Parsing XML from a web-service to an iOS iPhone application?

Question

I have a web-service which provides various data I would like to display when a user makes a selection (an example could be a list of local doctors when they search for doctor).

The problem is, the web-service is older and XML-based, not JSON, and I cannot find much regarding parsing and displaying xml output in an iOS application on the internet.

All I have found is a short example of NSURL / NSURLConnection , and a couple of JSON-related parsers, but I don't know how complicated starting from scratch with NSURL would become in the event of displaying large formatted ordered lists of data from a web service?

Has anyone ever had to do something like this? I am sure it's been done in the past, I would just like to see evidence of how.. Any examples of a plugin or class I could look into? Thanks!

Answer 1

iOS includes the NSXMLParserDelegate

then, you implement it's methods:

-(void)parser:(NSXMLParser *)parser didStartElement:(NSString *)elementName namespaceURI:(NSString *)namespaceURI qualifiedName:(NSString *)qName attributes:(NSDictionary *)attributeDict{
     //Do something when you start a new element
}



-(void)parser:(NSXMLParser *)parser foundCharacters:(NSString *)string {
    //Do something with the character inside an element
}


-(void)parser:(NSXMLParser *)parser didEndElement:(NSString *)elementName namespaceURI:(NSString *)namespaceURI qualifiedName:(NSString *)qName {
     //Do something when you finish an element
}

it's very easy to parse the xml with just this methods