Adding std::string inside element

[Joe Van Dyk]

Hi,

I've got a string that looks like:
"<xml /> <more_xml />".

I want to insert that inside a TiXmlElement.  How can I do that?  I can't figure out a way to correctly parse it, as there's two (or more) root elements in the string.

[Joe Van Dyk]

So, if I had an existing document that looked like this:

<xml>
  <element>
  </element>
</xml>

I'd want to insert the string so the document looks like:

<xml>
  <element>
    <xml /> <more_xml />
  </element>
</xml>

[Joe Van Dyk]

Aha, I can create a TiXmlText object and insert that into the element.  However, quoting then becomes an issue, because all the '<' and '&' and '>' characters in the string are converted to '&lt;', etc.

Any ideas?

[Lee Thomason]

Assuming you have a TiXmlElement* to <element>, you would want to do something like:

element->LinkEndChild( new TiXmlElement( "xml" ));
element->LinkEndChild( new TiXmlElement( "more_xml" ));

...because you want to insert new *elements*, not new text. If you are generating those elements from text, you can always:

TiXmlElement* fooElement = new TiXmlElement( "foo" );
foo->Parse( "<more_xml/>";
element->LinkEndChild( fooElement );

Noting that "xml" is a reserved name, and you shouldn't use it.

hope that helps!
lee

[Joe Van Dyk]

Thanks for the response.

The problem is that I have a string that contains multiple xml elements.  They're not broken up into separate strings, so I can't do:

std::string the_input_string = "<an_element /> <another_element />";
foo->Parse(the_input_string);

right?

I know my life would be a lot easier if I had separate strings for each element.

[Joe Van Dyk]

What I'd really like is some function that would return a vector of TiXmlElements given a string that contains multiple root elements.

Then I could insert each one of those elements into the root element.

[Lee Thomason]

Actually, if you used:

TiXmlDocument xml;
xml.Parse( "<an_element /> <another_element />" );

You could then add the child elements of 'xml' to another XmlDocument, which I think gets you the behavior you want.

A vector if TiXmlElements isn't going to happen - it's a little too specialized. :)

lee

[Joe Van Dyk]

I thought a document could only have one root element (and there's two in that string).

[Lee Thomason]

TinyXML errs towards permissiveness - including allowing more than one root element. If taking advantage of a loophole in TinyXML bothers you (and maybe it should in case we tighten it down in the future) you could wrap the elements you want to parse in a root elment by prepending a <root> and postpending a </root>.

lee

[Joe Van Dyk]

Oh.... I see now.  I didn't know that a TiXlDocument could have multiple children.  I thought it was merely tolerant (i.e. ignores) any additional root elements in the document.