Simple KML: Cocoa parsing library for Keynote Markup Language

Simple KML is a simple & lightweight parsing library for KML written in Objective-C for the iOS platform.

Requirements

Simple KML has been designed & built for iOS 3.2 (the iPad). There's no particular reason it couldn't run on another iOS version or be adapted to Mac OS X; it just hasn't been done yet out of lack of necessity.

Simple KML depends on TouchXML, an Objective-C library for DOM-based XML parsing based on libxml2, and Objective-Zip, a library for working with archive files, both of which are included in the download.

Features

• Support for most of the base KML entities.

  Basic support for Object, Feature, Placemark, Container, Document, Folder, Geometry, Point, LineString, LinearRing, Polygon, StyleSelector, Style, SubStyle, BalloonStyle, ColorStyle, LineStyle, PolyStyle, and IconStyle.

• Simple invocation.

  SimpleKML *myKML = [SimpleKML KMLWithContentsOfFile:@"/path/to/file.kml" error:&error]
SimpleKML *myKML = [SimpleKML KMLWithContentsOfURL:[NSURL URLWithString:@"http://example.com/file.kml"] error:&error]

• Support for KMZ archives.

  Currently searches for a top-level doc.kml and retrieves icon data for bundled IconStyle entities.

• Cocoa-native behavior.

  Native types:

  SimpleKMLLineStyle *lineStyle = myPolygon.lineStyle; UIColor *lineColor = lineStyle.color;
NSArray *polygonPoints = myPolygon.outerBoundary.coordinates; // CLLocation objects
UIColor *textColor = myPlacemark.style.balloonStyle.textColor;
UIImage *icon = myPlacemark.style.iconStyle.icon; // planned: automatically apply scale, heading, and parent style color

  Intelligent parsing:

  SimpleKMLStyle *inlineStyle = myPlacemark.inlineStyle; // within <Placemark>
SimpleKMLStyle *sharedStyle = myPlacemark.sharedStyle; // common to <Document>; no need to reference <StyleUrl>
SimpleKMLStyle *activeStyle = myPlacemark.style; // the inline style overrides the shared style

  SimpleKMLGeometry *geometry = myPlacemark.geometry; // <Point>, <Polygon>, <LineString>, etc.
SimpleKMLPoint *point = myPlacemark.point; // shortcut if <Point> exists for <Placemark>

  Smart error handling:

  NSError *error;
SimpleKML *myKML = [SimpleKML KMLWithContentsOfFile:@"invalid.kml" error:&error];
if (error) { NSLog(@"%@", error); } // SimpleKMLParseError: Improperly formed KML (LinearRing has less than four coordinates)

  Debugging:

  gdb: po [mySimpleKMLObject source] // protected variable containing original XML source

  Hierarchies:

  SimpleKMLDocument *document = myPlacemark.document;
NSArray *documentFeatures = document.features;

Usage

Include all of the Simple KML files in your Xcode project, as well as the files in the TouchXML and Objective-Zip subdirectories if you don't already use these in your project.

Per TouchXML's installation guide, add /usr/include/libxml2 to your "Header Search Paths" and -lxml2 to your "Other Linker Flags" since TouchXML depends on libxml2.

Plans, needs, bugs, etc.

If you find a bug or want to otherwise contribute, please fork the project on GitHub and contribute that way. In particular, I would like to start adding built-in testing with a library of accompanying KML test files to parse.

License

Copyright (c) 2010 Code Sorcery Workshop, LLC and Development Seed, Inc.

The Simple KML library should be accompanied by a LICENSE file. This file contains the license relevant to this distribution. If no license exists, please contact Justin R. Miller at <incanus@codesorcery.net>.