File downloading and XML parsing

[xtjacob]

Hello, I'm trying to write a program in C the requires me to download a XML file, parse it for data, and display parsed text from the file. What is the best way to do this? I cannot seem to find a way that makes sense. Thanks!

[gsmanners]

I don't know what you would do (or why) but if I wanted to parse XML, I'd probably start with this:


sudo apt-get libxml2-dev libxml2-doc

Then just look up the references in devhelp.

[xtjacob]

Well I'm trying to write a weather program, and the api for the website I'm using uses XML files, so I assumed I needed to parse them to get the information out of them. Unless there's a better way that I don't know about...

[gsmanners]

It's probably easier to parse than to download. See this if you need an example, I guess. http://xmlsoft.org/examples/parse1.c

[Fallen_Demon]

gsmanners is right on the XML part, libxml is your friend here. To grab the data from the site, you can use libcurl


sudo apt-get install libcurl-dev

From what I remember when I was playing with it, libxml takes in a file pointer. Not sure if it's possible to give it an URL