parse-xml

A fast, safe, compliant XML parser for Node.js and browsers.

Links

• API Docs
• GitHub
• npm

Installation

npm install @rgrove/parse-xml

Or, if you like living dangerously, you can load the minified bundle in a browser via Unpkg and use the parseXml global.

Features

• Returns a convenient object tree representing an XML document.

• Works great in Node.js and browsers.

• Provides helpful, detailed error messages with context when a document is not well-formed.

• Mostly conforms to XML 1.0 (Fifth Edition) as a non-validating parser (see below for details).

• Passes all relevant tests in the XML Conformance Test Suite.

• Written in TypeScript and compiled to ES2020 JavaScript for Node.js and ES2017 JavaScript for browsers. The browser build is also optimized for minification.

• Extremely fast and surprisingly small.

• Zero dependencies.

Not Features

While this parser is capable of parsing document type declarations (<!DOCTYPE ... >) and including them in the node tree, it doesn't actually do anything with them. External document type definitions won't be loaded, and the parser won't validate the document against a DTD or resolve custom entity references defined in a DTD.

In addition, the only supported character encoding is UTF-8 because it's not feasible (or useful) to support other character encodings in JavaScript.

Examples

Basic Usage

ESM

import { parseXml } from '@rgrove/parse-xml';
parseXml('<kittens fuzzy="yes">I like fuzzy kittens.</kittens>');

CommonJS

const { parseXml } = require('@rgrove/parse-xml');
parseXml('<kittens fuzzy="yes">I like fuzzy kittens.</kittens>');

The result is an XmlDocument instance containing the parsed document, with a structure that looks like this (some properties and methods are excluded for clarity; see the API docs for details):

{
  type: 'document',
  children: [
    {
      type: 'element',
      name: 'kittens',
      attributes: {
        fuzzy: 'yes'
      },
      children: [
        {
          type: 'text',
          text: 'I like fuzzy kittens.'
        }
      ],
      parent: { ... },
      isRootNode: true
    }
  ]
}

All parse-xml objects have toJSON() methods that return JSON-serializable objects, so you can easily convert an XML document to JSON:

let json = JSON.stringify(parseXml(xml));

Friendly Errors

When something goes wrong, parse-xml throws an error that tells you exactly what happened and shows you where the problem is so you can fix it.

parseXml('<foo><bar>baz</foo>');

Output

Error: Missing end tag for element bar (line 1, column 14)
  <foo><bar>baz</foo>
               ^

In addition to a helpful message, error objects have the following properties:

• column Number

  Column where the error occurred (1-based).

• excerpt String

  Excerpt from the input string that contains the problem.

• line Number

  Line where the error occurred (1-based).

• pos Number

  Character position where the error occurred relative to the beginning of the input (0-based).

Why another XML parser?

There are many XML parsers for Node, and some of them are good. However, most of them suffer from one or more of the following shortcomings:

• Native dependencies.

• Loose, non-standard parsing behavior that can lead to unexpected or even unsafe results when given input the author didn't anticipate.

• Kitchen sink APIs that tightly couple a parser with DOM manipulation functions, a stringifier, or other tooling that isn't directly related to parsing and consuming XML.

• Stream-based parsing. This is great in the rare case that you need to parse truly enormous documents, but can be a pain to work with when all you want is a node tree.

• Poor error handling.

• Too big or too Node-specific to work well in browsers.

parse-xml's goal is to be a small, fast, safe, compliant, non-streaming, non-validating, browser-friendly parser, because I think this is an under-served niche.

I think parse-xml demonstrates that it's not necessary to jettison the spec entirely or to write complex code in order to implement a small, fast XML parser.

Also, it was fun.

Benchmark

Here's how parse-xml's performance stacks up against a few comparable libraries:

• fast-xml-parser, which claims to be the fastest pure JavaScript XML parser
• libxmljs2, which is based on the native libxml library written in C
• xmldoc, which is based on sax-js

While libxmljs2 is faster at parsing medium and large documents, its performance comes at the expense of a large C dependency, no browser support, and a history of security vulnerabilities in the underlying libxml2 library.

In these results, "ops/s" refers to operations per second. Higher is faster.

Node.js v22.10.0 / Darwin arm64
Apple M1 Max

Running "Small document (291 bytes)" suite...
Progress: 100%

  @rgrove/parse-xml 4.2.0:
    253 082 ops/s, ±0.16%   | fastest

  fast-xml-parser 4.5.0:
    127 232 ops/s, ±0.44%   | 49.73% slower

  libxmljs2 0.35.0 (native):
    68 709 ops/s, ±2.77%    | slowest, 72.85% slower

  xmldoc 1.3.0 (sax-js):
    122 345 ops/s, ±0.15%   | 51.66% slower

Finished 4 cases!
  Fastest: @rgrove/parse-xml 4.2.0
  Slowest: libxmljs2 0.35.0 (native)

Running "Medium document (72081 bytes)" suite...
Progress: 100%

  @rgrove/parse-xml 4.2.0:
    1 350 ops/s, ±0.18%   | 29.5% slower

  fast-xml-parser 4.5.0:
    560 ops/s, ±0.48%     | slowest, 70.76% slower

  libxmljs2 0.35.0 (native):
    1 915 ops/s, ±2.64%   | fastest

  xmldoc 1.3.0 (sax-js):
    824 ops/s, ±0.20%     | 56.97% slower

Finished 4 cases!
  Fastest: libxmljs2 0.35.0 (native)
  Slowest: fast-xml-parser 4.5.0

Running "Large document (1162464 bytes)" suite...
Progress: 100%

  @rgrove/parse-xml 4.2.0:
    109 ops/s, ±0.17%   | 40.11% slower

  fast-xml-parser 4.5.0:
    48 ops/s, ±0.55%    | slowest, 73.63% slower

  libxmljs2 0.35.0 (native):
    182 ops/s, ±1.16%   | fastest

  xmldoc 1.3.0 (sax-js):
    73 ops/s, ±0.50%    | 59.89% slower

Finished 4 cases!
  Fastest: libxmljs2 0.35.0 (native)
  Slowest: fast-xml-parser 4.5.0

See the parse-xml-benchmark repo for instructions on how to run this benchmark yourself.

License

ISC License