Parsing XML elements for a TableView - objective-c

Question

At the moment I am designing a simple app that will read news feeds. The XML feed I am using is this... http://feeds.foxnews.com/foxnews/world?format=xml .
What I am looking to do is essentially take the 'title' element and the description' elements from this page, and use them in a TableView.
This is what I currently have:
-(void)parserDidStartDocument:(NSXMLParser *)parser{
_elementsArray = [[NSMutableArray alloc]init];
}
-(void)parser:(NSXMLParser*)parser foundCharacters:(NSString *)string{
if (!_currentString) {
_currentString = [[NSMutableString alloc]init];
}
[_currentString appendString:string];
}
-(void)parser:(NSXMLParser *)parser didEndElement:(NSString *)elementName namespaceURI:(NSString *)namespaceURI qualifiedName:(NSString *)qName{
if ([elementName isEqualToString:#"title"]) {
[_elementsArray addObject:_currentString];
_currentString=nil;
return;
}
if ([elementName isEqualToString:#"description"]) {
[_elementsArray addObject:_currentString];
_currentString=nil;
return;
}
_currentString = nil;
}
-(void)parserDidEndDocument:(NSXMLParser *)parser{
for (NSString*string in _elementsArray) {
NSLog(#"%#",string);
}
_elementsArray = nil;
}
I do get an output of this, that is not a problem.
My problem is that each element is added in a new NSArray entry. How would I add both elements to one entry? ( would it be possible to use keys ? )

Answer 1

You could use a temporary NSDictionary to store your title and description together for each item, and add the dictionary to the _elementsArray.
- (void)parser:(NSXMLParser *)parser didStartElement:(NSString *)elementName namespaceURI:(NSString *)namespaceURI qualifiedName:(NSString *)qualifiedName attributes:(NSDictionary *)attributeDict {
if ([elementName isEqualToString:#"item"]) {
_currentDict = [NSMutableDictionary dictionary];
return;
}
}
-(void)parser:(NSXMLParser *)parser didEndElement:(NSString *)elementName namespaceURI:(NSString *)namespaceURI qualifiedName:(NSString *)qName{
if ([elementName isEqualToString:#"item"]) {
[_elementsArray addObject:_currentDict];
_currentDict=nil;
return;
}
if ([elementName isEqualToString:#"title"]) {
_currentDict[#"title"] = _currentString;
_currentString=nil;
return;
}
if ([elementName isEqualToString:#"description"]) {
_currentDict[#"description"] = _currentString;
_currentString=nil;
return;
}
_currentString = nil;
}
// Other methods left unchanged
This should output something like:
NSArray (
NSDictionary {
#"title": #"First title",
#"description": #"A news article"
},
NSDictionary {
#"title": #"Second title",
#"description": #"Another interesting article"
}
)
Untested, but I hope you get the idea.
Note also that parsing an XML (or RSS) file into native ObjC objects is a very recurring problem, and lots of open source libs out there already do most of the heavy lifting for you.