Question

I’m writing an iPhone app that downloads data from the Flickr API. At the moment there seems to be no way to limit how many comments it downloads, and although I’d like to get maybe 8 or 10, it sometimes sends me hundreds. I have subclassed ASIHTTPRequest so that it will only download a set amount of bytes (for example, it will stop downloading after receiving 1024 bytes of comment data).

Now, the information I’d like to parse is all there (the comment data contains things like a user id, the text, etc.). However, since it is cut off before the end, the XML is malformed, and my current solution (using ObjectiveFlickr’s XML parser) is unable to parse the XML. Is there a way to handle badly formed XML, a la the way old web browsers handled HTML, and only extract the data that is well-formed?

Here is some sample data:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<rsp stat="ok">
<comments photo_id="5692627867">
    <comment id="49862655-5692627867-72157626659891768" author="29114051@N05" authorname="eαse*" iconserver="4046" iconfarm="5" datecreate="1304689286" permalink="http://www.flickr.com/photos/kikicchi/5692627867/#comment72157626659891768">lovely lovely lovelyyyyy!!! ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥</comment>
    <comment id="49862655-5692627867-72157626535581359" author="49946698@N06" authorname="RandomPics Art" iconserver="4017" iconfarm="5" datecreate="1304692593" permalink="http://www.flickr.com/photos/kikicchi/5692627867/#comment72157626535581359">nice! like soft colors and tones!</comment>
    <comment id="49862655-5692627867-72157626660240896" author="49907977@N06" authorname="kiki_chi" iconserver="4014" iconfarm="5" datecreate="1304693051" permalink="http://www.flickr.com/photos/kikicchi/5692627867/#comment72157626660240896">&amp;gt;eαse*
&amp;gt;RandomPics Art

Thank you:) :) :)</comment>
    <comment id="49862655-5692627867-72157626660761230" author="41717031@N08" authorname="petia.bourova" iconserver="4082" iconfarm="5" datecreate="1304698244" permalink="http://www.flickr.com/photos/kikicchi/5692627867/#comment72157626660761230">Thank you!Very nice photo!I like The coulers very,very much!!!</comment>
    <comment id="49862655-5692627867-72157626661258700" author="31540474@N08" authorname="Leentje32" iconserver="4067" iconfarm="5" datecreate="1304703576" permalink="http://www.flickr.com/photos/kikicchi/5692627867/#comment72157626661258700">Aww so lovely!! Beautiful capture.</comment>
    <comment id="49862655-5692627867-72157626662413410" author="61373986@N06" authorname="My NIKON And Me" iconserver="5310" iconfarm="6" datecreate="1304716098" permalink="http://www.flickr.com/photos/kikicchi/5692627867/#comment72157626662413410">lovely image!!!</comment>
    <comment id="49862655-5692627867-72157626663408864" author="7652657@N02" authorname="Majlee" iconserver="3130" iconfarm="4" datecreate="1304728344" permalink="http://www.flickr.com/photos/kikicchi/5692627867/#comment72157626663408864">This is just adorable !</comment>
    <comment id="49862655-5692627867-72157626663519092" author="15613254@N05" authorname="mr_jyoti" iconserver="4011" iconfarm="5" datecreate="1304729940" permalink="http://www.flickr.com/photos/kikicchi/5692627867/#comment72157626663519092">Cool shot. Nice bokey.</comment>
    <comment id="49862655-5692627867-72157626663642456" author="16327396@N03" authorname="my beanie hat rocks" iconserver="2550" iconfarm="3" datecreate="1304731810" permalink="http://www.flickr.com/photos/kikicchi/5692627867/#comment72157626663642456">Maybe she could cheer this fella up!!

&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.flickr.com/photos/weasteman/5652855802/in/photostream&quot;&gt;www.flickr.com/photos/weasteman/5652855802/in/photostream&lt;/a&gt;

=D</comment>

Answer 1

I am not sure about the exact XML format, but it looks simple. In such case you can try to figure out last tag in the data and add the missing closing tags manually. It should not be more than a simple string search & replace.