Loading XML files

I have chosen to use XML files because they are so easy to parse. We are not going to write our own XML parser, rather we will use an open source library called TinyXML. TinyXML was written by Lee Thomason and is available under the zlib license from http://sourceforge.net/projects/tinyxml/.

Once downloaded the only setup we need to do is to include a few of the files in our project:

• tinyxmlerror.cpp

• tinyxmlparser.cpp

• tinystr.cpp

• tinystr.h

• tinyxml.cpp

• tinyxml.h

Also, at the top of tinyxml.h, add this line of code:

#define TIXML_USE_STL

By doing this we ensure that we are using the STL versions of the TinyXML functions. We can now go through a little of how an XML file is structured. It's actually fairly simple and we will only give a brief overview to help you get up to speed with how we will use it.

Basic XML structure

Here is a basic XML file:

<?xml version="1.0" ?>
<ROOT>
    <ELEMENT>
    </ELEMENT>
</ROOT>

The first line of the file defines...