Question

I’d like to use NSXMLParser to parse a large xml file. There are a few thousand elements on the root level, so it’s too large for a tree based approach. Ideally, I would like to parse each of those one thousand elements individually into a tree and then do some (more complicated) parsing on them. I only need the string values (including the xml markup) of these root level elements which I can then hand off to my already existing tree based parser. I wasn’t able to find out how to do that with NSXMLParser, if possible at all.

Imagine an xml file like this

<start>
 <record>
  <title>The Title</title>
  <content>Some content</content>
 </record>
 <record>
  <title>The Title</title>
  <content>Some content</content>
 </record>
</start>

For each record, I’d like to get a string containing <title>The Title</title> <content>Some content</content>.

Answer 1

I ended up rewriting everything as a SAX parser. It is slightly more complicated to implement and fairly restrictive, but the speed up and memory usage is really worth it in my case.