Apache Xerces' weird error message

For one of my projects I'm using Apache's Xerces C++ XML Parser and run into this strange error:

The primary document entity could not be opened.

Took me a while to figure out that Xerces simply wants to say "File not found" here, because I was was calling parse() with the data to be parsed, while Xerces expects a file name here. Silly me.

However: Here's how to parse an XML string using Xerces SAX parser. you need to use a MemBufInputSource:

std::string xmldoc("<first><second>Some Text</second></first>"); // // Create a SAX parser object. // XERCES_CPP_NAMESPACE_QUALIFIER SAX2XMLReader* parser = XERCES_CPP_NAMESPACE_QUALIFIER XMLReaderFactory::createXMLReader(); // // Create the handler object and install it // YourContentHandler handler(); parser->setContentHandler(&handler); parser->setErrorHandler(&handler); XERCES_CPP_NAMESPACE_QUALIFIER MemBufInputSource source( (const XMLByte*)xmldoc.c_str(), xmldoc.length(), "a name for the input source", false ); parser->parse(source);