Sure, many web services now use JSON as their favorite exchange format, but XML is still used a lot. In the "full" Cocoa you find NSXML, i.e. a set of classes (NSXMLDocument, NSXMLElement, NSXMLNode etc.) that parse XML text and represent it in a hierarchical in-memory structure, so that you can easily navigate through nodes. Unfortunately these classes were not ported to Cocoa Touch, probably for performance and memory-consumption reasons, and by default you're stuck with NSXMLParser: this is a SAX-style parser that analyze the input XML text is async mode and raise an event every time it finds nodes and elements. In addition of being a pain to use in simple situations NSXMLParser is also read-only.

A quick alternative is KissXML, an open-source library based over the libxml2 C library (which is somehow similar in style to NSXMLDocument). If you find yourself working with non-huge, local XML text, give it a look because it can save you much time.

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