pugixml

pugixml is a C++ XML processing library, which consists of a DOM-like interface with rich traversal/modification capabilities, an extremely fast XML parser which constructs the DOM tree from an XML file/buffer, and an XPath 1.0 implementation for complex data-driven tree queries. Full Unicode support is also available, with Unicode interface variants and conversions between different Unicode encodings (which happen automatically during parsing/saving).

pugixml is used by a lot of projects, both open-source and proprietary, for performance and easy-to-use interface.

Documentation

Documentation for the current release of pugixml is available on-line as two separate documents:

• Quick-start guide, that aims to provide enough information to start using the library;
• Complete reference manual, that describes all features of the library in detail.

You’re advised to start with the quick-start guide; however, many important library features are either not described in it at all or only mentioned briefly; if you require more information you should read the complete manual.

Example

Here's an example of how code using pugixml looks; it opens an XML file, goes over all Tool nodes and prints tools that have a Timeout attribute greater than 0:

#include "pugixml.hpp"
#include <iostream>

int main()
{
    pugi::xml_document doc;
    pugi::xml_parse_result result = doc.load_file("xgconsole.xml");
    if (!result)
        return -1;
        
    for (pugi::xml_node tool: doc.child("Profile").child("Tools").children("Tool"))
    {
        int timeout = tool.attribute("Timeout").as_int();
        
        if (timeout > 0)
            std::cout << "Tool " << tool.attribute("Filename").value() << " has timeout " << timeout << "\n";
    }
}

And the same example using XPath:

#include "pugixml.hpp"
#include <iostream>

int main()
{
    pugi::xml_document doc;
    pugi::xml_parse_result result = doc.load_file("xgconsole.xml");
    if (!result)
        return -1;
        
    pugi::xpath_node_set tools_with_timeout = doc.select_nodes("/Profile/Tools/Tool[@Timeout > 0]");
    
    for (pugi::xpath_node node: tools_with_timeout)
    {
        pugi::xml_node tool = node.node();
        std::cout << "Tool " << tool.attribute("Filename").value() <<
            " has timeout " << tool.attribute("Timeout").as_int() << "\n";
    }
}

License

This library is available to anybody free of charge, under the terms of MIT License (see LICENSE.md).

To honor the license agreement, please include attribution into the user-facing product documentation and/or credits, for example using this or similar text:

Uses pugixml. Copyright (c) 2006-2026, Arseny Kapoulkine

This work is based on the pugxml parser, which carried the following Public Domain dedication

// Pug XML Parser - Version 1.0002
// --------------------------------------------------------
// Copyright (C) 2003, by Kristen Wegner (kristen@tima.net)
// Released into the Public Domain. Use at your own risk.
// See pugxml.xml for further information, history, etc.
// Contributions by Neville Franks (readonly@getsoft.com).