XmlSerializer?
  17. Error Deserializing Xml to Object – xmlns=” was not expected
  18. Serialize an object to XElement and Deserialize it in memory
  19. Serializing OpenCV Mat_
  20. How to Serialize List?
  21. Deserializing XML File with multiple element attributes – attributes are not deserializing
  22. FileMode.Open and FileMode.OpenOrCreate difference when file exists? c# bug?
  23. How to do serialization of Class having members of custom data types in C++? [closed]
  24. How do I map XML to C# objects
  25. Serializing Lists of Classes to XML
  26. How to deserialize only part of an XML document in C#
  27. How do you use XMLSerialize for Enum typed properties in c#?
  28. Get private data members for non intrusive boost serialization C++
  29. how to do performance test using the boost library for a custom library
  30. How can I extend a lexical cast to support enumerated types?

Leave a Comment