TCMXMLWriter - an elegant memory efficient XML Marshaller

Design Goals

• small memory footprint during marshalling
• elegant syntax
• suitable for iOS & Mac
• self contained, no other dependencies

Requirements

• iOS 4.x or higher
• Mac OS X 10.6.8 or higher, 64-bit only
• will probably be upped to Lion + iOS 5.0 soon

License

• MIT

Usage

You need to include the TCMXMLWriter.h/m in your project.

After that you initialize your TCMXMLWriter with either nothing (will write to memory) a file URL (will write as a stream to that URL) or a stream it will write to.

This is a example generating KML of New York:

TCMXMLWriter *writer = [[TCMXMLWriter alloc] initWithOptions:TCMXMLWriterOptionPrettyPrinted];
[writer instructXML];
[writer tag:@"kml" attributes:@{@"xmlns" : @"http://www.opengis.net/kml/2.2"} contentBlock:^{
	[writer tag:@"Document" contentBlock:^{
		[writer tag:@"Placemark" contentBlock:^{
			[writer tag:@"name" contentText:@"NYC"];
			[writer tag:@"description" contentText:@"New York City"];
			[writer tag:@"Point" contentBlock:^{
				[writer tag:@"coordinates" contentText:@"-74.006393,40.714172,0"];
			}];
		}];
	}];
}];

The attributes dictionary can include these types as value:

• NSNumber
  • -[NSNumber stringValue]
  • when TCMXMLWriterOptionPrettyBOOL is specified, then BOOLs will be replaced with -boolYESValue and -boolNoValue, defaults to @"yes" and @"no"
• NSDate (will be encoded using ISO8601 with GMT - e.g. 2011-07-18T17:47:59Z )
• NSStrings which will be represented literally

When TCMXMLWriterOptionOrderedAttributes is specified, the attributes will in -caseInsensitiveCompare: order instead of the random order defined by the NSDictionary.

For more api see the TCMXMLWriter.h

Acknowledgements

• greatly inspired by the ruby XML Builder framework