pugixml

News

16 June 2026 pugixml 1.16 release

pugixml-1.16 is out. This is an anniversary release: pugixml turns 20 this year!

In early 2006, I was evaluating existing XML parsers to parse large COLLADA files quickly and nothing fit the bill; existing DOM parsers were very slow and often cumbersome to use, existing SAX parsers required a tricky parsing flow for documents with many internal references with unspecified order. The most promising existing parser was pugxml (no i), which had a nice API and an interesting parsing approach - but still left a lot of performance on the table so I thought I could quickly patch it up and call it a day. The project was named pugixml (where i stands for improved) in late May 2006.

The first version was assigned a number 0.1 in July, and was used in a few internal projects. It was tiny: 1800 lines of code (plus 700 line header), no tree modification, no Unicode support, no XPath, no compact mode, slower parser. But it was quite useful and so the first version 0.2 was released to the public in November. Originally pugixml was developed in Subversion, until eventually migrating to Git on github.com. Over the following years it quickly gained important features that were missing in the original release; code got faster through continuous tuning; some APIs were adjusted or removed. The library started gaining wider adoption.

In 2010, v1.0 came out. This represented a major stability point: it was the last release to remove or break any APIs, and since then pugixml has remained API-stable and also maintained binary compatibility. Since then, other important improvements have been introduced; for example, in 2015 a major new compilation mode, PUGIXML_COMPACT, allowed to significantly reduce the DOM memory consumption at a small performance cost with no change in API/ABI.

Development continues to this day, 20 years later; in some sense, pugixml is “complete” - the library has worked great for the last decade and all critical functionality is there. But it still requires continued maintenance, as new compilers and language features introduce new problems, some latent bugs are occasionally found, and occasional new minor features are being added. What started as a quick excursion turned into a life-long project - here’s to the next decade!

Highlights for this release (read the changelog for details) include:

• Add xml_node::ensure_child and xml_node::ensure_attribute that return the child/attribute with the specified name, adding one if it does not exist
• PUGIXML_CHARCONV_FLOAT option can be enabled to switch floating point conversions to <charconv>, making conversions locale-independent and improving performance
• Several performance improvements (XPath queries, node/attribute lookup) and bug fixes (remove_child stack overflow, load_file integer overflow on 32-bit systems)

You can download the source package or get the new version from GitHub using the latest tag (https://github.com/zeux/pugixml).

10 January 2025 pugixml 1.15 release

pugixml-1.15 is out. This is a maintenance release that adds support for std::string_view along with compatibility improvements (read the changelog for details).

Highlights for this release include:

• Many xml_attribute:: and xml_node:: functions now transparently support std::string_view and std::string when C++17 support is detected.

You can download the source package or get the new version from GitHub using the latest tag (https://github.com/zeux/pugixml).

01 October 2023 pugixml 1.14 release

pugixml-1.14 is out. This is a maintenance release that adds several minor features (read the changelog for details).

Highlights for this release include:

• xml_attribute::set_name and xml_node::set_name now have overloads that accept pointer to non-null-terminated string and size
• Implement parse_merge_pcdata parsing mode in which PCDATA contents is merged into a single node when original document had comments that were skipped during parsing
• Fix PUGIXML_STATIC_CRT CMake option

You can download the source package or get the new version from GitHub using the latest tag (https://github.com/zeux/pugixml).

02 November 2022 pugixml 1.13 release

pugixml-1.13 is out. This is a maintenance release that fixes several issues (read the changelog for details).

Highlights for this release include:

• xml_attribute::set_value, xml_node::set_value and xml_text::set now have overloads that accept pointer to non-null-terminated string and size
• Fix error handling in xml_document::save_file that could result in the function succeeding while running out of disk space
• Fix memory leak during error handling of some out-of-memory conditions during xml_document::load

You can download the source package or get the new version from GitHub using the latest tag (https://github.com/zeux/pugixml).

09 February 2022 pugixml 1.12 release

pugixml-1.12 is out. This is a maintenance release that fixes some compatibility issues and other minor bugs (read the changelog for details).

Highlights for this release include:

• Fix xml_document move construction (for C++11) and xml_node iterator signatures (for C++20)
• Add support for VS2022
• Reorganize CMake settings to have PUGIXML_ prefix and allow more configuration via CMake options, like choosing compact/wchar_t modes.

You can download the source package or get the new version from GitHub using the latest tag (https://github.com/zeux/pugixml).

26 November 2020 pugixml 1.11 release

pugixml-1.11 is out. This is a maintenance release that fixes some compatibility issues and introduces several new APIs (read the changelog for details).

Highlights for this release include:

• Add xml_node::remove_attributes and xml_node::remove_children
• Add a way to customize floating point precision via xml_attribute::set and xml_text::set overloads
• XPath parser now limits recursion depth which prevents stack overflow on malicious queries

You can download the source package or get the new version from GitHub using the latest tag (https://github.com/zeux/pugixml).

15 September 2019 pugixml 1.10 release

pugixml-1.10 is out. This is a maintenance release that fixes some compatibility issues and introduces several formatting features (read the changelog for details).

Highlights for this release include:

• XPath union operation now is ~2x faster to compute and results in a stable order that doesn’t depend on pointer order
• Add format_skip_control_chars formatting flag to skip non-printable ASCII characters
• Add format_attribute_single_quote formatting flag to use single quotes for attribute values
• Add Visual Studio .natvis files to improve debugging experience

You can download the source package or get the new version from GitHub using the latest tag (https://github.com/zeux/pugixml).

04 April 2018 pugixml 1.9 release

pugixml-1.9 is out. This is a maintenance release that fixes some compatibility issues and introduces several features (read the changelog for details).

Highlights for this release include:

• Added move semantics support for xml_document
• XPath parser no longer relies on exceptional control flow/longjmp in absence of exceptions
  • xpath_exception is still used to communicate errors when exceptions are enabled
• Fix compilation issues for some custom GCC installations
• Fix compilation warnings for GCC 7.3/8

You can download the source package or get the new version from GitHub using the latest tag (http://github.com/zeux/pugixml).

24 November 2016 pugixml 1.8 release

pugixml-1.8 is out. This is a maintenance release that fixes some compatibility issues and introduces several features (read the changelog for details).

Highlights for this release include:

• Added parse_embed_pcdata parsing mode to reduce memory consumption for some documents
• Added Latin-1 auto-detection support
• When printing empty elements, a space is no longer added before / in format_raw mode
• Fixed compilation issues for Borland C++ 5.4 and some distributions of MinGW 3.8

You can download the source package or get the new version from GitHub using the latest tag (http://github.com/zeux/pugixml).

19 October 2015 pugixml 1.7 release

pugixml-1.7 is out. This is a major release that focuses on performance and memory improvements along with several bug fixes (read the changelog for details).

Highlights for this release include:

• Introduced a new compact tree storage mode that takes significantly less memory (2-5x smaller DOM) at some performance cost
• New integer parsing/formatting implementation (3-5x faster at getting/setting integers)
• Added format_indent_attributes that makes the resulting XML friendlier to line diff/merge tools
• Fix Clang 3.7 crashes in out-of-memory cases (C++ DR 1748)

You can download the source package or get the new version from GitHub using the latest tag (http://github.com/zeux/pugixml).

10 April 2015 pugixml 1.6 release

pugixml-1.6 is out. This is a maintenance release that fixes several bugs (read the changelog for details).

Highlights for this release include:

• Fixed translate and normalize-space XPath functions to no longer return internal NUL characters
• Fixed buffer overrun on malformed comments inside DOCTYPE sections
• Attribute/text values now use more digits when printing floating point numbers to guarantee round-tripping.

You can download the source package or get the new version from GitHub using the latest tag (http://github.com/zeux/pugixml).

27 November 2014 pugixml 1.5 release

pugixml-1.5 is out. This is a major release focused on performance improvements that also has some new features and compatibility improvements (read the changelog for details).

Highlights for this release include:

• Implemented efficient moving of nodes within the same document
• Optimized parsing (10-40% faster with clang/GCC, 10% faster with MSVC)
• Optimized node copying (stackless, shares string contents where possible, up to 3x faster overall)
• Optimized node output (stackless, up to 60% faster)
• Optimized XPath evaluation (XPathMark suite is 100x faster; some commonly used queries are 4x faster)

You can download the source package or get the new version from GitHub using the latest tag (http://github.com/zeux/pugixml).

26 October 2014 pugixml moves to GitHub

pugixml project used to be hosted on Google Code since time immemorial. About a year ago the active development switched to Git but the Subversion repository on Google Code was still maintained via svn-git and the primary way to report issues was via Issue Tracker on Google Code.

Since Google disabled the downloads feature on Google Code, pugixml releases are hosted on github anyway; also git-svn makes some git workflows more complicated. As of this day, pugixml moves to GitHub and Google Code project is no longer maintained.

You can use GitHub’s issue tracker, submit pull requests, use pugixml as Git submodules, etc.

Note that you can still use Subversion to access pugixml repository on github as follows:

svn checkout https://github.com/zeux/pugixml/tags/latest

Please let me know if you find any issues with GitHub’s Subversion access.

28 February 2014 pugixml 1.4 release

pugixml-1.4 is finally out. This is a major release with several new features and compatibility improvements (read the changelog for details).

Highlights for this release include:

• Improved validation of documents without element nodes
• More parsing options (parse_fragment flag to parse XML document fragments, parse_trim_pcdata flag to remove leading/trailing whitespace)
• Better integer support for attribute and text nodes (long long types and hexadecimal conversion)
• More stack-efficient XPath compilation and evaluation

You can download the source package or get the new version from Subversion using the latest tag (http://pugixml.googlecode.com/svn/tags/latest).

01 May 2012 pugixml 1.2 release

pugixml-1.2 is finally out. This is a major release with lots of new features and compatibility improvements (read the changelog for details).

Highlights for this release include:

• New optional header-only compilation mode that does not require compiling pugixml sources and can improve performance for certain applications due to inlining
• Enhanced interface for PCDATA manipulation using an xml_text object
• C++11 range-based for-loop support for node/attribute iteration
• Compatibility improvements for many mobile platforms (including Android, Windows Mobile and other SDKs/devices)

You can download the source package or get the new version from Subversion using the latest tag (http://pugixml.googlecode.com/svn/tags/latest).

31 October 2010 pugixml 1.0 release

pugixml-1.0 is out. This is a major release with lots of fixes/improvements (read the changelog for details).

The most important changes are:

• XPath implementation was considerably improved – variable support was added, exceptions and STL are no longer required for XPath to function, query evaluation performance was improved and several bugs were fixed.
• All deprecated functions and types were removed
• File loading/saving functions can now work with wide character paths

You can download the source package or get the new version from Subversion using the latest tag (http://pugixml.googlecode.com/svn/tags/latest).

14 October 2010 New project site

pugixml now has a new home, pugixml.org. This site acts as a frontend for all pugixml-related stuff (downloads, documentation, support and other information). Additionally, there is a news feed, which you can subscribe to via RSS.

All downloads, documentation, Subversion repository and issue tracker are still hosted at Google Code; the existing links still work, and this is not going to change.

11 July 2010 pugixml 0.9 release

pugixml-0.9 is out. This is a major release with lots of fixes/improvements (read the changelog for the details). The most important changes are:

• Unicode support is completely reworked: now pugixml can be configured to use wchar_t instead of char for all string-based interfaces; also encoding conversion is performed during parsing/saving (with automatic encoding detection). All popular Unicode encodings are supported.
• New version features a new documentation, with detailed description of library interface and behavior, more samples, quick-start guide and so on.
• There are new functions for loading document from memory; they do not require the input buffer to be null-terminated. Old functions still work, but are deprecated and will be removed in the future version.

Also there are a lot of other changes, including performance and memory consumption improvements.