semi/signal

I recently put up the SlashXML library on bitbucket. SlashXML provides a way to retrieve data from an XML document via path names to elements. It’s somewhat in the same vein as XPath, but much simpler. I wrote this way back when because I was annoyed at the more conventional method of having to extract data during the depth-first traversal of the document tree – this is a fine way to parse the document and pull in the data but not necessarily the most elegant way to query it. I haven’t written any documentation so, as I did with the bluetooth stuff, I’ll post a quick-and-dirty tutorial here.

The C# code files and .NET DLL are up now (/cs folder). I do have a version of this in C++ which uses TinyXML, but there’s a major bug that needs to be resolved before I upload it.

Load an XML document from a file

SlashXML.SlashXMLReader xmlReader = new SlashXML.SlashXMLReader();
xmlReader.LoadXMLFile(filepath);


Load an XML document from a string

SlashXML.SlashXMLReader xmlReader = new SlashXML.SlashXMLReader();
xmlReader.LoadXMLString(xmlString);

Retrieve data from an element

string data = xmlReader.GetDataAt("root/child");

If the element doesn’t exist, has no data, or contains other elements instead of data, the return value will be null.

Retrieve data from an indexed element

string data = xmlReader.GetDataAt("root/child[2]");

Indexing on data read in occurs when there are multiple elements with the same name.

Get the number of child nodes under an element

int numChildren = xmlReader.GetNumChildren("root", "child");

Note that underlying SlashXML.SlashXMLReader is SlashXML.StringTreeUtility.StringTree which actually holds the data read in and which can be queried directly for the data. Also, SlashXML reads everything into memory – do not use this for massive files (e.g. 1GB+ documents)! In fact, you should probably reconsider your use of XML if your files are that massive.

You’ll notice a major missing feature here – retrieving data in attributes! It’s not too difficult to do, but I haven’t had time to do it. It’ll be in a future version.

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