Using Boost Property Tree to replace DOM Parser

Question

I need to write a XML Parser using Boost Property tree which can replace an existing MSXML DOM Parser. Basically my code should return the list of child nodes, number of child nodes etc. Can this be achieved using Property Tree? Eg. GetfirstChild(),selectNodes(),Getlength()etc.

I saw a lot of APIs related to Boost Property Tree, but the documentation seems to be bare minimum and confusing. As of now, I am able to parse the entire XML using BOOST_FOREACH. But the path to each node is hard coded which will not serve my purpose.

Answer 1

boost::property_tree can be used to parse XML and it's a tree so you can use as XML DOM substitution but the library is not intended to be fully fledged XML parser and it's not complaint with XML standard. For instance it can successfully parse non-wellformed xml input and it doesn't support some of XML features. So it's your choice - if you want simple interface to simple XML configuration then yes, you should use boost::property_tree