How to Parser .tmx with C++ to TileMap

Tired of using different solutions that only gave me a headache, I decided to write a .tmx parser that works in the simplest way possible.

It’s just a class that has a static member function (so no need to instantiate) and it returns a vector<vector<int>> to implement quickly.

The only dependency is the TinyXML2 which we will detail later.

For more information about TinyXML2, see this post:

How to parser XML with TinyXML2 C++

How to use parser

To use it, you need to either install TinyXML2 or use it without installing in this repository in short that I did a fork.

But the best option is to install it on your system. Below example of installation on Ubuntu and derivatives:

sudo apt install libtinyxml2-dev

Now just clone with your preferred version control, example with Git

git clone https://github.com/terroo/loadtmx

And copy the loadtmx.hpp file to your project.

To implement it, just create any file, include loadtmx.hpp and use either std::vector<std::vector<int>> or auto, for example:

vim main.cpp

#include "loadtmx.hpp"

int main( int argc , char **argv ){
  auto map = LoadTmx::tilemap("file.tmx");
}

Suppose you have this .tmx and you want to parser each number in it:

To download this example use raw from Gist or run the command below:

wget https://cutt.ly/tilemaptmx -O tilemap.tmx

Now add it to your code and print each position with a for loop:

#include "loadtmx.hpp"

int main( int argc , char **argv ){
  auto map = LoadTmx::tilemap("tilemap.tmx");

  for(auto &line : map){
    for(auto &col : line){
      std::cout << col;
    }
    std::cout << '\n';
  }
  return 0;
}

To compile, run:

g++ main.cpp -ltinyxml2
./a.out

The possible output will be precisely the position numbers that were stored in line and col

If you want to use a classic loop it would be:

for(std::size_t i{}; i < map.size(); ++i){
  for(std::size_t j{}; j < map[i].size(); ++j){
    std::cout << map[i][j];
  }
  std::cout << '\n';
}

If using local TinyXML2 instead of installed on your system, compile along with the TinyXML2 .cpp file, eg g++ main.cpp tinyxml2/tinyxml2.cpp.

Note: It already includes the <iostream> and <vector> by default, so including it you can already remove any other use of these libraries in your code to avoid overhead.

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