Why xmloxide Stands Out
With libxml2 officially unmaintained since December 2025 and plagued by security vulnerabilities, developers need a modern alternative. Enter xmloxide—a pure Rust reimplementation of the XML/HTML parsing standard. This memory-safe library passes 100% of W3C XML conformance tests while outperforming libxml2 in serialization and XPath benchmarks.
Key Features
Memory Safety First
- Arena-based DOM tree with zero unsafe code in public APIs
- Self-contained Documents with Send + Sync support
- Zero-copy string interning for fast comparisons
Comprehensive Parsing Capabilities
- Multiple APIs: DOM, SAX2 streaming, XmlReader pull, push/incremental
- HTML 4.01 parser with auto-closing and void element support
- Robust error recovery for malformed XML
Performance Benchmarks
Serialization is 1.5-2.4x faster than libxml2 thanks to arena-based tree design. XPath queries run 1.1-2.7x faster across all benchmarks. For SVG documents, xmloxide achieves 12% better throughput.
Getting Started
use xmloxide::Document;
let doc = Document::parse_str("<root><child>Hello</child></root>").unwrap();
assert_eq!(doc.text_content(doc.root_element().unwrap()), "Hello");C/C++ Integration
For legacy systems, xmloxide provides full C API compatibility. Migrate from libxml2 with drop-in replacements:
xmlReadMemory→Document::parse_strxmlFreeDoc→drop(Document)xmlNodeGetContent→doc.text_content()
Use Cases
Whether you need XML validation, XPath queries, or HTML parsing, xmloxide covers:
- 100% W3C XML conformance
- DTD/RelaxNG/XSD validation
- Canonical XML (C14N) serialization
- XInclude document inclusion
Try xmloxide Today
Replace libxml2 with a safer, faster alternative. Run cargo add xmloxide to start parsing XML/HTML with Rust’s memory guarantees. For C/C++ projects, build shared/static libraries with make and use the xmloxide.h header.
