Question

I am being returned some XML from a web service. Basically, the xml looks like this:

<response>
    <data>
    More XML here but the it's escaped by XML entities
    </data>
</response>

so, as you can see, I have xml that is valid, but the stuff inside data tag is escaped with XML entities. what’s the best (most efficient) way for me to feed this into the parser?

What I am doing right now is, when I get the data from web service, I convert it into NSString….then replace the “XML escaped entities” with real ones…..then convert it back into NSData…then feed it into the parser. This doesn’t seem like a very good solution so I was wondering if there’s a better way to do it?

Thanks.

Alright, here’s the xml that I am getting:

<s:Envelope xmlns:s="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/"><s:Header><ActivityId CorrelationId="d39007b5-ee69-41c7-a61d-831b456f9ea3" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/2004/09/ServiceModel/Diagnostics">aa88d1cd-253c-48d1-abeb-62a880bea806</ActivityId></s:Header><s:Body xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema"><LoginResponse xmlns="http://MSS"><LoginResult>&lt;LoginInformation&gt;&#xD;
  &lt;User&gt;&#xD;
    &lt;UserID&gt;612&lt;/UserID&gt;&#xD;
    &lt;UserName&gt;Demo User&lt;/UserName&gt;&#xD;
    &lt;Email&gt;[e-mail]&lt;/Email&gt;&#xD;
    &lt;CompanyID&gt;17034&lt;/CompanyID&gt;&#xD;
    &lt;CompanyName&gt;PlanET Demonstration Agency&lt;/CompanyName&gt;&#xD;
  &lt;/User&gt;&#xD;
&lt;/LoginInformation&gt;</LoginResult></LoginResponse></s:Body></s:Envelope>

As you can see, everything in is escaped.

Answer 1

That’s kind of horrifying. Why don’t you just take the contents of that tag (e.g. the data with the entities) and just pass that through another NSXMLParser? The first parser will have decoded the entities, and the second parser will be presented with the decoded version of the contents of that tag.