Given a valid, arbitrary xmlNodePtr, I would like the string representation of that node, including the tag, attributes, and children in the same form (recursive).

FWIW, my scenario is I am using PerformXPathQuery to get a block of data from within an existing document. I need to get the results of the query, which has nested XML elements in it, as the raw string, so I can insert it into a text field.

These seems like a simple task, however I cannot find an easy way. Writing an xmlDocPtr to file must do this, however, I cannot see a handy method that will do the same thing to an arbitrary node in the tree, and return it in memory.

I hope I am just going blind from the brown-on-brown documentation color scheme at xmlsoft.org


Is xmlNodeDump (or xmlNodeDumpOutput) what you are looking for?

  • Was looking for this quite a while and couldn't get it to work. My returned size had been -1 and my buffer was NULL. Just for anyone as an info: Initialize your buffer! Some examples in the internet are just not correct and the docs are not very detailed in this point either. Use xmlBufferPtr buffer = xmlBufferCreate();. – lindinax Jul 24 '13 at 8:18

My code I used to dump a node to a string. It's objectiv-c so just change your output as needed.

xmlBufferPtr buffer = xmlBufferCreate();
int size = xmlNodeDump(buffer, myXMLDoc, myXMLNode, 0, 1);

NSLog(@"%d", size);
NSLog(@"%s", buffer->content);

Don't forget to free your buffer again.


One way you could do it definitely is to create a new document, then use xmlDocCopyNode to copy the node into it and serialize it.

  • Thanks for the idea. Including the leading <xml> tag is definitely sub-optimal. However I tried it with the following and the copy comes up empty : <code> for (NSInteger i = 0; i < nodes->nodeNr; i++) { xmlDocPtr partialDoc = xmlNewDoc(BAD_CAST XML_DEFAULT_VERSION); xmlChar *mem; int len; xmlNodePtr copyNode = xmlDocCopyNode( nodes->nodeTab[i], partialDoc, 1 ); xmlAddChild( xmlDocGetRootElement( partialDoc ), copyNode ); xmlDocDumpMemory( partialDoc, &mem, &len ); NSLog( @"%s", mem ); } </code> – Stickley Nov 22 '11 at 19:53
  • Sorry, I don't understand if you still have a problem or not. Could you update your question if you have something unclear so far? – kan Nov 22 '11 at 20:58

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