Parsing the file
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## Parsing the file

Parsing the file requires only the name of the file and a single function call, plus error checking. Full code: Appendix C, Code for Keyword Example

             xmlDocPtr doc;
    	 xmlNodePtr cur;

    	 doc = xmlParseFile(docname);

    	 if (doc == NULL ) {
    		fprintf(stderr,"Document not parsed successfully. \n");
    		return;
    	}

    	 cur = xmlDocGetRootElement(doc);

    	 if (cur == NULL) {
    		fprintf(stderr,"empty document\n");
    		xmlFreeDoc(doc);
    		return;
    	}

    	 if (xmlStrcmp(cur->name, (const xmlChar *) "story")) {
    		fprintf(stderr,"document of the wrong type, root node != story");
    		xmlFreeDoc(doc);
    		return;
    	}

| Declare the pointer that will point to your parsed document.
| Declare a node pointer (you'll need this in order to interact with individual nodes).
| Check to see that the document was successfully parsed. If it was not, libxml will at this point register an error and stop.

| Note
One common example of an error at this point is improper handling of encoding. The XML standard requires documents stored with an encoding other than UTF-8 or UTF-16 to contain an explicit declaration of their encoding. If the declaration is there, libxml will automatically perform the necessary conversion to UTF-8 for you. More information on XML's encoding requirements is contained in the standard.

| Retrieve the document's root element.
| Check to make sure the document actually contains something.
| In our case, we need to make sure the document is the right type. "story" is the root type of the documents used in this tutorial.

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