iOS Programming: The Big Nerd Ranch Guide

For the More Curious: NSXMLParser

NSXMLParser is the built-in XML parser in the iOS SDK. While there are plenty of parsers you can pick up on the Internet, adding a third party dependency is sometimes difficult. Many developers, seeing that NSXMLParser is not a tree-based parser (it doesn’t create an object graph out of the box), go searching for an alternative parser. However, in this chapter, you’ve learned how to make NSXMLParser into a tree-based parser.

To parse simple XML, all you need are the three delegate methods used in this chapter. More complex XML has element attributes, namespaces, CDATA, and a slew of other items that need to be handled. NSXMLParser can handle these, too. The NSXMLParserDelegate protocol includes many more methods ...