in a class i'm writing i'll most likely have to use NSXMLParser twice to parse two different xml's, and i'm wondering which approach should i use? - release the parser after it finished parsing url and reinitialize when need to parse the second url? - use different class as delegate for parsing other url? - or something else?
thanks peter
In my own personal experience, I've commonly had to parse several different REST xml responses and for each of them I inherit a base class and create one class per request/response/parse. IMHO although this isn't clean code, I honestly find it impossible to write clean code when dealing with a SAX-style parser.
My advice would be separate calls and perhaps separate classes if you don't want a bunch of if-else's in your code. Now if the XML is very similar, it could be a different story...
I have written a class which implements the parser methods and you just have to pass it a string (your url). It returns with an array of elements. It may be of use to you.
You can download it here: http://www.kieranmcgrady.me/helper-classes-for-parsing-xml-files
In the past I've often made classes to parse each response type that I expected to see, you can reuse an NSXMLParser, but I really haven't seen a need to.
Depending on your requirements you may want to just read the responses into nested NSDictionaries, then deal with accessing the elements that you need directly from the dictionaries.
