is there a better way to do this XML scraping task in R?

Question

I have some XML that looks like:

Answer 1

After fixing the xml...

The way to traverse this with xpath is:

> plist = xmlParse('data.xml')
> xpathSApply(plist, '/plist/array/dict/dict/string', xmlValue)
[1] "-27.45433"                           "153.01474"                          
[3] "-27.45706"                           "153.01239"                          
[5] "university"                          "Queensland University of Technology"
[7] "way"                                 "26303436" 

The output you can index like normal.

However, if the nodes had attributes, for example <string type='uniname">...</string>, then you could have used the nice "@" syntax like:

> xpathSApply(plist, '/plist/array/dict/dict/string[@type='uniname']', xmlValue)

Another way, which might be better for this plist formatting, is:

> sapply(getNodeSet(plist, '//key[text() = "name"]'), function(x) xmlValue(getSibling(x)))
[1] "Queensland University of Technology"