README

LibXml2-XmlTextReader wrapper class for Delphi
==============================================

This code is released under the MIT Licence - see the Copyright file.
The libxml2 pascal-headers havee been borrowed from the "Libxml2 for pascal"
project.

See: http://sourceforge.net/projects/libxml2-pas/

Introduction
------------

The TXmlTextReader class wraps the XmlTextReader interface of the libxml2
library.

See: http://xmlsoft.org/xmlreader.html

The XmlTextReader way of reading XML is an alternative to using SAX or DOM.
Thanks to libxml2 it's pretty fast and it's interface is easy to use. It's
similar to .Net's XmlTextReader class.

XML reading is done in one direction only, you can't jump backwards.


Requierements
-------------

This version of TXmlTextReader is currently for Delphi 2009 / 2010 only. If you
would like to use it for any other ObjectPascal environment, please let me know
- it's just a bunch of #ifdef's to be added to take care of the correct
string/pointer conversions.

Besides this you will need the libxml2 dll's, which can be downloaded for
Windows here:

http://www.zlatkovic.com/libxml.en.html

Example
-------

Assuming we have the following XML file:

  <root>
    <first something="foo" somethingElse="bar">
    <second>Baz</second>
  </root>

The code for reading this file might look like this:

  ...
  reader := TXmlTextReader.Create('temp.xml');
  try
    reader.Read;
    CheckEquals('root', reader.Name);
    reader.Read; // #text because of indentation
    reader.Read;
    CheckEquals('first', reader.Name);
    CheckEquals('foo', reader.GetAttribute('something'));
    CheckEquals('bar', reader.GetAttribute('somethingElse'));
    reader.Read; // #text because of indentation
    reader.Read;
    CheckEquals('second', reader.Name);
    CheckEquals('Baz', reader.ReadString); // read 'ahead' element content
    reader.Read; // #text
    CheckEquals('Baz', reader.Value);
    reader.Read;
    reader.Read;
    CheckFalse(reader.Read); // EOF!
  finally
    xmlFile.Free;
  end;
  ...

For more samples take a look at the unit tests in XmlTextReaderTest.pas.