swig beginner question

["Gregg Reynolds" <dev@...>]

Hi,

I'm a swig novice trying to use to wrap libxml2 for lua.  It was
fairly easy to get to the point where I can read and crawl an XML
file, but I can't see how to get at string data.  Example:

require("libxml");  --my swig module name
doc = libxml.xmlReadFile("./test.xml", 0, 0)
ch=doc.children
print(ch.type)
=> 3  -- ok, means ELEMENT node
print(ch.name)
=> userdata: 0x835...

But ch.name should be "test", the element name.  In libxml2 it's a
"const xmlChar*", and xmlChar is typedefed to unsigned char.  (See
http://xmlsoft.org/html/libxml-tree.html#xmlNode)

Anybody know how to get the userdata dereferenced properly, so normal
lua syntax will work for such fields?

btw, I first tried tolua, but it seems to be outdated and I'm on 5.1.1.

Thanks,

gregg