How to Parse XML in Microsoft Excel VBA

1. Importance of an XML Parser
2. Build XML Parser Using VBA
3. Conclusion

This article will teach us how to parse XML files in VBA.

Importance of an XML Parser

As a Microsoft Excel user, it is common that you might receive some data in the form of an XML file. You will have to retrieve the information from the XML file and use it in your sheets or VBA macros according to your requirement.

A way to do this is to treat it as a text file and parse the information. But this is not an elegant way to parse XML files since the information is stored well-structured using tags, and treating it as a text file negates this concept.

Therefore, we will have to make use of an XML Parser. An XML Parser reads the XML file and retrieves the relevant data so it can be used readily.

Build XML Parser Using VBA

We can parse an XML file using VBA and convert the data into our Excel sheet. The method we will be using uses the XML DOM implementation, short for the XML Document Object Model, and this model allows us to represent the XML file as an object we can then manipulate as required.

To start parsing your XML file through VBA, you must perform a simple sequence of steps. These are explained below.

To parse XML through VBA, you need to have MSXML.4.0 or greater on your system.

In the code above, we have first created a variable xDoc of the MSXML2.DOMDocument60 type. Here, we have appended 60 at the end because we are using version 6.0 of Microsoft XML, and without the 60, this code will generate a compile-time error of User-defined type not found.

Next, we have specified that we are working with the xDoc variable using the With statement. The .async property defines permission for asynchronous downloads, and the .validateOnParse property indicates if the parser should validate the XML document.

After that, we use the .Load function to load the specified XML file into the DOM variable. Here, you can change the path and file name to the one on your computer.

The next two lines are for error handling in case the XML file is not loaded properly. To test if the loading has worked, we take one node from the file and specify its name as price.

You should note that the node name is case-sensitive and must be specified according to your XML file. Finally, we display the price using the node.Text property in a message box.

Output:

This shows that the loading has worked perfectly fine.

One way to use the XML file data is to store it in an Excel sheet. Let us make a few changes to the code above to store the data in the Excel sheet:

Sub XMLParser()

Dim xDoc As New MSXML2.DOMDocument60
Set xDoc = New MSXML2.DOMDocument60
Dim list As MSXML2.IXMLDOMNodeList
Dim osh As Worksheet
Set osh = ThisWorkbook.Sheets("Sheet1")
oRow = 1

With xDoc
.async = False
.validateOnParse = True

If xDoc.Load("D:\VBA\example.xml") = False Then
Debug.Print .parseError.reason, .parseError.ErrorCode
Exit Sub
End If

Set list = xDoc.SelectNodes("//price")
loopCount = 0
For Each node In list
oRow = oRow + 1
osh.Range("A" & oRow) = node.Text
Next
End With

End Sub

Here, we are retrieving all the price nodes and storing them in the sheet. In this example, we have only one price node that will be saved into the sheet as follows:

You can tweak the code according to your XML file and requirements.

Conclusion

This sums up our discussion on the method to parse XML files through VBA. In this article, we have learned how to build an XML parser using XML DOM in VBA.