Re: [xml] Most portable xml library?

[Bjoern Hoehrmann <derhoermi gmx net>]

* richardcavell mail com wrote:
> I'm writing a Wikipedia bot in C.  It is designed to be as standard and 
> portable as possible.  I'm looking for an XML library to parse the 
> output of Wikipedia requests.  The tasks are in fact very simple.  For 
> example, look at the login result item here:
>
> http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/API:Login
>
> My bot currently does XML parsing with <string.h> and does it 
> correctly.  But it's not the pro way to do it.

It seems unlikely to me that you have implemented a fully conforming XML
processor yet would describe it as implemented "with <string.h>". Also,
having written a couple of tools that interace with the MediaWiki API, I
would also recommend against using anything but the JSON/JSON-P formats;
in my case I tried using the YAML output and found many bugs.

> Is libxml2 the most portable XML library?

That is unlikely, simply because the library offers many features; there
are simpler libraries, like expat, that are likely to be more portable.
I am not sure though if portability should be much of a concern here.

> And is there example code for extracting individual items from the 
> result?  I don't desire to parse the entire document.

There are plenty of examples, but unless the format you care about has a
"you don't need to parse beyond this" marker, you cannot avoid "parsing"
entire documents, as you need to "parse" to discriminate between things
you care about and things you do not care about.
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