Question

Being new to libxml2 I am confused why xmlParseFile always returns nil

uses
  libxml2;

procedure TForm1.FormCreate(Sender: TObject);
var
  doc: xmlDocPtr;
begin
  doc := xmlParseFile('1.xml'); // doc is nil
  doc := xmlParseFile('c:\1.xml'); // doc is again nil
end;

Sample 1.xml:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<root>
</root>

The xml is reported to be well-formed by both XML Spy 2007 and xmllint tools.

I use the precompiled DLLs from http://xmlsoft.org and tries this code with both DelphiAPI-2.6.26 and libxml2-pas-2-7-3-src without luck.

I guess I am missing something?

The debugger just jumps over the line since it points to an external reference like this:

function xmlParseFile (const filename: PChar) : xmlDocPtr; cdecl; external LIBXML2_SO;

Answer 1

With all credit going to Remy I will put the answer instead of him to have this closed:

Changing the Delphi wrapper from PChar (which is PWideChar in XE and XE2) to PAnsiChar resolved the problem. Once the definition of the function was changed to

function xmlParseFile (const filename: PWideChar) : xmlDocPtr; cdecl; 
external LIBXML2_SO; 

it worked fine.