Getting Started with SwiftLibXML

Add the Dependency

Add SwiftLibXML to your Package.swift:

dependencies: [
    .package(url: "https://github.com/rhx/SwiftLibXML.git", from: "2.0.0"),
],
targets: [
    .target(
        name: "MyTarget",
        dependencies: [
            .product(name: "SwiftLibXML", package: "SwiftLibXML")
        ]
    ),
]

Then import the module at the top of any Swift file:

import SwiftLibXML

Parse an XML Document

Create an XMLDocument from UTF-8 encoded Data. The initialiser returns nil when parsing fails completely (malformed input that the error-recovery pass cannot salvage).

import Foundation
import SwiftLibXML

let xml = """
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<catalogue>
  <book id="1">
    <title>Clean Code</title>
    <author>Robert C. Martin</author>
  </book>
  <book id="2">
    <title>The Swift Programming Language</title>
    <author>Apple Inc.</author>
  </book>
</catalogue>
"""

guard let document = SwiftLibXML.XMLDocument(data: Data(xml.utf8)) else {
    print("Parse failed")
    return
}

Read the Root Element

rootElement gives you the document root as an XMLElement:

let root = document.rootElement
print(root.name)   // catalogue

Walk Child Elements

children iterates the immediate children. Because libxml2 stores whitespace between tags as text nodes, the sequence includes both element nodes and text nodes. Filter on name to keep only the nodes you care about:

for element in root.children where element.name != "text" {
    let id = element.attribute(named: "id") ?? "?"
    print("\(element.name) id=\(id)")
}
// book id=1
// book id=2

Query with XPath

xpath(_:namespaces:defaultPrefix:) compiles an XPath expression and returns an XMLPath collection. XPath expressions select element nodes only, which avoids text-node filtering altogether:

if let titles = document.xpath("//title") {
    for title in titles {
        print(title.content)
    }
}
// Clean Code
// The Swift Programming Language

Next Steps

• Parsing and Traversal — tree iteration strategies in depth

• XPath Queries — predicate expressions and result collections

• Working with Namespaces — namespace-aware queries