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Asked: 2026-05-13T18:26:24+00:00

I’m trying to parse a Stack Overflow RSS feed of a specific question: https://stackoverflow.com/feeds/question/2110875

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I’m trying to parse a Stack Overflow RSS feed of a specific question:
https://stackoverflow.com/feeds/question/2110875

For this I’m using the TouchXML library. There seems to be a problem in the following code:

CXMLDocument *parser = [[CXMLDocument alloc] initWithData:sourceData options:0 error:nil];
NSArray *allEntries = [parser nodesForXPath:@"//entry" error:nil];
NSLog(@"Found entries: %d",[allEntries count]); //Returns 0

The NSLog statement should return the count of all entries in the feed. In this case it should be ‘3’, problem is that it returns 0.

I found that this piece of code does work:

CXMLDocument *preParser = [[CXMLDocument alloc] initWithData:sourceData options:0 error:nil];
NSString *sourceStringUTF8 = [preParser XMLString];
[preParser release];

CXMLDocument *parser = [[CXMLDocument alloc] initWithData:[sourceStringUTF8 dataUsingEncoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding] options:0 error:nil];
NSArray *allEntries = [parser nodesForXPath:@"//entry" error:nil];
NSLog(@"Found entries: %d",[allEntries count]); //Returns 3, which is ok

But using this seems hacky (it probably is) and introduces a few other sporadic bugs.

As far as I know the Xpath expression is correct. I’ve checked it using this page as well.

Can anyone help me with this problem, or point me in the right direction.

Thanks.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    I had a very similar problem. This has something to do with the xml namespace, which TouchXML doesn’t support very well (a known issue).

    I believe that in your hack, the namespace wasn’t passed into the second parser, that’s why it works.

    A easier way is just to change

    <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="en" xml:lang="en">

    replaced with simply 

    <html>

    and xPath now works.

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