TBXML root element is null no matter what I do

Wracking my brain for hours trying to figure this one out. TBXML must have the rootXMLElement set in order to begin traversing and parsing data.

No matter what I do, when I NSLog it, it's null.

Here's a sample of the XML:

<?xml version= "1.0" encoding="UTF8"?> 
<patients>
    <patient>
        <patientNumber>1234</patientNumber>
        <nameFirst>Jason</nameFirst>
        <!--more properties of a patient-->
    </patient>
    <patient>
        <patientNumber>5542</patientNumber>
        <nameFirst>Gar开发者_运维百科y</nameFirst>
        <!--more properties of a patient-->
    </patient>
</patients>

The code I'm using thus far:

NSURL *xmlURL = [NSURL URLWithString:destPath];
TBXML *tbxml = [TBXML tbxmlWithURL:xmlURL];

NSLog shows tbxml.rootXMLElement as null.

Other details of note:

1. I use a ruby script to delete any non-ASCII characters from the XML file. The app does not require anything more.
2. I thought the problem might be that the XML file was not UTF-8, so I used bash command iconv to convert it from ASCII to UTF-8. Didn't work either.

Any suggestions are greatly appreciated.

---

It looks like it is a local XML based on the fact that you are preprocessing it. When you are processing local file paths as URLs you need to use fileURLWithPath: for it to work properly. So you need to do this,

NSURL *xmlURL = [NSURL fileURLWithPath:destPath];
TBXML *tbxml = [TBXML tbxmlWithURL:xmlURL];