I am using the libxml2 libraries to parse XML sent to me (my program) as a file from another program. With care that should mean that I never get bad XML, but twice already I’ve made hand tweaks that broke the XML in the received file. By broken I mean that the elements have errors, end tags not matching start tags, random characters in between tags, etc.
The file is small so there are no particular memory worries about loading all of it into the parser, so I use xmlReadFile() to read in the doc.
My problem comes when the XML is broken. xmlReadFile() does an abend and core dumps. I can’t catch it with an exception nor does setting the flag to “recover” work.
I’ve looked at Google with minimum success. I found xmllint, but I really would like not to have to call system() or popen() every time I get a new XML file. I looked at DTDs but can’t seem to figure out how to tell a DTD to actually validate the value passed in a . (Many of the tags in the doc have values that are one of a set of, say, 5 possible answers.) Of course, if DTD worked I at least wouldn’t crash the xmlReadFile().
Any suggestions on how to validate the XML before xmlReadFile() or with xmlReadFile() and how to prevent the crashes? Does xmllint have a C++ interface that I just haven’t found?
No boost. No changing libraries.
Have you tried
xmlReaderForFile(... XML_PARSE_RECOVER ...)?