VerySimpleXML – a lightweight Delphi XML reader and writer

There are lot of possibilities if you’re in need to parse or write XML files:

• use TXMLDocument (the MSXML wrapper)
• or use xml components like OmniXML, NativeXml, ADOM, SAX, libxml2, DIXml, fcl-XML, Fast XMLParser, SimpleXML
  

Now here comes another one: VerySimpleXML – a lightweight, one-unit XML reader/writer in under 500 600 lines of code. Use it for small well-formed XML files (like configuration files, etc.).

Download verysimplexml-v1.1.zip (7kb)
Download verysimplexml-v1.0.zip (7kb)

What’s new:
v1.1 – 2012/05/01
changed class name to reflect unit naming (class is now called
TXmlVerySimple instead TVerySimpleXml)
- it uses TStreamReader to read line by line instead of reading the
whole file at once (this allows parsing of big xml files with little
additional memory)
- automatically escapes/unescapes not allowed chars (>, <, ", &), thus
removes the most-hated "- escaping introduced in v1.0

Some usage examples:

uses Xml.VerySimple;
 
var
  Xml: TXmlVerySimple;
  Node, Child: TXmlNode;
begin
  Xml := TXmlVerySimple.Create;
  Xml.LoadFromFile('example.xml');
  Xml.Root.Find('book', 'id', 'bk102').Find('author').Text := 'Dein, Carol';
  Node := Xml.Root.AddChild('book');
  Child := Node.AddChild('author');
  Child.Text := 'Barger, Al';
  Child.Attribute['type'] := 'topseller';
  Node.AddChild('title').SetAttribute('lang', 'en').SetText('A big View');
  Xml.SaveToFile('output.xml');
  Xml.Free;
end;

VerySimpleXML supports just a subset of the XML specification

• load and save from stream or file
• nodes, childs and attributes
• UTF-8 and ANSI encoding
• compact output by setting Xml.Ident := ”;
• method chaining
• “>” and “>” inside text and attribute values when wrapped in quotation marks (XML-spec requires you to transform them into &lt; etc.)now automatically escaped with v1.1

It does NOT support:

• CDATA, comments, etc…

Example XML-file:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<catalog>
  <book id="bk101">
    <author>Gambardella, Matthew</author>
    <title/>
    <keywords />
  </book>
  <book id=bk102 lang="en">
    <author>Ralls, Kim</author>
    <title>Midnight Rain</title>
    <description>A former architect battles corporate zombies</description>
    <keywords>
      <keyword lang="es">no-muerto</keyword>
      <keyword lang=en>zombies</keyword>
    </keywords>
  </book>
  <book id="bk103">
    <author rate="&gt;5">Corets, Eva</author>
    <title>Maeve Ascendant</title>
    <description>The collapse of a <nanotechnology> society</description>
  </book>
</catalog>

Warning! This is not a standard well-formed XML file (not all attributes are wrapped with quotation marks, < and > are used within attributes and text), it is an example of the (very simple) fault tolerance of VerySimpleXML. Version 1.1 automatically escapes all non allowed chars.