Awesome

Axt

A forgiving HTML SAX Parser for iOS inspired by NSXMLParser.

Axt is the German word for Ono (斧).

Axt is highly inspired by NSXMLParser which is great for parsing XML but not for HTML. HTML is often not well-formed which makes it not suitable for NSXMLParser. In this cases AXHTMLParser provides a robust and reliable behavior.

Why a SAX parser?

SAX parser in general need less memory and are faster than DOM-style parser which makes them better suitable where memory and speed is key.

Installation

Podfile

pod 'Axt'

Features

Designed to forgive not well-formed HTML (unlike NSXMLParser)
Inspired by NSXMLParser (same methods and delegate protocol)
Powered by libxml
Complete documentation
Unit tested

Usage

#import "Axt.h"
    
NSInputStream *stream = [NSInputStream inputStreamWithFileAtPath:...];
AXHTMLParser *parser = [[AXHTMLParser alloc] initWithStream:stream];
parser.delegate = ... // set the delegate

BOOL success = [parser parse];

Examples

Not well-formed

Parsing this not well-formed HTML

<html>
    <head></head>
    <body>
        <h1>Axt</h1>
        <p>A forgiving HTML SAX Parser for iOS<br></p>
    </body>
</html>

will result in the following delegate calls

parserDidStartDocument:
parser:didStartElement:attributes: html
parser:didStartElement:attributes: head
parser:didEndElement: head
parser:didStartElement:attributes: body
parser:didStartElement:attributes: h1
parser:foundCharacters: Axt
parser:didEndElement: h1
parser:didStartElement:attributes: p
parser:foundCharacters: A forgiving HTML SAX Parser for iOS
parser:didStartElement:attributes: br
parser:didEndElement: br
parser:didEndElement: p
parser:didEndElement: body
parser:didEndElement: html

Partial HTML

The following html is not only-well formed but also misses the html and body tags.

<h1>header
    <p>paragraph<br></p>

However the parser handles the HTML and calls the delegate methods correctly.

parserDidStartDocument:
parser:didStartElement:attributes: html
parser:didStartElement:attributes: body
parser:didStartElement:attributes: h1
parser:foundCharacters: header
parser:didEndElement: h1
parser:didStartElement:attributes: p
parser:foundCharacters: paragraph
parser:didStartElement:attributes: br
parser:didEndElement: br
parser:didEndElement: p
parser:didEndElement: body
parser:didEndElement: html
parserDidEndDocument:

Unit Test

Run the unit test with xctool

xctool -find-target AxtTests -sdk iphonesimulator test

Contact

Matthias Hochgatterer

Github: https://github.com/brutella/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/brutella

License

Axt is available under the MIT license. See the LICENSE file for more info.