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Daniel Veillard09ab7e12001-07-10 15:49:44 +0000[diff] [blame]1<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"
2 "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
Daniel Veillardccb09631998-10-27 06:21:04 +0000[diff] [blame]3<html>
4<head>
Daniel Veillard598bec32003-07-06 10:02:03 +0000[diff] [blame]5 <title>The XML C parser and toolkit of Gnome</title>
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +0000[diff] [blame]6 <meta name="GENERATOR" content="amaya 5.1">
Daniel Veillardb24054a1999-12-18 15:32:46 +0000[diff] [blame]7 <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html">
Daniel Veillardccb09631998-10-27 06:21:04 +0000[diff] [blame]8</head>
Daniel Veillardccb09631998-10-27 06:21:04 +0000[diff] [blame]9
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]10<body bgcolor="#ffffff">
Daniel Veillard598bec32003-07-06 10:02:03 +0000[diff] [blame]11<h1 align="center">The XML C parser and toolkit of Gnome</h1>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]12
Daniel Veillard9c466822001-10-25 12:03:39 +0000[diff] [blame]13<h1>Note: this is the flat content of the <a href="index.html">web
14site</a></h1>
15
Daniel Veillardc9484202001-10-24 12:35:52 +0000[diff] [blame]16<h1 style="text-align: center">libxml, a.k.a. gnome-xml</h1>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]17
18<p></p>
Daniel Veillard9c466822001-10-25 12:03:39 +0000[diff] [blame]19
Daniel Veillard7ebac022004-02-25 22:36:35 +0000[diff] [blame]20<p
21style="text-align: right; font-style: italic; font-size: 10pt">"Programming
22with libxml2 is like the thrilling embrace of an exotic stranger." <a
23href="http://diveintomark.org/archives/2004/02/18/libxml2">Mark
24Pilgrim</a></p>
25
Daniel Veillard598bec32003-07-06 10:02:03 +0000[diff] [blame]26<p>Libxml2 is the XML C parser and toolkit developed for the Gnome project
Daniel Veillard23a52c52003-08-18 10:01:18 +0000[diff] [blame]27(but usable outside of the Gnome platform), it is free software available
Daniel Veillardeec1ae92003-09-09 13:11:01 +0000[diff] [blame]28under the <a href="http://www.opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.html">MIT
29License</a>. XML itself is a metalanguage to design markup languages, i.e.
30text language where semantic and structure are added to the content using
31extra "markup" information enclosed between angle brackets. HTML is the most
32well-known markup language. Though the library is written in C <a
33href="python.html">a variety of language bindings</a> make it available in
34other environments.</p>
Daniel Veillard9c466822001-10-25 12:03:39 +0000[diff] [blame]35
Daniel Veillard710823b2003-03-04 10:05:52 +0000[diff] [blame]36<p>Libxml2 is known to be very portable, the library should build and work
37without serious troubles on a variety of systems (Linux, Unix, Windows,
38CygWin, MacOS, MacOS X, RISC Os, OS/2, VMS, QNX, MVS, ...)</p>
39
Daniel Veillard9c466822001-10-25 12:03:39 +0000[diff] [blame]40<p>Libxml2 implements a number of existing standards related to markup
41languages:</p>
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000[diff] [blame]42<ul>
Daniel Veillard9c466822001-10-25 12:03:39 +0000[diff] [blame]43 <li>the XML standard: <a
44 href="http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml">http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml</a></li>
45 <li>Namespaces in XML: <a
46 href="http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml-names/">http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml-names/</a></li>
47 <li>XML Base: <a
48 href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xmlbase/">http://www.w3.org/TR/xmlbase/</a></li>
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +0000[diff] [blame]49 <li><a href="http://www.cis.ohio-state.edu/rfc/rfc2396.txt">RFC 2396</a> :
50 Uniform Resource Identifiers <a
Daniel Veillard9c466822001-10-25 12:03:39 +0000[diff] [blame]51 href="http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2396.txt">http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2396.txt</a></li>
52 <li>XML Path Language (XPath) 1.0: <a
53 href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xpath">http://www.w3.org/TR/xpath</a></li>
54 <li>HTML4 parser: <a
55 href="http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/">http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/</a></li>
Daniel Veillard23a52c52003-08-18 10:01:18 +0000[diff] [blame]56 <li>XML Pointer Language (XPointer) Version 1.0: <a
Daniel Veillard9c466822001-10-25 12:03:39 +0000[diff] [blame]57 href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xptr">http://www.w3.org/TR/xptr</a></li>
58 <li>XML Inclusions (XInclude) Version 1.0: <a
59 href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xinclude/">http://www.w3.org/TR/xinclude/</a></li>
Daniel Veillard23a52c52003-08-18 10:01:18 +0000[diff] [blame]60 <li>ISO-8859-x encodings, as well as <a
Daniel Veillard9c466822001-10-25 12:03:39 +0000[diff] [blame]61 href="http://www.cis.ohio-state.edu/rfc/rfc2044.txt">rfc2044</a> [UTF-8]
62 and <a href="http://www.cis.ohio-state.edu/rfc/rfc2781.txt">rfc2781</a>
Daniel Veillard23a52c52003-08-18 10:01:18 +0000[diff] [blame]63 [UTF-16] Unicode encodings, and more if using iconv support</li>
Daniel Veillard9c466822001-10-25 12:03:39 +0000[diff] [blame]64 <li>part of SGML Open Technical Resolution TR9401:1997</li>
65 <li>XML Catalogs Working Draft 06 August 2001: <a
66 href="http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/entity/spec-2001-08-06.html">http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/entity/spec-2001-08-06.html</a></li>
Daniel Veillard5c396542002-03-15 07:57:50 +0000[diff] [blame]67 <li>Canonical XML Version 1.0: <a
68 href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xml-c14n">http://www.w3.org/TR/xml-c14n</a>
Daniel Veillard2d347fa2002-03-17 10:34:11 +0000[diff] [blame]69 and the Exclusive XML Canonicalization CR draft <a
70 href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xml-exc-c14n">http://www.w3.org/TR/xml-exc-c14n</a></li>
Daniel Veillard758c5312003-12-15 11:51:25 +0000[diff] [blame]71 <li>Relax NG, ISO/IEC 19757-2:2003, <a
Daniel Veillard17bed982003-02-24 20:11:43 +0000[diff] [blame]72 href="http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/relax-ng/spec-20011203.html">http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/relax-ng/spec-20011203.html</a></li>
Daniel Veillardf83a2c72003-04-08 13:48:40 +0000[diff] [blame]73 <li>W3C XML Schemas Part 2: Datatypes <a
74 href="http://www.w3.org/TR/2001/REC-xmlschema-2-20010502/">REC 02 May
Daniel Veillard7ecced52003-12-18 14:22:09 +0000[diff] [blame]75 2001</a></li>
Daniel Veillardeca726d2004-04-18 21:47:34 +0000[diff] [blame]76 <li>W3C <a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xml-id/">xml:id</a> Working Draft 7
77 April 2004</li>
Daniel Veillard96984452000-08-31 13:50:12 +0000[diff] [blame]78</ul>
79
Daniel Veillard560c2a42003-07-06 21:13:49 +0000[diff] [blame]80<p>In most cases libxml2 tries to implement the specifications in a
Daniel Veillard7c4eb632004-04-19 21:29:12 +0000[diff] [blame]81relatively strictly compliant way. As of release 2.4.16, libxml2 passed all
Daniel Veillard560c2a42003-07-06 21:13:49 +0000[diff] [blame]821800+ tests from the <a
Daniel Veillarda5393562002-02-20 11:40:49 +0000[diff] [blame]83href="http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/xml-conformance/">OASIS XML Tests
84Suite</a>.</p>
Daniel Veillard5b16f582002-02-20 11:38:46 +0000[diff] [blame]85
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000[diff] [blame]86<p>To some extent libxml2 provides support for the following additional
87specifications but doesn't claim to implement them completely:</p>
Daniel Veillard9c466822001-10-25 12:03:39 +0000[diff] [blame]88<ul>
89 <li>Document Object Model (DOM) <a
90 href="http://www.w3.org/TR/DOM-Level-2-Core/">http://www.w3.org/TR/DOM-Level-2-Core/</a>
Daniel Veillardd4cfcef2004-05-06 18:55:27 +0000[diff] [blame]91 the document model, but it doesn't implement the API itself, gdome2 does
92 this on top of libxml2</li>
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +0000[diff] [blame]93 <li><a href="http://www.cis.ohio-state.edu/rfc/rfc959.txt">RFC 959</a> :
Daniel Veillard8a469172003-06-12 16:05:07 +0000[diff] [blame]94 libxml2 implements a basic FTP client code</li>
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +0000[diff] [blame]95 <li><a href="http://www.cis.ohio-state.edu/rfc/rfc1945.txt">RFC 1945</a> :
96 HTTP/1.0, again a basic HTTP client code</li>
Daniel Veillard7c4eb632004-04-19 21:29:12 +0000[diff] [blame]97 <li>SAX: a SAX2 like interface and a minimal SAX1 implementation compatible
98 with early expat versions</li>
Daniel Veillard9c466822001-10-25 12:03:39 +0000[diff] [blame]99</ul>
100
Daniel Veillardf83a2c72003-04-08 13:48:40 +0000[diff] [blame]101<p>A partial implementation of <a
102href="http://www.w3.org/TR/2001/REC-xmlschema-1-20010502/">XML Schemas Part
1031: Structure</a> is being worked on but it would be far too early to make any
104conformance statement about it at the moment.</p>
Daniel Veillarde6d8e202002-05-02 06:11:10 +0000[diff] [blame]105
Daniel Veillard96984452000-08-31 13:50:12 +0000[diff] [blame]106<p>Separate documents:</p>
107<ul>
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +0000[diff] [blame]108 <li><a href="http://xmlsoft.org/XSLT/">the libxslt page</a> providing an
Daniel Veillard2d347fa2002-03-17 10:34:11 +0000[diff] [blame]109 implementation of XSLT 1.0 and common extensions like EXSLT for
110 libxml2</li>
Daniel Veillardc6271d22001-10-27 07:50:58 +0000[diff] [blame]111 <li><a href="http://www.cs.unibo.it/~casarini/gdome2/">the gdome2 page</a>
Daniel Veillard2d347fa2002-03-17 10:34:11 +0000[diff] [blame]112 : a standard DOM2 implementation for libxml2</li>
113 <li><a href="http://www.aleksey.com/xmlsec/">the XMLSec page</a>: an
114 implementation of <a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xmldsig-core/">W3C XML
115 Digital Signature</a> for libxml2</li>
Daniel Veillarde6d8e202002-05-02 06:11:10 +0000[diff] [blame]116 <li>also check the related links section below for more related and active
117 projects.</li>
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000[diff] [blame]118</ul>
Daniel Veillard252004d2004-03-23 12:32:32 +0000[diff] [blame]119<!----------------<p>Results of the <a
Daniel Veillard806cada2003-03-19 21:58:59 +0000[diff] [blame]120href="http://xmlbench.sourceforge.net/results/benchmark/index.html">xmlbench
Daniel Veillard31ae4622004-02-16 07:45:44 +0000[diff] [blame]121benchmark</a> on sourceforge February 2004 (smaller is better):</p>
Daniel Veillardd8da01c2003-03-24 15:58:23 +0000[diff] [blame]122
Daniel Veillard31ae4622004-02-16 07:45:44 +0000[diff] [blame]123<p align="center"><img src="benchmark.png"
Daniel Veillardd8da01c2003-03-24 15:58:23 +0000[diff] [blame]124alt="benchmark results for Expat Xerces libxml2 Oracle and Sun toolkits"></p>
Daniel Veillardcf80b782004-03-07 19:32:19 +0000[diff] [blame]125-------------->
Daniel Veillard806cada2003-03-19 21:58:59 +0000[diff] [blame]126
Daniel Veillard252004d2004-03-23 12:32:32 +0000[diff] [blame]127
Daniel Veillarde1662542002-08-28 11:50:59 +0000[diff] [blame]128<p>Logo designed by <a href="mailto:liyanage@access.ch">Marc Liyanage</a>.</p>
129
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000[diff] [blame]130<h2><a name="Introducti">Introduction</a></h2>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]131
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +0000[diff] [blame]132<p>This document describes libxml, the <a
Daniel Veillard560c2a42003-07-06 21:13:49 +0000[diff] [blame]133href="http://www.w3.org/XML/">XML</a> C parser and toolkit developed for the
134<a href="http://www.gnome.org/">Gnome</a> project. <a
Daniel Veillardec78c0f2000-08-25 10:25:23 +0000[diff] [blame]135href="http://www.w3.org/XML/">XML is a standard</a> for building tag-based
136structured documents/data.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]137
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000[diff] [blame]138<p>Here are some key points about libxml:</p>
139<ul>
Daniel Veillard8a469172003-06-12 16:05:07 +0000[diff] [blame]140 <li>Libxml2 exports Push (progressive) and Pull (blocking) type parser
Daniel Veillard2d347fa2002-03-17 10:34:11 +0000[diff] [blame]141 interfaces for both XML and HTML.</li>
Daniel Veillard8a469172003-06-12 16:05:07 +0000[diff] [blame]142 <li>Libxml2 can do DTD validation at parse time, using a parsed document
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000[diff] [blame]143 instance, or with an arbitrary DTD.</li>
Daniel Veillard8a469172003-06-12 16:05:07 +0000[diff] [blame]144 <li>Libxml2 includes complete <a
Daniel Veillard8c2ecaf2001-07-10 17:53:07 +0000[diff] [blame]145 href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xpath">XPath</a>, <a
146 href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xptr">XPointer</a> and <a
147 href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xinclude">XInclude</a> implementations.</li>
Daniel Veillardec78c0f2000-08-25 10:25:23 +0000[diff] [blame]148 <li>It is written in plain C, making as few assumptions as possible, and
Daniel Veillard189446d2000-10-13 10:23:06 +0000[diff] [blame]149 sticking closely to ANSI C/POSIX for easy embedding. Works on
Daniel Veillardab8500d2000-10-15 21:06:19 +0000[diff] [blame]150 Linux/Unix/Windows, ported to a number of other platforms.</li>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000[diff] [blame]151 <li>Basic support for HTTP and FTP client allowing applications to fetch
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000[diff] [blame]152 remote resources.</li>
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000[diff] [blame]153 <li>The design is modular, most of the extensions can be compiled out.</li>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000[diff] [blame]154 <li>The internal document representation is as close as possible to the <a
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000[diff] [blame]155 href="http://www.w3.org/DOM/">DOM</a> interfaces.</li>
Daniel Veillard560c2a42003-07-06 21:13:49 +0000[diff] [blame]156 <li>Libxml2 also has a <a
157 href="http://www.megginson.com/SAX/index.html">SAX like interface</a>;
158 the interface is designed to be compatible with <a
Daniel Veillard402e8c82000-02-29 22:57:47 +0000[diff] [blame]159 href="http://www.jclark.com/xml/expat.html">Expat</a>.</li>
Daniel Veillardc575b992002-02-08 13:28:40 +0000[diff] [blame]160 <li>This library is released under the <a
161 href="http://www.opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.html">MIT
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000[diff] [blame]162 License</a>. See the Copyright file in the distribution for the precise
Daniel Veillardc575b992002-02-08 13:28:40 +0000[diff] [blame]163 wording.</li>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000[diff] [blame]164</ul>
Daniel Veillardccb09631998-10-27 06:21:04 +0000[diff] [blame]165
Daniel Veillarde0c1d722001-03-21 10:28:36 +0000[diff] [blame]166<p>Warning: unless you are forced to because your application links with a
Daniel Veillard2d347fa2002-03-17 10:34:11 +0000[diff] [blame]167Gnome-1.X library requiring it, <strong><span
Daniel Veillarde0c1d722001-03-21 10:28:36 +0000[diff] [blame]168style="background-color: #FF0000">Do Not Use libxml1</span></strong>, use
169libxml2</p>
170
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]171<h2><a name="FAQ">FAQ</a></h2>
172
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000[diff] [blame]173<p>Table of Contents:</p>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]174<ul>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000[diff] [blame]175 <li><a href="FAQ.html#License">License(s)</a></li>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]176 <li><a href="FAQ.html#Installati">Installation</a></li>
177 <li><a href="FAQ.html#Compilatio">Compilation</a></li>
178 <li><a href="FAQ.html#Developer">Developer corner</a></li>
179</ul>
180
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000[diff] [blame]181<h3><a name="License">License</a>(s)</h3>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]182<ol>
183 <li><em>Licensing Terms for libxml</em>
Daniel Veillard8a469172003-06-12 16:05:07 +0000[diff] [blame]184 <p>libxml2 is released under the <a
Daniel Veillardc575b992002-02-08 13:28:40 +0000[diff] [blame]185 href="http://www.opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.html">MIT
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000[diff] [blame]186 License</a>; see the file Copyright in the distribution for the precise
Daniel Veillardc575b992002-02-08 13:28:40 +0000[diff] [blame]187 wording</p>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]188 </li>
Daniel Veillard8a469172003-06-12 16:05:07 +0000[diff] [blame]189 <li><em>Can I embed libxml2 in a proprietary application ?</em>
Daniel Veillard42766c02002-08-22 20:52:17 +0000[diff] [blame]190 <p>Yes. The MIT License allows you to keep proprietary the changes you
191 made to libxml, but it would be graceful to send-back bug fixes and
192 improvements as patches for possible incorporation in the main
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000[diff] [blame]193 development tree.</p>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]194 </li>
195</ol>
196
197<h3><a name="Installati">Installation</a></h3>
198<ol>
Daniel Veillard560c2a42003-07-06 21:13:49 +0000[diff] [blame]199 <li><strong><span style="background-color: #FF0000">Do Not Use
200 libxml1</span></strong>, use libxml2</li>
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +0000[diff] [blame]201 <li><em>Where can I get libxml</em> ?
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]202 <p>The original distribution comes from <a
203 href="ftp://rpmfind.net/pub/libxml/">rpmfind.net</a> or <a
Daniel Veillard024f1992003-12-10 16:43:49 +0000[diff] [blame]204 href="ftp://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/sources/libxml2/2.6/">gnome.org</a></p>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000[diff] [blame]205 <p>Most Linux and BSD distributions include libxml, this is probably the
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000[diff] [blame]206 safer way for end-users to use libxml.</p>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]207 <p>David Doolin provides precompiled Windows versions at <a
208 href="http://www.ce.berkeley.edu/~doolin/code/libxmlwin32/ ">http://www.ce.berkeley.edu/~doolin/code/libxmlwin32/</a></p>
209 </li>
210 <li><em>I see libxml and libxml2 releases, which one should I install ?</em>
211 <ul>
Daniel Veillard42766c02002-08-22 20:52:17 +0000[diff] [blame]212 <li>If you are not constrained by backward compatibility issues with
213 existing applications, install libxml2 only</li>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]214 <li>If you are not doing development, you can safely install both.
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000[diff] [blame]215 Usually the packages <a
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]216 href="http://rpmfind.net/linux/RPM/libxml.html">libxml</a> and <a
217 href="http://rpmfind.net/linux/RPM/libxml2.html">libxml2</a> are
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000[diff] [blame]218 compatible (this is not the case for development packages).</li>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]219 <li>If you are a developer and your system provides separate packaging
220 for shared libraries and the development components, it is possible
221 to install libxml and libxml2, and also <a
222 href="http://rpmfind.net/linux/RPM/libxml-devel.html">libxml-devel</a>
223 and <a
224 href="http://rpmfind.net/linux/RPM/libxml2-devel.html">libxml2-devel</a>
225 too for libxml2 &gt;= 2.3.0</li>
226 <li>If you are developing a new application, please develop against
227 libxml2(-devel)</li>
228 </ul>
229 </li>
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000[diff] [blame]230 <li><em>I can't install the libxml package, it conflicts with libxml0</em>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]231 <p>You probably have an old libxml0 package used to provide the shared
Daniel Veillard42766c02002-08-22 20:52:17 +0000[diff] [blame]232 library for libxml.so.0, you can probably safely remove it. The libxml
233 packages provided on <a
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000[diff] [blame]234 href="ftp://rpmfind.net/pub/libxml/">rpmfind.net</a> provide
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]235 libxml.so.0</p>
236 </li>
237 <li><em>I can't install the libxml(2) RPM package due to failed
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000[diff] [blame]238 dependencies</em>
239 <p>The most generic solution is to re-fetch the latest src.rpm , and
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]240 rebuild it locally with</p>
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000[diff] [blame]241 <p><code>rpm --rebuild libxml(2)-xxx.src.rpm</code>.</p>
Daniel Veillard42766c02002-08-22 20:52:17 +0000[diff] [blame]242 <p>If everything goes well it will generate two binary rpm packages (one
243 providing the shared libs and xmllint, and the other one, the -devel
244 package, providing includes, static libraries and scripts needed to build
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]245 applications with libxml(2)) that you can install locally.</p>
246 </li>
247</ol>
248
249<h3><a name="Compilatio">Compilation</a></h3>
250<ol>
Daniel Veillard8a469172003-06-12 16:05:07 +0000[diff] [blame]251 <li><em>What is the process to compile libxml2 ?</em>
252 <p>As most UNIX libraries libxml2 follows the "standard":</p>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]253 <p><code>gunzip -c xxx.tar.gz | tar xvf -</code></p>
254 <p><code>cd libxml-xxxx</code></p>
255 <p><code>./configure --help</code></p>
256 <p>to see the options, then the compilation/installation proper</p>
257 <p><code>./configure [possible options]</code></p>
258 <p><code>make</code></p>
259 <p><code>make install</code></p>
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000[diff] [blame]260 <p>At that point you may have to rerun ldconfig or a similar utility to
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]261 update your list of installed shared libs.</p>
262 </li>
Daniel Veillard8a469172003-06-12 16:05:07 +0000[diff] [blame]263 <li><em>What other libraries are needed to compile/install libxml2 ?</em>
264 <p>Libxml2 does not require any other library, the normal C ANSI API
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]265 should be sufficient (please report any violation to this rule you may
266 find).</p>
Daniel Veillard8a469172003-06-12 16:05:07 +0000[diff] [blame]267 <p>However if found at configuration time libxml2 will detect and use the
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]268 following libs:</p>
269 <ul>
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +0000[diff] [blame]270 <li><a href="http://www.info-zip.org/pub/infozip/zlib/">libz</a> : a
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000[diff] [blame]271 highly portable and available widely compression library.</li>
272 <li>iconv: a powerful character encoding conversion library. It is
273 included by default in recent glibc libraries, so it doesn't need to
274 be installed specifically on Linux. It now seems a <a
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]275 href="http://www.opennc.org/onlinepubs/7908799/xsh/iconv.html">part
276 of the official UNIX</a> specification. Here is one <a
Daniel Veillarddad3f682002-11-17 16:47:27 +0000[diff] [blame]277 href="http://www.gnu.org/software/libiconv/">implementation of the
278 library</a> which source can be found <a
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]279 href="ftp://ftp.ilog.fr/pub/Users/haible/gnu/">here</a>.</li>
280 </ul>
281 </li>
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000[diff] [blame]282 <li><em>Make check fails on some platforms</em>
Daniel Veillard42766c02002-08-22 20:52:17 +0000[diff] [blame]283 <p>Sometimes the regression tests' results don't completely match the
284 value produced by the parser, and the makefile uses diff to print the
285 delta. On some platforms the diff return breaks the compilation process;
286 if the diff is small this is probably not a serious problem.</p>
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000[diff] [blame]287 <p>Sometimes (especially on Solaris) make checks fail due to limitations
Daniel Veillarde46182c2002-02-12 14:29:11 +0000[diff] [blame]288 in make. Try using GNU-make instead.</p>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]289 </li>
290 <li><em>I use the CVS version and there is no configure script</em>
Daniel Veillard42766c02002-08-22 20:52:17 +0000[diff] [blame]291 <p>The configure script (and other Makefiles) are generated. Use the
292 autogen.sh script to regenerate the configure script and Makefiles,
293 like:</p>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]294 <p><code>./autogen.sh --prefix=/usr --disable-shared</code></p>
295 </li>
296 <li><em>I have troubles when running make tests with gcc-3.0</em>
297 <p>It seems the initial release of gcc-3.0 has a problem with the
298 optimizer which miscompiles the URI module. Please use another
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000[diff] [blame]299 compiler.</p>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]300 </li>
301</ol>
302
303<h3><a name="Developer">Developer</a> corner</h3>
304<ol>
Daniel Veillard93d95252003-04-29 20:25:40 +0000[diff] [blame]305 <li><em>Troubles compiling or linking programs using libxml2</em>
306 <p>Usually the problem comes from the fact that the compiler doesn't get
307 the right compilation or linking flags. There is a small shell script
308 <code>xml2-config</code> which is installed as part of libxml2 usual
Daniel Veillard560c2a42003-07-06 21:13:49 +0000[diff] [blame]309 install process which provides those flags. Use</p>
Daniel Veillard93d95252003-04-29 20:25:40 +0000[diff] [blame]310 <p><code>xml2-config --cflags</code></p>
311 <p>to get the compilation flags and</p>
312 <p><code>xml2-config --libs</code></p>
313 <p>to get the linker flags. Usually this is done directly from the
314 Makefile as:</p>
315 <p><code>CFLAGS=`xml2-config --cflags`</code></p>
316 <p><code>LIBS=`xml2-config --libs`</code></p>
317 </li>
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000[diff] [blame]318 <li><em>xmlDocDump() generates output on one line.</em>
Daniel Veillard8a469172003-06-12 16:05:07 +0000[diff] [blame]319 <p>Libxml2 will not <strong>invent</strong> spaces in the content of a
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]320 document since <strong>all spaces in the content of a document are
321 significant</strong>. If you build a tree from the API and want
322 indentation:</p>
323 <ol>
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000[diff] [blame]324 <li>the correct way is to generate those yourself too.</li>
Daniel Veillard8a469172003-06-12 16:05:07 +0000[diff] [blame]325 <li>the dangerous way is to ask libxml2 to add those blanks to your
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]326 content <strong>modifying the content of your document in the
327 process</strong>. The result may not be what you expect. There is
328 <strong>NO</strong> way to guarantee that such a modification won't
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000[diff] [blame]329 affect other parts of the content of your document. See <a
Daniel Veillard5373ea12003-07-24 13:09:13 +0000[diff] [blame]330 href="http://xmlsoft.org/html/libxml-parser.html#xmlKeepBlanksDefault">xmlKeepBlanksDefault
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]331 ()</a> and <a
Daniel Veillard5373ea12003-07-24 13:09:13 +0000[diff] [blame]332 href="http://xmlsoft.org/html/libxml-tree.html#xmlSaveFormatFile">xmlSaveFormatFile
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]333 ()</a></li>
334 </ol>
335 </li>
336 <li>Extra nodes in the document:
337 <p><em>For a XML file as below:</em></p>
338 <pre>&lt;?xml version="1.0"?&gt;
339&lt;PLAN xmlns="http://www.argus.ca/autotest/1.0/"&gt;
340&lt;NODE CommFlag="0"/&gt;
341&lt;NODE CommFlag="1"/&gt;
342&lt;/PLAN&gt;</pre>
343 <p><em>after parsing it with the function
344 pxmlDoc=xmlParseFile(...);</em></p>
345 <p><em>I want to the get the content of the first node (node with the
346 CommFlag="0")</em></p>
347 <p><em>so I did it as following;</em></p>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000[diff] [blame]348 <pre>xmlNodePtr pnode;
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]349pnode=pxmlDoc-&gt;children-&gt;children;</pre>
350 <p><em>but it does not work. If I change it to</em></p>
351 <pre>pnode=pxmlDoc-&gt;children-&gt;children-&gt;next;</pre>
352 <p><em>then it works. Can someone explain it to me.</em></p>
353 <p></p>
354 <p>In XML all characters in the content of the document are significant
355 <strong>including blanks and formatting line breaks</strong>.</p>
356 <p>The extra nodes you are wondering about are just that, text nodes with
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000[diff] [blame]357 the formatting spaces which are part of the document but that people tend
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]358 to forget. There is a function <a
359 href="http://xmlsoft.org/html/libxml-parser.html">xmlKeepBlanksDefault
360 ()</a> to remove those at parse time, but that's an heuristic, and its
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000[diff] [blame]361 use should be limited to cases where you are certain there is no
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]362 mixed-content in the document.</p>
363 </li>
364 <li><em>I get compilation errors of existing code like when accessing
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000[diff] [blame]365 <strong>root</strong> or <strong>child fields</strong> of nodes.</em>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]366 <p>You are compiling code developed for libxml version 1 and using a
367 libxml2 development environment. Either switch back to libxml v1 devel or
368 even better fix the code to compile with libxml2 (or both) by <a
369 href="upgrade.html">following the instructions</a>.</p>
370 </li>
371 <li><em>I get compilation errors about non existing
372 <strong>xmlRootNode</strong> or <strong>xmlChildrenNode</strong>
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000[diff] [blame]373 fields.</em>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]374 <p>The source code you are using has been <a
375 href="upgrade.html">upgraded</a> to be able to compile with both libxml
376 and libxml2, but you need to install a more recent version:
377 libxml(-devel) &gt;= 1.8.8 or libxml2(-devel) &gt;= 2.1.0</p>
378 </li>
379 <li><em>XPath implementation looks seriously broken</em>
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000[diff] [blame]380 <p>XPath implementation prior to 2.3.0 was really incomplete. Upgrade to
381 a recent version, there are no known bugs in the current version.</p>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]382 </li>
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000[diff] [blame]383 <li><em>The example provided in the web page does not compile.</em>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]384 <p>It's hard to maintain the documentation in sync with the code
385 &lt;grin/&gt; ...</p>
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000[diff] [blame]386 <p>Check the previous points 1/ and 2/ raised before, and please send
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]387 patches.</p>
388 </li>
Daniel Veillard8d7b5c72003-11-15 18:24:36 +0000[diff] [blame]389 <li><em>Where can I get more examples and information than provided on the
Daniel Veillard42766c02002-08-22 20:52:17 +0000[diff] [blame]390 web page?</em>
Daniel Veillard8a469172003-06-12 16:05:07 +0000[diff] [blame]391 <p>Ideally a libxml2 book would be nice. I have no such plan ... But you
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]392 can:</p>
393 <ul>
394 <li>check more deeply the <a href="html/libxml-lib.html">existing
395 generated doc</a></li>
Daniel Veillardc480c4e2003-12-10 13:24:38 +0000[diff] [blame]396 <li>have a look at <a href="examples/index.html">the set of
397 examples</a>.</li>
Daniel Veillard8a469172003-06-12 16:05:07 +0000[diff] [blame]398 <li>look for examples of use for libxml2 function using the Gnome code.
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000[diff] [blame]399 For example the following will query the full Gnome CVS base for the
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]400 use of the <strong>xmlAddChild()</strong> function:
401 <p><a
402 href="http://cvs.gnome.org/lxr/search?string=xmlAddChild">http://cvs.gnome.org/lxr/search?string=xmlAddChild</a></p>
403 <p>This may be slow, a large hardware donation to the gnome project
404 could cure this :-)</p>
405 </li>
406 <li><a
Daniel Veillardc480c4e2003-12-10 13:24:38 +0000[diff] [blame]407 href="http://cvs.gnome.org/bonsai/rview.cgi?cvsroot=/cvs/gnome&amp;dir=gnome-xml">Browse
408 the libxml2 source</a> , I try to write code as clean and documented
Daniel Veillard42766c02002-08-22 20:52:17 +0000[diff] [blame]409 as possible, so looking at it may be helpful. In particular the code
410 of xmllint.c and of the various testXXX.c test programs should
411 provide good examples of how to do things with the library.</li>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]412 </ul>
413 </li>
414 <li>What about C++ ?
Daniel Veillard8a469172003-06-12 16:05:07 +0000[diff] [blame]415 <p>libxml2 is written in pure C in order to allow easy reuse on a number
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]416 of platforms, including embedded systems. I don't intend to convert to
417 C++.</p>
Daniel Veillard91e69c52003-08-04 01:43:07 +0000[diff] [blame]418 <p>There is however a C++ wrapper which may fulfill your needs:</p>
Daniel Veillard9b6fd302002-05-13 12:06:47 +0000[diff] [blame]419 <ul>
420 <li>by Ari Johnson &lt;ari@btigate.com&gt;:
421 <p>Website: <a
Daniel Veillard91e69c52003-08-04 01:43:07 +0000[diff] [blame]422 href="http://libxmlplusplus.sourceforge.net/">http://libxmlplusplus.sourceforge.net/</a></p>
Daniel Veillard9b6fd302002-05-13 12:06:47 +0000[diff] [blame]423 <p>Download: <a
Daniel Veillard91e69c52003-08-04 01:43:07 +0000[diff] [blame]424 href="http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=12999">http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=12999</a></p>
Daniel Veillard9b6fd302002-05-13 12:06:47 +0000[diff] [blame]425 </li>
Daniel Veillard83ee40d2003-08-09 22:24:09 +0000[diff] [blame]426 <!-- Website is currently unavailable as of 2003-08-02
Daniel Veillard9b6fd302002-05-13 12:06:47 +0000[diff] [blame]427 <li>by Peter Jones &lt;pjones@pmade.org&gt;
Daniel Veillard83ee40d2003-08-09 22:24:09 +0000[diff] [blame]428 <p>Website: <a
429 href="http://pmade.org/pjones/software/xmlwrapp/">http://pmade.org/pjones/software/xmlwrapp/</a></p>
Daniel Veillard9b6fd302002-05-13 12:06:47 +0000[diff] [blame]430 </li>
Daniel Veillard83ee40d2003-08-09 22:24:09 +0000[diff] [blame]431 -->
Daniel Veillard9b6fd302002-05-13 12:06:47 +0000[diff] [blame]432 </ul>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]433 </li>
434 <li>How to validate a document a posteriori ?
435 <p>It is possible to validate documents which had not been validated at
Daniel Veillard42766c02002-08-22 20:52:17 +0000[diff] [blame]436 initial parsing time or documents which have been built from scratch
437 using the API. Use the <a
Daniel Veillard5373ea12003-07-24 13:09:13 +0000[diff] [blame]438 href="http://xmlsoft.org/html/libxml-valid.html#xmlValidateDtd">xmlValidateDtd()</a>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000[diff] [blame]439 function. It is also possible to simply add a DTD to an existing
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]440 document:</p>
441 <pre>xmlDocPtr doc; /* your existing document */
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000[diff] [blame]442xmlDtdPtr dtd = xmlParseDTD(NULL, filename_of_dtd); /* parse the DTD */
443
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]444 dtd-&gt;name = xmlStrDup((xmlChar*)"root_name"); /* use the given root */
445
446 doc-&gt;intSubset = dtd;
447 if (doc-&gt;children == NULL) xmlAddChild((xmlNodePtr)doc, (xmlNodePtr)dtd);
448 else xmlAddPrevSibling(doc-&gt;children, (xmlNodePtr)dtd);
449 </pre>
450 </li>
Daniel Veillarddad3f682002-11-17 16:47:27 +0000[diff] [blame]451 <li>So what is this funky "xmlChar" used all the time?
452 <p>It is a null terminated sequence of utf-8 characters. And only utf-8!
453 You need to convert strings encoded in different ways to utf-8 before
454 passing them to the API. This can be accomplished with the iconv library
455 for instance.</p>
John Fleck61f6fb62002-10-31 15:23:29 +0000[diff] [blame]456 </li>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]457 <li>etc ...</li>
458</ol>
459
460<p></p>
461
Daniel Veillard66f68e72003-08-18 16:39:51 +0000[diff] [blame]462<h2><a name="Documentat">Developer Menu</a></h2>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]463
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000[diff] [blame]464<p>There are several on-line resources related to using libxml:</p>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000[diff] [blame]465<ol>
MST 2003 John Fleck2b7142a2003-11-22 03:55:27 +0000[diff] [blame]466 <li>Use the <a href="search.php">search engine</a> to look up
467 information.</li>
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000[diff] [blame]468 <li>Check the <a href="FAQ.html">FAQ.</a></li>
Daniel Veillardc19fccc2000-07-03 11:52:01 +0000[diff] [blame]469 <li>Check the <a href="http://xmlsoft.org/html/libxml-lib.html">extensive
MST 2003 John Fleck2b7142a2003-11-22 03:55:27 +0000[diff] [blame]470 documentation</a> automatically extracted from code comments.</li>
Daniel Veillard8d869642000-07-14 12:12:59 +0000[diff] [blame]471 <li>Look at the documentation about <a href="encoding.html">libxml
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000[diff] [blame]472 internationalization support</a>.</li>
Daniel Veillardbc66f852002-01-14 09:49:20 +0000[diff] [blame]473 <li>This page provides a global overview and <a href="example.html">some
Daniel Veillard402e8c82000-02-29 22:57:47 +0000[diff] [blame]474 examples</a> on how to use libxml.</li>
Daniel Veillardc480c4e2003-12-10 13:24:38 +0000[diff] [blame]475 <li><a href="examples/index.html">Code examples</a></li>
Daniel Veillard560c2a42003-07-06 21:13:49 +0000[diff] [blame]476 <li>John Fleck's libxml2 tutorial: <a href="tutorial/index.html">html</a>
477 or <a href="tutorial/xmltutorial.pdf">pdf</a>.</li>
Daniel Veillard1177ca42003-04-26 22:29:54 +0000[diff] [blame]478 <li>If you need to parse large files, check the <a
479 href="xmlreader.html">xmlReader</a> API tutorial</li>
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +0000[diff] [blame]480 <li><a href="mailto:james@daa.com.au">James Henstridge</a> wrote <a
Daniel Veillard402e8c82000-02-29 22:57:47 +0000[diff] [blame]481 href="http://www.daa.com.au/~james/gnome/xml-sax/xml-sax.html">some nice
482 documentation</a> explaining how to use the libxml SAX interface.</li>
Daniel Veillardc480c4e2003-12-10 13:24:38 +0000[diff] [blame]483 <li>George Lebl wrote <a
MST 2003 John Fleck2b7142a2003-11-22 03:55:27 +0000[diff] [blame]484 href="http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/library/l-gnome3/">an article
Daniel Veillard402e8c82000-02-29 22:57:47 +0000[diff] [blame]485 for IBM developerWorks</a> about using libxml.</li>
Daniel Veillardec303412000-03-24 13:41:54 +0000[diff] [blame]486 <li>Check <a href="http://cvs.gnome.org/lxr/source/gnome-xml/TODO">the TODO
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000[diff] [blame]487 file</a>.</li>
Daniel Veillard42766c02002-08-22 20:52:17 +0000[diff] [blame]488 <li>Read the <a href="upgrade.html">1.x to 2.x upgrade path</a>
489 description. If you are starting a new project using libxml you should
490 really use the 2.x version.</li>
Daniel Veillard845cce42002-01-09 11:51:37 +0000[diff] [blame]491 <li>And don't forget to look at the <a
492 href="http://mail.gnome.org/archives/xml/">mailing-list archive</a>.</li>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000[diff] [blame]493</ol>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]494
Daniel Veillardd5f97f82000-09-17 16:38:14 +0000[diff] [blame]495<h2><a name="Reporting">Reporting bugs and getting help</a></h2>
Daniel Veillard4c3a2031999-11-19 17:46:26 +0000[diff] [blame]496
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame]497<p>Well, bugs or missing features are always possible, and I will make a
498point of fixing them in a timely fashion. The best way to report a bug is to
Daniel Veillardccf996f2003-08-14 10:48:38 +0000[diff] [blame]499use the <a href="http://bugzilla.gnome.org/buglist.cgi?product=libxml2">Gnome
Daniel Veillard42766c02002-08-22 20:52:17 +0000[diff] [blame]500bug tracking database</a> (make sure to use the "libxml2" module name). I
501look at reports there regularly and it's good to have a reminder when a bug
502is still open. Be sure to specify that the bug is for the package libxml2.</p>
Daniel Veillard4c3a2031999-11-19 17:46:26 +0000[diff] [blame]503
Daniel Veillard4ac494b2003-09-18 15:08:00 +0000[diff] [blame]504<p>For small problems you can try to get help on IRC, the #xml channel on
505irc.gnome.org (port 6667) usually have a few person subscribed which may help
506(but there is no garantee and if a real issue is raised it should go on the
507mailing-list for archival).</p>
Daniel Veillard9582d6c2003-09-16 11:40:04 +0000[diff] [blame]508
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000[diff] [blame]509<p>There is also a mailing-list <a
Daniel Veillard3197f162001-04-04 00:40:08 +0000[diff] [blame]510href="mailto:xml@gnome.org">xml@gnome.org</a> for libxml, with an <a
511href="http://mail.gnome.org/archives/xml/">on-line archive</a> (<a
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame]512href="http://xmlsoft.org/messages">old</a>). To subscribe to this list,
513please visit the <a
514href="http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/xml">associated Web</a> page and
515follow the instructions. <strong>Do not send code, I won't debug it</strong>
516(but patches are really appreciated!).</p>
Daniel Veillardd99224d2004-04-06 10:04:16 +0000[diff] [blame]517
518<p>Please note that with the current amount of virus and SPAM, sending mail
519to the list without being subscribed won't work. There is *far too many
520bounces* (in the order of a thousand a day !) I cannot approve them manually
521anymore. If your mail to the list bounced waiting for administrator approval,
522it is LOST ! Repost it and fix the problem triggering the error.</p>
Daniel Veillard234547b2001-07-05 09:46:10 +0000[diff] [blame]523
Daniel Veillard008186f2001-09-13 14:24:44 +0000[diff] [blame]524<p>Check the following <strong><span style="color: #FF0000">before
525posting</span></strong>:</p>
Daniel Veillard234547b2001-07-05 09:46:10 +0000[diff] [blame]526<ul>
Daniel Veillard321be0c2002-10-08 21:26:42 +0000[diff] [blame]527 <li>Read the <a href="FAQ.html">FAQ</a> and <a href="search.php">use the
Daniel Veillarda37aab82003-06-09 09:10:36 +0000[diff] [blame]528 search engine</a> to get information related to your problem.</li>
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000[diff] [blame]529 <li>Make sure you are <a href="ftp://xmlsoft.org/">using a recent
530 version</a>, and that the problem still shows up in a recent version.</li>
531 <li>Check the <a href="http://mail.gnome.org/archives/xml/">list
532 archives</a> to see if the problem was reported already. In this case
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000[diff] [blame]533 there is probably a fix available, similarly check the <a
Daniel Veillardccf996f2003-08-14 10:48:38 +0000[diff] [blame]534 href="http://bugzilla.gnome.org/buglist.cgi?product=libxml2">registered
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000[diff] [blame]535 open bugs</a>.</li>
536 <li>Make sure you can reproduce the bug with xmllint or one of the test
537 programs found in source in the distribution.</li>
Daniel Veillard234547b2001-07-05 09:46:10 +0000[diff] [blame]538 <li>Please send the command showing the error as well as the input (as an
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000[diff] [blame]539 attachment)</li>
Daniel Veillard234547b2001-07-05 09:46:10 +0000[diff] [blame]540</ul>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000[diff] [blame]541
Daniel Veillarda37aab82003-06-09 09:10:36 +0000[diff] [blame]542<p>Then send the bug with associated information to reproduce it to the <a
Daniel Veillard33a67802001-03-07 09:44:02 +0000[diff] [blame]543href="mailto:xml@gnome.org">xml@gnome.org</a> list; if it's really libxml
Daniel Veillard98d071d2003-01-10 09:22:44 +0000[diff] [blame]544related I will approve it. Please do not send mail to me directly, it makes
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000[diff] [blame]545things really hard to track and in some cases I am not the best person to
Daniel Veillard98d071d2003-01-10 09:22:44 +0000[diff] [blame]546answer a given question, ask on the list.</p>
547
548<p>To <span style="color: #E50000">be really clear about support</span>:</p>
549<ul>
Daniel Veillarda37aab82003-06-09 09:10:36 +0000[diff] [blame]550 <li>Support or help <span style="color: #E50000">requests MUST be sent to
Daniel Veillard98d071d2003-01-10 09:22:44 +0000[diff] [blame]551 the list or on bugzilla</span> in case of problems, so that the Question
552 and Answers can be shared publicly. Failing to do so carries the implicit
553 message "I want free support but I don't want to share the benefits with
Daniel Veillard831e8fd2003-01-25 11:45:34 +0000[diff] [blame]554 others" and is not welcome. I will automatically Carbon-Copy the
555 xml@gnome.org mailing list for any technical reply made about libxml2 or
556 libxslt.</li>
Daniel Veillard560c2a42003-07-06 21:13:49 +0000[diff] [blame]557 <li>There is <span style="color: #E50000">no garantee of support</span>, if
558 your question remains unanswered after a week, repost it, making sure you
559 gave all the detail needed and the information requested.</li>
Daniel Veillarda37aab82003-06-09 09:10:36 +0000[diff] [blame]560 <li>Failing to provide information as requested or double checking first
Daniel Veillard98d071d2003-01-10 09:22:44 +0000[diff] [blame]561 for prior feedback also carries the implicit message "the time of the
562 library maintainers is less valuable than my time" and might not be
563 welcome.</li>
564</ul>
Daniel Veillard4c3a2031999-11-19 17:46:26 +0000[diff] [blame]565
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000[diff] [blame]566<p>Of course, bugs reported with a suggested patch for fixing them will
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000[diff] [blame]567probably be processed faster than those without.</p>
Daniel Veillardec303412000-03-24 13:41:54 +0000[diff] [blame]568
569<p>If you're looking for help, a quick look at <a
Daniel Veillardf7ed3362001-08-17 12:01:21 +0000[diff] [blame]570href="http://mail.gnome.org/archives/xml/">the list archive</a> may actually
Daniel Veillard560c2a42003-07-06 21:13:49 +0000[diff] [blame]571provide the answer. I usually send source samples when answering libxml2
572usage questions. The <a
573href="http://xmlsoft.org/html/book1.html">auto-generated documentation</a> is
574not as polished as I would like (i need to learn more about DocBook), but
575it's a good starting point.</p>
Daniel Veillardec303412000-03-24 13:41:54 +0000[diff] [blame]576
Daniel Veillardd5f97f82000-09-17 16:38:14 +0000[diff] [blame]577<h2><a name="help">How to help</a></h2>
578
579<p>You can help the project in various ways, the best thing to do first is to
580subscribe to the mailing-list as explained before, check the <a
Daniel Veillardf7ed3362001-08-17 12:01:21 +0000[diff] [blame]581href="http://mail.gnome.org/archives/xml/">archives </a>and the <a
Daniel Veillardccf996f2003-08-14 10:48:38 +0000[diff] [blame]582href="http://bugzilla.gnome.org/buglist.cgi?product=libxml2">Gnome bug
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000[diff] [blame]583database</a>:</p>
Daniel Veillardd5f97f82000-09-17 16:38:14 +0000[diff] [blame]584<ol>
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000[diff] [blame]585 <li>Provide patches when you find problems.</li>
Daniel Veillard8a469172003-06-12 16:05:07 +0000[diff] [blame]586 <li>Provide the diffs when you port libxml2 to a new platform. They may not
Daniel Veillardab8500d2000-10-15 21:06:19 +0000[diff] [blame]587 be integrated in all cases but help pinpointing portability problems
588 and</li>
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000[diff] [blame]589 <li>Provide documentation fixes (either as patches to the code comments or
Daniel Veillardd5f97f82000-09-17 16:38:14 +0000[diff] [blame]590 as HTML diffs).</li>
Daniel Veillard42766c02002-08-22 20:52:17 +0000[diff] [blame]591 <li>Provide new documentations pieces (translations, examples, etc
592 ...).</li>
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000[diff] [blame]593 <li>Check the TODO file and try to close one of the items.</li>
594 <li>Take one of the points raised in the archive or the bug database and
Daniel Veillarde7ead2d2001-08-22 23:44:09 +0000[diff] [blame]595 provide a fix. <a href="mailto:daniel@veillard.com">Get in touch with me
596 </a>before to avoid synchronization problems and check that the suggested
597 fix will fit in nicely :-)</li>
Daniel Veillardd5f97f82000-09-17 16:38:14 +0000[diff] [blame]598</ol>
599
Daniel Veillard10a2c651999-12-12 13:03:50 +0000[diff] [blame]600<h2><a name="Downloads">Downloads</a></h2>
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000[diff] [blame]601
Daniel Veillard688f6692004-03-26 10:57:38 +0000[diff] [blame]602<p>The latest versions of libxml2 can be found on the <a
Daniel Veillardeca726d2004-04-18 21:47:34 +0000[diff] [blame]603href="ftp://xmlsoft.org/">xmlsoft.org</a> server ( <a
604href="http://xmlsoft.org/sources/">HTTP</a>, <a
605href="ftp://xmlsoft.org/">FTP</a> and rsync are available), there is also
606mirrors (<a href="ftp://speakeasy.rpmfind.net/pub/libxml/">Seattle</a>, <a
Daniel Veillard20c8cf22001-06-26 22:47:36 +0000[diff] [blame]607href="ftp://fr.rpmfind.net/pub/libxml/">France</a>) or on the <a
Daniel Veillardd99224d2004-04-06 10:04:16 +0000[diff] [blame]608href="ftp://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/MIRRORS.html">Gnome FTP server</a> as <a
609href="ftp://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/sources/libxml2/2.6/">source archive</a>
Daniel Veillard688f6692004-03-26 10:57:38 +0000[diff] [blame]610, Antonin Sprinzl also provide <a href="ftp://gd.tuwien.ac.at/pub/libxml/">a
Daniel Veillarde16b5742002-09-26 17:50:03 +0000[diff] [blame]611mirror in Austria</a>. (NOTE that you need both the <a
Daniel Veillardc19fccc2000-07-03 11:52:01 +0000[diff] [blame]612href="http://rpmfind.net/linux/RPM/libxml2.html">libxml(2)</a> and <a
613href="http://rpmfind.net/linux/RPM/libxml2-devel.html">libxml(2)-devel</a>
Daniel Veillardb46a5732003-04-08 13:35:48 +0000[diff] [blame]614packages installed to compile applications using libxml.)</p>
Daniel Veillardeca726d2004-04-18 21:47:34 +0000[diff] [blame]615
616<p>You can find all the history of libxml(2) and libxslt releases in the <a
Daniel Veillardd4cfcef2004-05-06 18:55:27 +0000[diff] [blame]617href="http://xmlsoft.org/sources/old/">old</a> directory. The precompiled
618Windows binaries made by Igor Zlatovic are available in the<a
619href="http://xmlsoft.org/sources/win32/"> win32</a> directory.</p>
Daniel Veillardb46a5732003-04-08 13:35:48 +0000[diff] [blame]620
621<p>Binary ports:</p>
622<ul>
623 <li>Red Hat RPMs for i386 are available directly on <a
624 href="ftp://xmlsoft.org/">xmlsoft.org</a>, the source RPM will compile on
625 any architecture supported by Red Hat.</li>
Daniel Veillardf83a2c72003-04-08 13:48:40 +0000[diff] [blame]626 <li><p><a href="mailto:igor@zlatkovic.com">Igor Zlatkovic</a></p>
Daniel Veillardce192eb2003-04-16 15:58:05 +0000[diff] [blame]627 is now the maintainer of the Windows port, <a
Daniel Veillardb46a5732003-04-08 13:35:48 +0000[diff] [blame]628 href="http://www.zlatkovic.com/projects/libxml/index.html">he provides
629 binaries</a>.</li>
630 <li><a href="mailto:Gary.Pennington@sun.com">Gary Pennington</a> provides
631 <a href="http://garypennington.net/libxml2/">Solaris binaries</a>.</li>
632 <li><a href="mailto:Steve.Ball@zveno.com">Steve Ball</a> provides <a
633 href="http://www.zveno.com/open_source/libxml2xslt.html">Mac Os X
634 binaries</a>.</li>
635 <li>The HP-UX porting center provides <a
636 href="http://hpux.connect.org.uk/hppd/hpux/Gnome/">HP-UX binaries</a></li>
637</ul>
638
639<p>If you know other supported binary ports, please <a
640href="http://veillard.com/">contact me</a>.</p>
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000[diff] [blame]641
Daniel Veillard6c8b1172000-03-01 00:40:41 +0000[diff] [blame]642<p><a name="Snapshot">Snapshot:</a></p>
643<ul>
Daniel Veillard8a469172003-06-12 16:05:07 +0000[diff] [blame]644 <li>Code from the W3C cvs base gnome-xml <a
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000[diff] [blame]645 href="ftp://xmlsoft.org/cvs-snapshot.tar.gz">cvs-snapshot.tar.gz</a>.</li>
Daniel Veillard6c8b1172000-03-01 00:40:41 +0000[diff] [blame]646 <li>Docs, content of the web site, the list archive included <a
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000[diff] [blame]647 href="ftp://xmlsoft.org/libxml-docs.tar.gz">libxml-docs.tar.gz</a>.</li>
Daniel Veillard6c8b1172000-03-01 00:40:41 +0000[diff] [blame]648</ul>
649
Daniel Veillardc6271d22001-10-27 07:50:58 +0000[diff] [blame]650<p><a name="Contribs">Contributions:</a></p>
Daniel Veillard6c8b1172000-03-01 00:40:41 +0000[diff] [blame]651
652<p>I do accept external contributions, especially if compiling on another
Daniel Veillardd99224d2004-04-06 10:04:16 +0000[diff] [blame]653platform, get in touch with the list to upload the package, wrappers for
654various languages have been provided, and can be found in the <a
655href="python.html">bindings section</a></p>
Daniel Veillard6c8b1172000-03-01 00:40:41 +0000[diff] [blame]656
Daniel Veillard8a469172003-06-12 16:05:07 +0000[diff] [blame]657<p>Libxml2 is also available from CVS:</p>
Daniel Veillard10a2c651999-12-12 13:03:50 +0000[diff] [blame]658<ul>
Daniel Veillard10a2c651999-12-12 13:03:50 +0000[diff] [blame]659 <li><p>The <a
660 href="http://cvs.gnome.org/bonsai/rview.cgi?cvsroot=/cvs/gnome&amp;dir=gnome-xml">Gnome
Daniel Veillard402e8c82000-02-29 22:57:47 +0000[diff] [blame]661 CVS base</a>. Check the <a
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame]662 href="http://developer.gnome.org/tools/cvs.html">Gnome CVS Tools</a>
Daniel Veillardd99224d2004-04-06 10:04:16 +0000[diff] [blame]663 page; the CVS module is <b>libxml2</b>.</p>
Daniel Veillard10a2c651999-12-12 13:03:50 +0000[diff] [blame]664 </li>
Daniel Veillard82687162001-01-22 15:32:01 +0000[diff] [blame]665 <li>The <strong>libxslt</strong> module is also present there</li>
Daniel Veillard10a2c651999-12-12 13:03:50 +0000[diff] [blame]666</ul>
667
668<h2><a name="News">News</a></h2>
669
Daniel Veillarde6d8e202002-05-02 06:11:10 +0000[diff] [blame]670<p>Items not finished and worked on, get in touch with the list if you want
Daniel Veillard688f6692004-03-26 10:57:38 +0000[diff] [blame]671to help those</p>
Daniel Veillardab8500d2000-10-15 21:06:19 +0000[diff] [blame]672<ul>
Daniel Veillard72fef162003-02-05 14:31:19 +0000[diff] [blame]673 <li>More testing on RelaxNG</li>
Daniel Veillardcf27f7c2002-04-30 07:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame]674 <li>Finishing up <a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xmlschema-1/">XML
Daniel Veillard72fef162003-02-05 14:31:19 +0000[diff] [blame]675 Schemas</a></li>
676</ul>
677
Daniel Veillardd99224d2004-04-06 10:04:16 +0000[diff] [blame]678<p>There is the list of public releases:</p>
679
Daniel Veillard81205012004-05-18 03:06:41 +0000[diff] [blame]680<h3>2.6.10: May 17 2004</h3>
681<ul>
682 <li>Web page generated for ChangeLog</li>
683 <li>build fixes: --without-html problems, make check without make all</li>
684 <li>portability: problem with xpath.c on Windows (MSC and Borland), memcmp
685 vs. strncmp on Solaris, XPath tests on Windows (Mark Vakoc), C++ do not
686 use "list" as parameter name, make tests work with Python 1.5 (Ed
687 Davis),</li>
688 <li>improvements: made xmlTextReaderMode public, small buffers resizing
689 (Morten Welinder), add --maxmem option to xmllint, add
690 xmlPopInputCallback() for Matt Sergeant, refactoring of serialization
691 escaping, added escaping customization </li>
692 <li>bugfixes: xsd:extension (Taihei Goi), assorted regexp bugs (William
693 Brack), xmlReader end of stream problem, node deregistration with reader,
694 URI escaping and filemanes, XHTML1 formatting (Nick Wellnhofer), regexp
695 transition reduction (William), various XSD Schemas fixes (Kasimier
696 Buchcik), XInclude fallback problem (William), weird problems with DTD
697 (William), structured error handler callback context (William), reverse
698 xmlEncodeSpecialChars() behaviour back to escaping '"'</li>
699</ul>
700
Daniel Veillardeca726d2004-04-18 21:47:34 +0000[diff] [blame]701<h3>2.6.9: Apr 18 2004</h3>
702<ul>
703 <li>implement xml:id Working Draft, relaxed XPath id() checking</li>
704 <li>bugfixes: xmlCtxtReset (Brent Hendricks), line number and CDATA (Dave
705 Beckett), Relax-NG compilation (William Brack), Regexp patches (with
706 William), xmlUriEscape (Mark Vakoc), a Relax-NG notAllowed problem (with
707 William), Relax-NG name classes compares (William), XInclude duplicate
708 fallback (William), external DTD encoding detection (William), a DTD
709 validation bug (William), xmlReader Close() fix, recusive extention
710 schemas</li>
711 <li>improvements: use xmlRead* APIs in test tools (Mark Vakoc), indenting
712 save optimization, better handle IIS broken HTTP redirect behaviour (Ian
713 Hummel), HTML parser frameset (James Bursa), libxml2-python RPM
714 dependancy, XML Schemas union support (Kasimier Buchcik), warning removal
715 clanup (William), keep ChangeLog compressed when installing from RPMs</li>
716 <li>documentation: examples and xmlDocDumpMemory docs (John Fleck), new
Daniel Veillardd4cfcef2004-05-06 18:55:27 +0000[diff] [blame]717 example (load, xpath, modify, save), xmlCatalogDump() comments,</li>
Daniel Veillardeca726d2004-04-18 21:47:34 +0000[diff] [blame]718 <li>Windows: Borland C++ builder (Eric Zurcher), work around Microsoft
719 compiler NaN handling bug (Mark Vakoc)</li>
720</ul>
721
Daniel Veillard252004d2004-03-23 12:32:32 +0000[diff] [blame]722<h3>2.6.8: Mar 23 2004</h3>
723<ul>
724 <li>First step of the cleanup of the serialization code and APIs</li>
725 <li>XML Schemas: mixed content (Adam Dickmeiss), QName handling fixes (Adam
726 Dickmeiss), anyURI for "" (John Belmonte)</li>
727 <li>Python: Canonicalization C14N support added (Anthony Carrico)</li>
728 <li>xmlDocCopyNode() extension (William)</li>
729 <li>Relax-NG: fix when processing XInclude results (William), external
730 reference in interleave (William), missing error on &lt;choice&gt;
731 failure (William), memory leak in schemas datatype facets.</li>
732 <li>xmlWriter: patch for better DTD support (Alfred Mickautsch)</li>
733 <li>bug fixes: xmlXPathLangFunction memory leak (Mike Hommey and William
734 Brack), no ID errors if using HTML_PARSE_NOERROR, xmlcatalog fallbacks to
735 URI on SYSTEM lookup failure, XInclude parse flags inheritance (William),
736 XInclude and XPointer fixes for entities (William), XML parser bug
737 reported by Holger Rauch, nanohttp fd leak (William), regexps char
738 groups '-' handling (William), dictionnary reference counting problems,
Daniel Veillardd99224d2004-04-06 10:04:16 +0000[diff] [blame]739 do not close stderr.</li>
Daniel Veillard252004d2004-03-23 12:32:32 +0000[diff] [blame]740 <li>performance patches from Petr Pajas</li>
741 <li>Documentation fixes: XML_CATALOG_FILES in man pages (Mike Hommey)</li>
742 <li>compilation and portability fixes: --without-valid, catalog cleanups
743 (Peter Breitenlohner), MingW patch (Roland Schwingel), cross-compilation
744 to Windows (Christophe de Vienne), --with-html-dir fixup (Julio Merino
745 Vidal), Windows build (Eric Zurcher)</li>
746</ul>
747
Daniel Veillard92914492004-02-23 16:33:21 +0000[diff] [blame]748<h3>2.6.7: Feb 23 2004</h3>
749<ul>
750 <li>documentation: tutorial updates (John Fleck), benchmark results</li>
751 <li>xmlWriter: updates and fixes (Alfred Mickautsch, Lucas Brasilino)</li>
752 <li>XPath optimization (Petr Pajas)</li>
753 <li>DTD ID handling optimization</li>
754 <li>bugfixes: xpath number with &gt; 19 fractional (William Brack), push
755 mode with unescaped '&gt;' characters, fix xmllint --stream --timing, fix
756 xmllint --memory --stream memory usage, xmlAttrSerializeTxtContent
757 handling NULL, trying to fix Relax-NG/Perl interface.</li>
758 <li>python: 2.3 compatibility, whitespace fixes (Malcolm Tredinnick)</li>
759 <li>Added relaxng option to xmllint --shell</li>
760</ul>
761
Daniel Veillard5c9547e2004-02-12 15:31:49 +0000[diff] [blame]762<h3>2.6.6: Feb 12 2004</h3>
763<ul>
764 <li>nanohttp and nanoftp: buffer overflow error on URI parsing (Igor and
765 William) reported by Yuuichi Teranishi</li>
766 <li>bugfixes: make test and path issues, xmlWriter attribute serialization
767 (William Brack), xmlWriter indentation (William), schemas validation
768 (Eric Haszlakiewicz), XInclude dictionnaries issues (William and Oleg
769 Paraschenko), XInclude empty fallback (William), HTML warnings (William),
770 XPointer in XInclude (William), Python namespace serialization,
771 isolat1ToUTF8 bound error (Alfred Mickautsch), output of parameter
772 entities in internal subset (William), internal subset bug in push mode,
773 &lt;xs:all&gt; fix (Alexey Sarytchev)</li>
774 <li>Build: fix for automake-1.8 (Alexander Winston), warnings removal
775 (Philip Ludlam), SOCKLEN_T detection fixes (Daniel Richard), fix
776 --with-minimum configuration.</li>
777 <li>XInclude: allow the 2001 namespace without warning.</li>
778 <li>Documentation: missing example/index.html (John Fleck), version
779 dependancies (John Fleck)</li>
780 <li>reader API: structured error reporting (Steve Ball)</li>
781 <li>Windows compilation: mingw, msys (Mikhail Grushinskiy), function
782 prototype (Cameron Johnson), MSVC6 compiler warnings, _WINSOCKAPI_
783 patch</li>
784 <li>Parsers: added xmlByteConsumed(ctxt) API to get the byte offest in
785 input.</li>
786</ul>
787
Daniel Veillard189f46b2004-01-25 21:03:04 +0000[diff] [blame]788<h3>2.6.5: Jan 25 2004</h3>
789<ul>
790 <li>Bugfixes: dictionnaries for schemas (William Brack), regexp segfault
791 (William), xs:all problem (William), a number of XPointer bugfixes
792 (William), xmllint error go to stderr, DTD validation problem with
793 namespace, memory leak (William), SAX1 cleanup and minimal options fixes
794 (Mark Vadoc), parser context reset on error (Shaun McCance), XPath union
795 evaluation problem (William) , xmlReallocLoc with NULL (Aleksey Sanin),
796 XML Schemas double free (Steve Ball), XInclude with no href, argument
797 callbacks order for XPath callbacks (Frederic Peters)</li>
798 <li>Documentation: python scripts (William Brack), xslt stylesheets (John
799 Fleck), doc (Sven Zimmerman), I/O example.</li>
800 <li>Python bindings: fixes (William), enum support (Stéphane Bidoul),
801 structured error reporting (Stéphane Bidoul)</li>
802 <li>XInclude: various fixes for conformance, problem related to dictionnary
803 references (William &amp; me), recursion (William)</li>
804 <li>xmlWriter: indentation (Lucas Brasilino), memory leaks (Alfred
Daniel Veillard5c9547e2004-02-12 15:31:49 +0000[diff] [blame]805 Mickautsch),</li>
Daniel Veillard189f46b2004-01-25 21:03:04 +0000[diff] [blame]806 <li>xmlSchemas: normalizedString datatype (John Belmonte)</li>
807 <li>code cleanup for strings functions (William)</li>
808 <li>Windows: compiler patches (Mark Vakoc)</li>
809 <li>Parser optimizations, a few new XPath and dictionnary APIs for future
810 XSLT optimizations.</li>
811</ul>
812
Daniel Veillarde6e59cd2003-12-24 11:56:44 +0000[diff] [blame]813<h3>2.6.4: Dec 24 2003</h3>
814<ul>
815 <li>Windows build fixes (Igor Zlatkovic)</li>
Daniel Veillard189f46b2004-01-25 21:03:04 +0000[diff] [blame]816 <li>Some serious XInclude problems reported by Oleg Paraschenko and</li>
817 <li>Unix and Makefile packaging fixes (me, William Brack,</li>
Daniel Veillarde6e59cd2003-12-24 11:56:44 +0000[diff] [blame]818 <li>Documentation improvements (John Fleck, William Brack), example fix
819 (Lucas Brasilino)</li>
820 <li>bugfixes: xmlTextReaderExpand() with xmlReaderWalker, XPath handling of
821 NULL strings (William Brack) , API building reader or parser from
822 filedescriptor should not close it, changed XPath sorting to be stable
823 again (William Brack), xmlGetNodePath() generating '(null)' (William
824 Brack), DTD validation and namespace bug (William Brack), XML Schemas
825 double inclusion behaviour</li>
826</ul>
827
Daniel Veillardc480c4e2003-12-10 13:24:38 +0000[diff] [blame]828<h3>2.6.3: Dec 10 2003</h3>
829<ul>
830 <li>documentation updates and cleanup (DV, William Brack, John Fleck)</li>
831 <li>added a repository of examples, examples from Aleksey Sanin, Dodji
Daniel Veillarde6e59cd2003-12-24 11:56:44 +0000[diff] [blame]832 Seketeli, Alfred Mickautsch</li>
Daniel Veillardc480c4e2003-12-10 13:24:38 +0000[diff] [blame]833 <li>Windows updates: Mark Vakoc, Igor Zlatkovic, Eric Zurcher, Mingw
834 (Kenneth Haley)</li>
835 <li>Unicode range checking (William Brack)</li>
836 <li>code cleanup (William Brack)</li>
837 <li>Python bindings: doc (John Fleck), bug fixes</li>
838 <li>UTF-16 cleanup and BOM issues (William Brack)</li>
839 <li>bug fixes: ID and xmlReader validation, XPath (William Brack),
840 xmlWriter (Alfred Mickautsch), hash.h inclusion problem, HTML parser
841 (James Bursa), attribute defaulting and validation, some serialization
842 cleanups, XML_GET_LINE macro, memory debug when using threads (William
843 Brack), serialization of attributes and entities content, xmlWriter
844 (Daniel Schulman)</li>
845 <li>XInclude bugfix, new APIs and update to the last version including the
846 namespace change.</li>
847 <li>XML Schemas improvements: include (Robert Stepanek), import and
848 namespace handling, fixed the regression tests troubles, added examples
Daniel Veillarde6e59cd2003-12-24 11:56:44 +0000[diff] [blame]849 based on Eric van der Vlist book, regexp fixes</li>
Daniel Veillardc480c4e2003-12-10 13:24:38 +0000[diff] [blame]850 <li>preliminary pattern support for streaming (needed for schemas
851 constraints), added xmlTextReaderPreservePattern() to collect subdocument
852 when streaming.</li>
853 <li>various fixes in the structured error handling</li>
854</ul>
855
Daniel Veillard6d373a22003-11-04 10:26:43 +0000[diff] [blame]856<h3>2.6.2: Nov 4 2003</h3>
857<ul>
858 <li>XPath context unregistration fixes</li>
859 <li>text node coalescing fixes (Mark Lilback)</li>
860 <li>API to screate a W3C Schemas from an existing document (Steve Ball)</li>
861 <li>BeOS patches (Marcin 'Shard' Konicki)</li>
862 <li>xmlStrVPrintf function added (Aleksey Sanin)</li>
863 <li>compilation fixes (Mark Vakoc)</li>
864 <li>stdin parsing fix (William Brack)</li>
865 <li>a posteriori DTD validation fixes</li>
Daniel Veillardc480c4e2003-12-10 13:24:38 +0000[diff] [blame]866 <li>xmlReader bug fixes: Walker fixes, python bindings</li>
Daniel Veillard6d373a22003-11-04 10:26:43 +0000[diff] [blame]867 <li>fixed xmlStopParser() to really stop the parser and errors</li>
868 <li>always generate line numbers when using the new xmlReadxxx
869 functions</li>
870 <li>added XInclude support to the xmlReader interface</li>
871 <li>implemented XML_PARSE_NONET parser option</li>
872 <li>DocBook XSLT processing bug fixed</li>
873 <li>HTML serialization for &lt;p&gt; elements (William Brack and me)</li>
874 <li>XPointer failure in XInclude are now handled as resource errors</li>
875 <li>fixed xmllint --html to use the HTML serializer on output (added
876 --xmlout to implement the previous behaviour of saving it using the XML
877 serializer)</li>
878</ul>
879
Daniel Veillarde4e3f5d2003-10-28 23:06:32 +0000[diff] [blame]880<h3>2.6.1: Oct 28 2003</h3>
881<ul>
882 <li>Mostly bugfixes after the big 2.6.0 changes</li>
883 <li>Unix compilation patches: libxml.m4 (Patrick Welche), warnings cleanup
884 (William Brack)</li>
885 <li>Windows compilation patches (Joachim Bauch, Stephane Bidoul, Igor
886 Zlatkovic)</li>
887 <li>xmlWriter bugfix (Alfred Mickautsch)</li>
888 <li>chvalid.[ch]: couple of fixes from Stephane Bidoul</li>
Daniel Veillard6d373a22003-11-04 10:26:43 +0000[diff] [blame]889 <li>context reset: error state reset, push parser reset (Graham
890 Bennett)</li>
Daniel Veillarde4e3f5d2003-10-28 23:06:32 +0000[diff] [blame]891 <li>context reuse: generate errors if file is not readable</li>
892 <li>defaulted attributes for element coming from internal entities
893 (Stephane Bidoul)</li>
894 <li>Python: tab and spaces mix (William Brack)</li>
895 <li>Error handler could crash in DTD validation in 2.6.0</li>
896 <li>xmlReader: do not use the document or element _private field</li>
897 <li>testSAX.c: avoid a problem with some PIs (Massimo Morara)</li>
898 <li>general bug fixes: mandatory encoding in text decl, serializing
899 Document Fragment nodes, xmlSearchNs 2.6.0 problem (Kasimier Buchcik),
900 XPath errors not reported, slow HTML parsing of large documents.</li>
901</ul>
902
Daniel Veillard3e35f8e2003-10-21 00:05:38 +0000[diff] [blame]903<h3>2.6.0: Oct 20 2003</h3>
904<ul>
905 <li>Major revision release: should be API and ABI compatible but got a lot
906 of change</li>
907 <li>Increased the library modularity, far more options can be stripped out,
908 a --with-minimum configuration will weight around 160KBytes</li>
909 <li>Use per parser and per document dictionnary, allocate names and small
910 text nodes from the dictionnary</li>
911 <li>Switch to a SAX2 like parser rewrote most of the XML parser core,
912 provides namespace resolution and defaulted attributes, minimize memory
913 allocations and copies, namespace checking and specific error handling,
914 immutable buffers, make predefined entities static structures, etc...</li>
915 <li>rewrote all the error handling in the library, all errors can be
916 intercepted at a structured level, with precise information
917 available.</li>
918 <li>New simpler and more generic XML and HTML parser APIs, allowing to
919 easilly modify the parsing options and reuse parser context for multiple
920 consecutive documents.</li>
921 <li>Similar new APIs for the xmlReader, for options and reuse, provided new
922 functions to access content as const strings, use them for Python
923 bindings</li>
924 <li>a lot of other smaller API improvements: xmlStrPrintf (Aleksey Sanin),
925 Walker i.e. reader on a document tree based on Alfred Mickautsch code,
926 make room in nodes for line numbers, reference counting and future PSVI
927 extensions, generation of character ranges to be checked with faster
928 algorithm (William), xmlParserMaxDepth (Crutcher Dunnavant), buffer
929 access</li>
930 <li>New xmlWriter API provided by Alfred Mickautsch</li>
931 <li>Schemas: base64 support by Anthony Carrico</li>
932 <li>Parser&lt;-&gt;HTTP integration fix, proper processing of the Mime-Type
933 and charset informations if available.</li>
934 <li>Relax-NG: bug fixes including the one reported by Martijn Faassen and
935 zeroOrMore, better error reporting.</li>
936 <li>Python bindings (Stéphane Bidoul), never use stdout for errors
937 output</li>
938 <li>Portability: all the headers have macros for export and calling
939 convention definitions (Igor Zlatkovic), VMS update (Craig A. Berry),
940 Windows: threads (Jesse Pelton), Borland compiler (Eric Zurcher, Igor),
941 Mingw (Igor), typos (Mark Vakoc), beta version (Stephane Bidoul),
942 warning cleanups on AIX and MIPS compilers (William Brack), BeOS (Marcin
943 'Shard' Konicki)</li>
944 <li>Documentation fixes and README (William Brack), search fix (William),
945 tutorial updates (John Fleck), namespace docs (Stefan Kost)</li>
946 <li>Bug fixes: xmlCleanupParser (Dave Beckett), threading uninitialized
947 mutexes, HTML doctype lowercase, SAX/IO (William), compression detection
948 and restore (William), attribute declaration in DTDs (William), namespace
949 on attribute in HTML output (William), input filename (Rob Richards),
950 namespace DTD validation, xmlReplaceNode (Chris Ryland), I/O callbacks
951 (Markus Keim), CDATA serialization (Shaun McCance), xmlReader (Peter
952 Derr), high codepoint charref like &amp;#x10FFFF;, buffer access in push
953 mode (Justin Fletcher), TLS threads on Windows (Jesse Pelton), XPath bug
954 (William), xmlCleanupParser (Marc Liyanage), CDATA output (William), HTTP
955 error handling.</li>
956 <li>xmllint options: --dtdvalidfpi for Tobias Reif, --sax1 for compat
957 testing, --nodict for building without tree dictionnary, --nocdata to
958 replace CDATA by text, --nsclean to remove surperfluous namespace
959 declarations</li>
960 <li>added xml2-config --libtool-libs option from Kevin P. Fleming</li>
961 <li>a lot of profiling and tuning of the code, speedup patch for
962 xmlSearchNs() by Luca Padovani. The xmlReader should do far less
963 allocation and it speed should get closer to SAX. Chris Anderson worked
964 on speeding and cleaning up repetitive checking code.</li>
965 <li>cleanup of "make tests"</li>
966 <li>libxml-2.0-uninstalled.pc from Malcolm Tredinnick</li>
967 <li>deactivated the broken docBook SGML parser code and plugged the XML
968 parser instead.</li>
969</ul>
970
Daniel Veillardeec1ae92003-09-09 13:11:01 +0000[diff] [blame]971<h3>2.5.11: Sep 9 2003</h3>
972
973<p>A bugfix only release:</p>
974<ul>
975 <li>risk of crash in Relax-NG</li>
976 <li>risk of crash when using multithreaded programs</li>
977</ul>
978
Daniel Veillardcfba2fe2003-08-15 00:33:43 +0000[diff] [blame]979<h3>2.5.10: Aug 15 2003</h3>
980
981<p>A bugfixes only release</p>
982<ul>
983 <li>Windows Makefiles (William Brack)</li>
984 <li>UTF-16 support fixes (Mark Itzcovitz)</li>
985 <li>Makefile and portability (William Brack) automake, Linux alpha, Mingw
Daniel Veillardeec1ae92003-09-09 13:11:01 +0000[diff] [blame]986 on Windows (Mikhail Grushinskiy)</li>
Daniel Veillardcfba2fe2003-08-15 00:33:43 +0000[diff] [blame]987 <li>HTML parser (Oliver Stoeneberg)</li>
988 <li>XInclude performance problem reported by Kevin Ruscoe</li>
989 <li>XML parser performance problem reported by Grant Goodale</li>
990 <li>xmlSAXParseDTD() bug fix from Malcolm Tredinnick</li>
Daniel Veillardeec1ae92003-09-09 13:11:01 +0000[diff] [blame]991 <li>and a couple other cleanup</li>
Daniel Veillardcfba2fe2003-08-15 00:33:43 +0000[diff] [blame]992</ul>
993
Daniel Veillard83ee40d2003-08-09 22:24:09 +0000[diff] [blame]994<h3>2.5.9: Aug 9 2003</h3>
995<ul>
996 <li>bugfixes: IPv6 portability, xmlHasNsProp (Markus Keim), Windows build
997 (Wiliam Brake, Jesse Pelton, Igor), Schemas (Peter Sobisch), threading
998 (Rob Richards), hexBinary type (), UTF-16 BOM (Dodji Seketeli),
999 xmlReader, Relax-NG schemas compilation, namespace handling, EXSLT (Sean
1000 Griffin), HTML parsing problem (William Brack), DTD validation for mixed
1001 content + namespaces, HTML serialization, library initialization,
1002 progressive HTML parser</li>
1003 <li>better interfaces for Relax-NG error handling (Joachim Bauch, )</li>
1004 <li>adding xmlXIncludeProcessTree() for XInclud'ing in a subtree</li>
1005 <li>doc fixes and improvements (John Fleck)</li>
1006 <li>configure flag for -with-fexceptions when embedding in C++</li>
1007 <li>couple of new UTF-8 helper functions (William Brack)</li>
1008 <li>general encoding cleanup + ISO-8859-x without iconv (Peter Jacobi)</li>
1009 <li>xmlTextReader cleanup + enum for node types (Bjorn Reese)</li>
1010 <li>general compilation/warning cleanup Solaris/HP-UX/... (William
1011 Brack)</li>
1012</ul>
1013
Daniel Veillard560c2a42003-07-06 21:13:49 +0000[diff] [blame]1014<h3>2.5.8: Jul 6 2003</h3>
1015<ul>
1016 <li>bugfixes: XPath, XInclude, file/URI mapping, UTF-16 save (Mark
1017 Itzcovitz), UTF-8 checking, URI saving, error printing (William Brack),
1018 PI related memleak, compilation without schemas or without xpath (Joerg
1019 Schmitz-Linneweber/Garry Pennington), xmlUnlinkNode problem with DTDs,
1020 rpm problem on , i86_64, removed a few compilation problems from 2.5.7,
1021 xmlIOParseDTD, and xmlSAXParseDTD (Malcolm Tredinnick)</li>
1022 <li>portability: DJGPP (MsDos) , OpenVMS (Craig A. Berry)</li>
1023 <li>William Brack fixed multithreading lock problems</li>
1024 <li>IPv6 patch for FTP and HTTP accesses (Archana Shah/Wipro)</li>
1025 <li>Windows fixes (Igor Zlatkovic, Eric Zurcher), threading (Stéphane
1026 Bidoul)</li>
1027 <li>A few W3C Schemas Structure improvements</li>
1028 <li>W3C Schemas Datatype improvements (Charlie Bozeman)</li>
1029 <li>Python bindings for thread globals (Stéphane Bidoul), and method/class
Daniel Veillard83ee40d2003-08-09 22:24:09 +0000[diff] [blame]1030 generator</li>
1031 <li>added --nonet option to xmllint</li>
Daniel Veillard560c2a42003-07-06 21:13:49 +0000[diff] [blame]1032 <li>documentation improvements (John Fleck)</li>
1033</ul>
1034
Daniel Veillard92fc02c2003-04-24 23:12:35 +0000[diff] [blame]1035<h3>2.5.7: Apr 25 2003</h3>
1036<ul>
1037 <li>Relax-NG: Compiling to regexp and streaming validation on top of the
1038 xmlReader interface, added to xmllint --stream</li>
1039 <li>xmlReader: Expand(), Next() and DOM access glue, bug fixes</li>
1040 <li>Support for large files: RGN validated a 4.5GB instance</li>
1041 <li>Thread support is now configured in by default</li>
1042 <li>Fixes: update of the Trio code (Bjorn), WXS Date and Duration fixes
1043 (Charles Bozeman), DTD and namespaces (Brent Hendricks), HTML push parser
1044 and zero bytes handling, some missing Windows file path conversions,
1045 behaviour of the parser and validator in the presence of "out of memory"
Daniel Veillard93d95252003-04-29 20:25:40 +0000[diff] [blame]1046 error conditions</li>
Daniel Veillard92fc02c2003-04-24 23:12:35 +0000[diff] [blame]1047 <li>extended the API to be able to plug a garbage collecting memory
1048 allocator, added xmlMallocAtomic() and modified the allocations
1049 accordingly.</li>
1050 <li>Performances: removed excessive malloc() calls, speedup of the push and
1051 xmlReader interfaces, removed excessive thread locking</li>
1052 <li>Documentation: man page (John Fleck), xmlReader documentation</li>
1053 <li>Python: adding binding for xmlCatalogAddLocal (Brent M Hendricks)</li>
1054</ul>
1055
Daniel Veillardc2d4a932003-04-01 11:13:05 +0000[diff] [blame]1056<h3>2.5.6: Apr 1 2003</h3>
1057<ul>
1058 <li>Fixed W3C XML Schemas datatype, should be compliant now except for
1059 binHex and base64 which are not supported yet.</li>
1060 <li>bug fixes: non-ASCII IDs, HTML output, XInclude on large docs and
1061 XInclude entities handling, encoding detection on external subsets, XML
1062 Schemas bugs and memory leaks, HTML parser (James Bursa)</li>
1063 <li>portability: python/trio (Albert Chin), Sun compiler warnings</li>
1064 <li>documentation: added --relaxng option to xmllint man page (John)</li>
1065 <li>improved error reporting: xml:space, start/end tag mismatches, Relax NG
1066 errors</li>
1067</ul>
1068
1069<h3>2.5.5: Mar 24 2003</h3>
Daniel Veillardd8da01c2003-03-24 15:58:23 +0000[diff] [blame]1070<ul>
1071 <li>Lot of fixes on the Relax NG implementation. More testing including
1072 DocBook and TEI examples.</li>
1073 <li>Increased the support for W3C XML Schemas datatype</li>
1074 <li>Several bug fixes in the URI handling layer</li>
1075 <li>Bug fixes: HTML parser, xmlReader, DTD validation, XPath, encoding
1076 conversion, line counting in the parser.</li>
1077 <li>Added support for $XMLLINT_INDENT environment variable, FTP delete</li>
1078 <li>Fixed the RPM spec file name</li>
1079</ul>
1080
Daniel Veillard17bed982003-02-24 20:11:43 +0000[diff] [blame]1081<h3>2.5.4: Feb 20 2003</h3>
1082<ul>
1083 <li>Conformance testing and lot of fixes on Relax NG and XInclude
1084 implementation</li>
1085 <li>Implementation of XPointer element() scheme</li>
1086 <li>Bug fixes: XML parser, XInclude entities merge, validity checking on
1087 namespaces,
1088 <p>2 serialization bugs, node info generation problems, a DTD regexp
1089 generation problem.</p>
1090 </li>
1091 <li>Portability: windows updates and path canonicalization (Igor)</li>
1092 <li>A few typo fixes (Kjartan Maraas)</li>
1093 <li>Python bindings generator fixes (Stephane Bidoul)</li>
1094</ul>
1095
Daniel Veillard1d788d22003-02-10 16:21:58 +0000[diff] [blame]1096<h3>2.5.3: Feb 10 2003</h3>
1097<ul>
1098 <li>RelaxNG and XML Schemas datatypes improvements, and added a first
1099 version of RelaxNG Python bindings</li>
1100 <li>Fixes: XLink (Sean Chittenden), XInclude (Sean Chittenden), API fix for
1101 serializing namespace nodes, encoding conversion bug, XHTML1
1102 serialization</li>
1103 <li>Portability fixes: Windows (Igor), AMD 64bits RPM spec file</li>
1104</ul>
1105
Daniel Veillard72fef162003-02-05 14:31:19 +0000[diff] [blame]1106<h3>2.5.2: Feb 5 2003</h3>
1107<ul>
1108 <li>First implementation of RelaxNG, added --relaxng flag to xmllint</li>
1109 <li>Schemas support now compiled in by default.</li>
1110 <li>Bug fixes: DTD validation, namespace checking, XInclude and entities,
1111 delegateURI in XML Catalogs, HTML parser, XML reader (Stéphane Bidoul),
1112 XPath parser and evaluation, UTF8ToUTF8 serialization, XML reader memory
1113 consumption, HTML parser, HTML serialization in the presence of
1114 namespaces</li>
1115 <li>added an HTML API to check elements and attributes.</li>
1116 <li>Documentation improvement, PDF for the tutorial (John Fleck), doc
1117 patches (Stefan Kost)</li>
1118 <li>Portability fixes: NetBSD (Julio Merino), Windows (Igor Zlatkovic)</li>
1119 <li>Added python bindings for XPointer, contextual error reporting
1120 (Stéphane Bidoul)</li>
1121 <li>URI/file escaping problems (Stefano Zacchiroli)</li>
Daniel Veillardcf27f7c2002-04-30 07:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame]1122</ul>
1123
Daniel Veillarde2830f12003-01-08 17:47:49 +0000[diff] [blame]1124<h3>2.5.1: Jan 8 2003</h3>
1125<ul>
1126 <li>Fixes a memory leak and configuration/compilation problems in 2.5.0</li>
1127 <li>documentation updates (John)</li>
1128 <li>a couple of XmlTextReader fixes</li>
1129</ul>
1130
Daniel Veillard7b4b2f92003-01-06 13:11:20 +0000[diff] [blame]1131<h3>2.5.0: Jan 6 2003</h3>
1132<ul>
1133 <li>New <a href="xmlreader.html">XmltextReader interface</a> based on C#
1134 API (with help of Stéphane Bidoul)</li>
1135 <li>Windows: more exports, including the new API (Igor)</li>
1136 <li>XInclude fallback fix</li>
1137 <li>Python: bindings for the new API, packaging (Stéphane Bidoul),
1138 drv_libxml2.py Python xml.sax driver (Stéphane Bidoul), fixes, speedup
1139 and iterators for Python-2.2 (Hannu Krosing)</li>
1140 <li>Tutorial fixes (john Fleck and Niraj Tolia) xmllint man update
1141 (John)</li>
1142 <li>Fix an XML parser bug raised by Vyacheslav Pindyura</li>
1143 <li>Fix for VMS serialization (Nigel Hall) and config (Craig A. Berry)</li>
1144 <li>Entities handling fixes</li>
1145 <li>new API to optionally track node creation and deletion (Lukas
1146 Schroeder)</li>
1147 <li>Added documentation for the XmltextReader interface and some <a
1148 href="guidelines.html">XML guidelines</a></li>
1149</ul>
1150
Daniel Veillardc1eed322002-12-12 11:01:32 +0000[diff] [blame]1151<h3>2.4.30: Dec 12 2002</h3>
1152<ul>
1153 <li>2.4.29 broke the python bindings, rereleasing</li>
1154 <li>Improvement/fixes of the XML API generator, and couple of minor code
1155 fixes.</li>
1156</ul>
1157
Daniel Veillard9b4bb4d2002-12-11 19:28:47 +0000[diff] [blame]1158<h3>2.4.29: Dec 11 2002</h3>
1159<ul>
1160 <li>Windows fixes (Igor): Windows CE port, pthread linking, python bindings
1161 (Stéphane Bidoul), Mingw (Magnus Henoch), and export list updates</li>
1162 <li>Fix for prev in python bindings (ERDI Gergo)</li>
1163 <li>Fix for entities handling (Marcus Clarke)</li>
1164 <li>Refactored the XML and HTML dumps to a single code path, fixed XHTML1
1165 dump</li>
1166 <li>Fix for URI parsing when handling URNs with fragment identifiers</li>
1167 <li>Fix for HTTP URL escaping problem</li>
1168 <li>added an TextXmlReader (C#) like API (work in progress)</li>
1169 <li>Rewrote the API in XML generation script, includes a C parser and saves
1170 more informations needed for C# bindings</li>
1171</ul>
1172
Daniel Veillardf9c4cad2002-11-22 15:57:07 +0000[diff] [blame]1173<h3>2.4.28: Nov 22 2002</h3>
1174<ul>
1175 <li>a couple of python binding fixes</li>
1176 <li>2 bug fixes in the XML push parser</li>
1177 <li>potential memory leak removed (Martin Stoilov)</li>
1178 <li>fix to the configure script for Unix (Dimitri Papadopoulos)</li>
1179 <li>added encoding support for XInclude parse="text"</li>
1180 <li>autodetection of XHTML1 and specific serialization rules added</li>
Daniel Veillard9b4bb4d2002-12-11 19:28:47 +0000[diff] [blame]1181 <li>nasty threading bug fixed (William Brack)</li>
Daniel Veillardf9c4cad2002-11-22 15:57:07 +0000[diff] [blame]1182</ul>
1183
Daniel Veillarddad3f682002-11-17 16:47:27 +0000[diff] [blame]1184<h3>2.4.27: Nov 17 2002</h3>
1185<ul>
1186 <li>fixes for the Python bindings</li>
1187 <li>a number of bug fixes: SGML catalogs, xmlParseBalancedChunkMemory(),
1188 HTML parser, Schemas (Charles Bozeman), document fragment support
1189 (Christian Glahn), xmlReconciliateNs (Brian Stafford), XPointer,
1190 xmlFreeNode(), xmlSAXParseMemory (Peter Jones), xmlGetNodePath (Petr
1191 Pajas), entities processing</li>
1192 <li>added grep to xmllint --shell</li>
1193 <li>VMS update patch from Craig A. Berry</li>
1194 <li>cleanup of the Windows build with support for more compilers (Igor),
1195 better thread support on Windows</li>
1196 <li>cleanup of Unix Makefiles and spec file</li>
1197 <li>Improvements to the documentation (John Fleck)</li>
1198</ul>
1199
Daniel Veillard48267432002-10-18 11:21:38 +0000[diff] [blame]1200<h3>2.4.26: Oct 18 2002</h3>
1201<ul>
1202 <li>Patches for Windows CE port, improvements on Windows paths handling</li>
1203 <li>Fixes to the validation code (DTD and Schemas), xmlNodeGetPath() ,
1204 HTML serialization, Namespace compliance, and a number of small
1205 problems</li>
1206</ul>
1207
Daniel Veillarde16b5742002-09-26 17:50:03 +0000[diff] [blame]1208<h3>2.4.25: Sep 26 2002</h3>
1209<ul>
1210 <li>A number of bug fixes: XPath, validation, Python bindings, DOM and
1211 tree, xmlI/O, Html</li>
1212 <li>Serious rewrite of XInclude</li>
1213 <li>Made XML Schemas regexp part of the default build and APIs, small fix
1214 and improvement of the regexp core</li>
1215 <li>Changed the validation code to reuse XML Schemas regexp APIs</li>
1216 <li>Better handling of Windows file paths, improvement of Makefiles (Igor,
1217 Daniel Gehriger, Mark Vakoc)</li>
1218 <li>Improved the python I/O bindings, the tests, added resolver and regexp
Daniel Veillard321be0c2002-10-08 21:26:42 +0000[diff] [blame]1219 APIs</li>
Daniel Veillarde16b5742002-09-26 17:50:03 +0000[diff] [blame]1220 <li>New logos from Marc Liyanage</li>
1221 <li>Tutorial improvements: John Fleck, Christopher Harris</li>
1222 <li>Makefile: Fixes for AMD x86_64 (Mandrake), DESTDIR (Christophe
1223 Merlet)</li>
1224 <li>removal of all stderr/perror use for error reporting</li>
1225 <li>Better error reporting: XPath and DTD validation</li>
1226 <li>update of the trio portability layer (Bjorn Reese)</li>
1227</ul>
1228
Daniel Veillard42766c02002-08-22 20:52:17 +0000[diff] [blame]1229<p><strong>2.4.24: Aug 22 2002</strong></p>
1230<ul>
1231 <li>XPath fixes (William), xf:escape-uri() (Wesley Terpstra)</li>
1232 <li>Python binding fixes: makefiles (William), generator, rpm build, x86-64
1233 (fcrozat)</li>
1234 <li>HTML &lt;style&gt; and boolean attributes serializer fixes</li>
1235 <li>C14N improvements by Aleksey</li>
Daniel Veillarde1662542002-08-28 11:50:59 +0000[diff] [blame]1236 <li>doc cleanups: Rick Jones</li>
Daniel Veillard42766c02002-08-22 20:52:17 +0000[diff] [blame]1237 <li>Windows compiler makefile updates: Igor and Elizabeth Barham</li>
1238 <li>XInclude: implementation of fallback and xml:base fixup added</li>
1239</ul>
1240
Daniel Veillard782afda2002-07-08 15:12:49 +0000[diff] [blame]1241<h3>2.4.23: July 6 2002</h3>
1242<ul>
1243 <li>performances patches: Peter Jacobi</li>
1244 <li>c14n fixes, testsuite and performances: Aleksey Sanin</li>
1245 <li>added xmlDocFormatDump: Chema Celorio</li>
1246 <li>new tutorial: John Fleck</li>
1247 <li>new hash functions and performances: Sander Vesik, portability fix from
1248 Peter Jacobi</li>
1249 <li>a number of bug fixes: XPath (William Brack, Richard Jinks), XML and
1250 HTML parsers, ID lookup function</li>
1251 <li>removal of all remaining sprintf: Aleksey Sanin</li>
1252</ul>
1253
Daniel Veillardc0801af2002-05-28 16:28:42 +0000[diff] [blame]1254<h3>2.4.22: May 27 2002</h3>
1255<ul>
1256 <li>a number of bug fixes: configure scripts, base handling, parser, memory
1257 usage, HTML parser, XPath, documentation (Christian Cornelssen),
Daniel Veillard21473672002-06-17 07:29:22 +0000[diff] [blame]1258 indentation, URI parsing</li>
Daniel Veillardc0801af2002-05-28 16:28:42 +0000[diff] [blame]1259 <li>Optimizations for XMLSec, fixing and making public some of the network
1260 protocol handlers (Aleksey)</li>
1261 <li>performance patch from Gary Pennington</li>
1262 <li>Charles Bozeman provided date and time support for XML Schemas
1263 datatypes</li>
1264</ul>
1265
Daniel Veillardcf27f7c2002-04-30 07:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame]1266<h3>2.4.21: Apr 29 2002</h3>
1267
1268<p>This release is both a bug fix release and also contains the early XML
1269Schemas <a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xmlschema-1/">structures</a> and <a
1270href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xmlschema-2/">datatypes</a> code, beware, all
1271interfaces are likely to change, there is huge holes, it is clearly a work in
1272progress and don't even think of putting this code in a production system,
Daniel Veillarde6d8e202002-05-02 06:11:10 +0000[diff] [blame]1273it's actually not compiled in by default. The real fixes are:</p>
Daniel Veillardcf27f7c2002-04-30 07:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame]1274<ul>
1275 <li>a couple of bugs or limitations introduced in 2.4.20</li>
1276 <li>patches for Borland C++ and MSC by Igor</li>
1277 <li>some fixes on XPath strings and conformance patches by Richard
1278 Jinks</li>
1279 <li>patch from Aleksey for the ExcC14N specification</li>
1280 <li>OSF/1 bug fix by Bjorn</li>
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +0000[diff] [blame]1281</ul>
1282
Daniel Veillarda7084cd2002-04-15 17:12:47 +0000[diff] [blame]1283<h3>2.4.20: Apr 15 2002</h3>
1284<ul>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000[diff] [blame]1285 <li>bug fixes: file descriptor leak, XPath, HTML output, DTD validation</li>
Daniel Veillarda7084cd2002-04-15 17:12:47 +0000[diff] [blame]1286 <li>XPath conformance testing by Richard Jinks</li>
1287 <li>Portability fixes: Solaris, MPE/iX, Windows, OSF/1, python bindings,
1288 libxml.m4</li>
1289</ul>
1290
Daniel Veillard19274092002-03-25 16:48:03 +0000[diff] [blame]1291<h3>2.4.19: Mar 25 2002</h3>
1292<ul>
1293 <li>bug fixes: half a dozen XPath bugs, Validation, ISO-Latin to UTF8
1294 encoder</li>
1295 <li>portability fixes in the HTTP code</li>
Daniel Veillardb2fb8ed2002-04-01 09:33:12 +0000[diff] [blame]1296 <li>memory allocation checks using valgrind, and profiling tests</li>
Daniel Veillard19274092002-03-25 16:48:03 +0000[diff] [blame]1297 <li>revamp of the Windows build and Makefiles</li>
1298</ul>
1299
Daniel Veillard34ce8be2002-03-18 19:37:11 +0000[diff] [blame]1300<h3>2.4.18: Mar 18 2002</h3>
1301<ul>
1302 <li>bug fixes: tree, SAX, canonicalization, validation, portability,
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000[diff] [blame]1303 XPath</li>
Daniel Veillard34ce8be2002-03-18 19:37:11 +0000[diff] [blame]1304 <li>removed the --with-buffer option it was becoming unmaintainable</li>
1305 <li>serious cleanup of the Python makefiles</li>
1306 <li>speedup patch to XPath very effective for DocBook stylesheets</li>
1307 <li>Fixes for Windows build, cleanup of the documentation</li>
1308</ul>
1309
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +0000[diff] [blame]1310<h3>2.4.17: Mar 8 2002</h3>
1311<ul>
1312 <li>a lot of bug fixes, including "namespace nodes have no parents in
1313 XPath"</li>
1314 <li>fixed/improved the Python wrappers, added more examples and more
1315 regression tests, XPath extension functions can now return node-sets</li>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000[diff] [blame]1316 <li>added the XML Canonicalization support from Aleksey Sanin</li>
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame]1317</ul>
1318
Daniel Veillard5f4b5992002-02-20 10:22:49 +0000[diff] [blame]1319<h3>2.4.16: Feb 20 2002</h3>
1320<ul>
1321 <li>a lot of bug fixes, most of them were triggered by the XML Testsuite
1322 from OASIS and W3C. Compliance has been significantly improved.</li>
1323 <li>a couple of portability fixes too.</li>
1324</ul>
1325
Daniel Veillard397ff112002-02-11 18:27:20 +0000[diff] [blame]1326<h3>2.4.15: Feb 11 2002</h3>
1327<ul>
1328 <li>Fixed the Makefiles, especially the python module ones</li>
1329 <li>A few bug fixes and cleanup</li>
1330 <li>Includes cleanup</li>
1331</ul>
1332
Daniel Veillardb6c1e2f2002-02-08 14:52:52 +0000[diff] [blame]1333<h3>2.4.14: Feb 8 2002</h3>
1334<ul>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000[diff] [blame]1335 <li>Change of License to the <a
Daniel Veillardb6c1e2f2002-02-08 14:52:52 +0000[diff] [blame]1336 href="http://www.opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.html">MIT
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000[diff] [blame]1337 License</a> basically for integration in XFree86 codebase, and removing
1338 confusion around the previous dual-licensing</li>
Daniel Veillardb6c1e2f2002-02-08 14:52:52 +0000[diff] [blame]1339 <li>added Python bindings, beta software but should already be quite
1340 complete</li>
1341 <li>a large number of fixes and cleanups, especially for all tree
1342 manipulations</li>
1343 <li>cleanup of the headers, generation of a reference API definition in
1344 XML</li>
1345</ul>
1346
1347<h3>2.4.13: Jan 14 2002</h3>
Daniel Veillard744683d2002-01-14 17:30:20 +0000[diff] [blame]1348<ul>
1349 <li>update of the documentation: John Fleck and Charlie Bozeman</li>
1350 <li>cleanup of timing code from Justin Fletcher</li>
1351 <li>fixes for Windows and initial thread support on Win32: Igor and Serguei
1352 Narojnyi</li>
1353 <li>Cygwin patch from Robert Collins</li>
1354 <li>added xmlSetEntityReferenceFunc() for Keith Isdale work on xsldbg</li>
1355</ul>
1356
Daniel Veillardef90ba72001-12-07 14:24:22 +0000[diff] [blame]1357<h3>2.4.12: Dec 7 2001</h3>
1358<ul>
1359 <li>a few bug fixes: thread (Gary Pennington), xmllint (Geert Kloosterman),
1360 XML parser (Robin Berjon), XPointer (Danny Jamshy), I/O cleanups
1361 (robert)</li>
1362 <li>Eric Lavigne contributed project files for MacOS</li>
1363 <li>some makefiles cleanups</li>
1364</ul>
1365
Daniel Veillarda4871052001-11-26 13:19:48 +0000[diff] [blame]1366<h3>2.4.11: Nov 26 2001</h3>
1367<ul>
1368 <li>fixed a couple of errors in the includes, fixed a few bugs, some code
1369 cleanups</li>
1370 <li>xmllint man pages improvement by Heiko Rupp</li>
1371 <li>updated VMS build instructions from John A Fotheringham</li>
1372 <li>Windows Makefiles updates from Igor</li>
1373</ul>
1374
Daniel Veillard43d3f612001-11-10 11:57:23 +0000[diff] [blame]1375<h3>2.4.10: Nov 10 2001</h3>
1376<ul>
1377 <li>URI escaping fix (Joel Young)</li>
1378 <li>added xmlGetNodePath() (for paths or XPointers generation)</li>
1379 <li>Fixes namespace handling problems when using DTD and validation</li>
1380 <li>improvements on xmllint: Morus Walter patches for --format and
1381 --encode, Stefan Kost and Heiko Rupp improvements on the --shell</li>
1382 <li>fixes for xmlcatalog linking pointed by Weiqi Gao</li>
1383 <li>fixes to the HTML parser</li>
1384</ul>
1385
1386<h3>2.4.9: Nov 6 2001</h3>
1387<ul>
1388 <li>fixes more catalog bugs</li>
1389 <li>avoid a compilation problem, improve xmlGetLineNo()</li>
1390</ul>
1391
Daniel Veillarded421aa2001-11-04 21:22:45 +0000[diff] [blame]1392<h3>2.4.8: Nov 4 2001</h3>
1393<ul>
1394 <li>fixed SGML catalogs broken in previous release, updated xmlcatalog
1395 tool</li>
1396 <li>fixed a compile errors and some includes troubles.</li>
1397</ul>
1398
Daniel Veillard52dcab32001-10-30 12:51:17 +0000[diff] [blame]1399<h3>2.4.7: Oct 30 2001</h3>
1400<ul>
1401 <li>exported some debugging interfaces</li>
1402 <li>serious rewrite of the catalog code</li>
1403 <li>integrated Gary Pennington thread safety patch, added configure option
1404 and regression tests</li>
1405 <li>removed an HTML parser bug</li>
1406 <li>fixed a couple of potentially serious validation bugs</li>
1407 <li>integrated the SGML DocBook support in xmllint</li>
1408 <li>changed the nanoftp anonymous login passwd</li>
1409 <li>some I/O cleanup and a couple of interfaces for Perl wrapper</li>
1410 <li>general bug fixes</li>
1411 <li>updated xmllint man page by John Fleck</li>
1412 <li>some VMS and Windows updates</li>
1413</ul>
1414
Daniel Veillard60087f32001-10-10 09:45:09 +0000[diff] [blame]1415<h3>2.4.6: Oct 10 2001</h3>
1416<ul>
Daniel Veillard52dcab32001-10-30 12:51:17 +0000[diff] [blame]1417 <li>added an updated man pages by John Fleck</li>
Daniel Veillard60087f32001-10-10 09:45:09 +0000[diff] [blame]1418 <li>portability and configure fixes</li>
1419 <li>an infinite loop on the HTML parser was removed (William)</li>
1420 <li>Windows makefile patches from Igor</li>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000[diff] [blame]1421 <li>fixed half a dozen bugs reported for libxml or libxslt</li>
Daniel Veillard60087f32001-10-10 09:45:09 +0000[diff] [blame]1422 <li>updated xmlcatalog to be able to modify SGML super catalogs</li>
1423</ul>
1424
Daniel Veillarddadd0872001-09-15 09:21:44 +0000[diff] [blame]1425<h3>2.4.5: Sep 14 2001</h3>
1426<ul>
1427 <li>Remove a few annoying bugs in 2.4.4</li>
1428 <li>forces the HTML serializer to output decimal charrefs since some
1429 version of Netscape can't handle hexadecimal ones</li>
1430</ul>
1431
1432<h3>1.8.16: Sep 14 2001</h3>
1433<ul>
1434 <li>maintenance release of the old libxml1 branch, couple of bug and
1435 portability fixes</li>
1436</ul>
1437
Daniel Veillard04382ae2001-09-12 18:51:30 +0000[diff] [blame]1438<h3>2.4.4: Sep 12 2001</h3>
1439<ul>
1440 <li>added --convert to xmlcatalog, bug fixes and cleanups of XML
1441 Catalog</li>
1442 <li>a few bug fixes and some portability changes</li>
1443 <li>some documentation cleanups</li>
1444</ul>
1445
Daniel Veillard39936902001-08-24 00:49:01 +0000[diff] [blame]1446<h3>2.4.3: Aug 23 2001</h3>
1447<ul>
1448 <li>XML Catalog support see the doc</li>
1449 <li>New NaN/Infinity floating point code</li>
1450 <li>A few bug fixes</li>
1451</ul>
1452
1453<h3>2.4.2: Aug 15 2001</h3>
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame]1454<ul>
1455 <li>adds xmlLineNumbersDefault() to control line number generation</li>
1456 <li>lot of bug fixes</li>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000[diff] [blame]1457 <li>the Microsoft MSC projects files should now be up to date</li>
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame]1458 <li>inheritance of namespaces from DTD defaulted attributes</li>
1459 <li>fixes a serious potential security bug</li>
1460 <li>added a --format option to xmllint</li>
1461</ul>
1462
1463<h3>2.4.1: July 24 2001</h3>
1464<ul>
1465 <li>possibility to keep line numbers in the tree</li>
1466 <li>some computation NaN fixes</li>
1467 <li>extension of the XPath API</li>
1468 <li>cleanup for alpha and ia64 targets</li>
1469 <li>patch to allow saving through HTTP PUT or POST</li>
Daniel Veillard09ab7e12001-07-10 15:49:44 +0000[diff] [blame]1470</ul>
1471
1472<h3>2.4.0: July 10 2001</h3>
1473<ul>
1474 <li>Fixed a few bugs in XPath, validation, and tree handling.</li>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000[diff] [blame]1475 <li>Fixed XML Base implementation, added a couple of examples to the
Daniel Veillard09ab7e12001-07-10 15:49:44 +0000[diff] [blame]1476 regression tests</li>
1477 <li>A bit of cleanup</li>
Daniel Veillardab8500d2000-10-15 21:06:19 +0000[diff] [blame]1478</ul>
1479
Daniel Veillard5b43fde2001-07-05 23:31:40 +0000[diff] [blame]1480<h3>2.3.14: July 5 2001</h3>
1481<ul>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000[diff] [blame]1482 <li>fixed some entities problems and reduce memory requirement when
1483 substituting them</li>
Daniel Veillard5b43fde2001-07-05 23:31:40 +0000[diff] [blame]1484 <li>lots of improvements in the XPath queries interpreter can be
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000[diff] [blame]1485 substantially faster</li>
Daniel Veillard5b43fde2001-07-05 23:31:40 +0000[diff] [blame]1486 <li>Makefiles and configure cleanups</li>
1487 <li>Fixes to XPath variable eval, and compare on empty node set</li>
1488 <li>HTML tag closing bug fixed</li>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000[diff] [blame]1489 <li>Fixed an URI reference computation problem when validating</li>
Daniel Veillard5b43fde2001-07-05 23:31:40 +0000[diff] [blame]1490</ul>
1491
Daniel Veillard2adbb512001-06-28 16:20:36 +0000[diff] [blame]1492<h3>2.3.13: June 28 2001</h3>
1493<ul>
1494 <li>2.3.12 configure.in was broken as well as the push mode XML parser</li>
1495 <li>a few more fixes for compilation on Windows MSC by Yon Derek</li>
1496</ul>
1497
1498<h3>1.8.14: June 28 2001</h3>
1499<ul>
1500 <li>Zbigniew Chyla gave a patch to use the old XML parser in push mode</li>
1501 <li>Small Makefile fix</li>
1502</ul>
1503
Daniel Veillard11648102001-06-26 16:08:24 +0000[diff] [blame]1504<h3>2.3.12: June 26 2001</h3>
1505<ul>
1506 <li>lots of cleanup</li>
1507 <li>a couple of validation fix</li>
1508 <li>fixed line number counting</li>
1509 <li>fixed serious problems in the XInclude processing</li>
1510 <li>added support for UTF8 BOM at beginning of entities</li>
1511 <li>fixed a strange gcc optimizer bugs in xpath handling of float, gcc-3.0
1512 miscompile uri.c (William), Thomas Leitner provided a fix for the
1513 optimizer on Tru64</li>
1514 <li>incorporated Yon Derek and Igor Zlatkovic fixes and improvements for
1515 compilation on Windows MSC</li>
1516 <li>update of libxml-doc.el (Felix Natter)</li>
1517 <li>fixed 2 bugs in URI normalization code</li>
1518</ul>
1519
Daniel Veillarde3c81b52001-06-17 14:50:34 +0000[diff] [blame]1520<h3>2.3.11: June 17 2001</h3>
1521<ul>
1522 <li>updates to trio, Makefiles and configure should fix some portability
1523 problems (alpha)</li>
1524 <li>fixed some HTML serialization problems (pre, script, and block/inline
1525 handling), added encoding aware APIs, cleanup of this code</li>
1526 <li>added xmlHasNsProp()</li>
1527 <li>implemented a specific PI for encoding support in the DocBook SGML
1528 parser</li>
1529 <li>some XPath fixes (-Infinity, / as a function parameter and namespaces
1530 node selection)</li>
1531 <li>fixed a performance problem and an error in the validation code</li>
1532 <li>fixed XInclude routine to implement the recursive behaviour</li>
1533 <li>fixed xmlFreeNode problem when libxml is included statically twice</li>
1534 <li>added --version to xmllint for bug reports</li>
1535</ul>
1536
Daniel Veillard2e4f1882001-06-01 10:11:57 +0000[diff] [blame]1537<h3>2.3.10: June 1 2001</h3>
1538<ul>
1539 <li>fixed the SGML catalog support</li>
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame]1540 <li>a number of reported bugs got fixed, in XPath, iconv detection,
1541 XInclude processing</li>
Daniel Veillard2e4f1882001-06-01 10:11:57 +0000[diff] [blame]1542 <li>XPath string function should now handle unicode correctly</li>
1543</ul>
1544
Daniel Veillard4623acd2001-05-19 15:13:15 +0000[diff] [blame]1545<h3>2.3.9: May 19 2001</h3>
1546
1547<p>Lots of bugfixes, and added a basic SGML catalog support:</p>
1548<ul>
1549 <li>HTML push bugfix #54891 and another patch from Jonas Borgström</li>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000[diff] [blame]1550 <li>some serious speed optimization again</li>
Daniel Veillard4623acd2001-05-19 15:13:15 +0000[diff] [blame]1551 <li>some documentation cleanups</li>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000[diff] [blame]1552 <li>trying to get better linking on Solaris (-R)</li>
Daniel Veillard4623acd2001-05-19 15:13:15 +0000[diff] [blame]1553 <li>XPath API cleanup from Thomas Broyer</li>
1554 <li>Validation bug fixed #54631, added a patch from Gary Pennington, fixed
1555 xmlValidGetValidElements()</li>
1556 <li>Added an INSTALL file</li>
1557 <li>Attribute removal added to API: #54433</li>
1558 <li>added a basic support for SGML catalogs</li>
1559 <li>fixed xmlKeepBlanksDefault(0) API</li>
1560 <li>bugfix in xmlNodeGetLang()</li>
1561 <li>fixed a small configure portability problem</li>
1562 <li>fixed an inversion of SYSTEM and PUBLIC identifier in HTML document</li>
1563</ul>
1564
Daniel Veillarda265af72001-05-14 11:13:58 +0000[diff] [blame]1565<h3>1.8.13: May 14 2001</h3>
1566<ul>
1567 <li>bugfixes release of the old libxml1 branch used by Gnome</li>
1568</ul>
1569
Daniel Veillard3bbbe6f2001-05-03 11:15:37 +0000[diff] [blame]1570<h3>2.3.8: May 3 2001</h3>
1571<ul>
1572 <li>Integrated an SGML DocBook parser for the Gnome project</li>
1573 <li>Fixed a few things in the HTML parser</li>
1574 <li>Fixed some XPath bugs raised by XSLT use, tried to fix the floating
1575 point portability issue</li>
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame]1576 <li>Speed improvement (8M/s for SAX, 3M/s for DOM, 1.5M/s for
1577 DOM+validation using the XML REC as input and a 700MHz celeron).</li>
Daniel Veillard3bbbe6f2001-05-03 11:15:37 +0000[diff] [blame]1578 <li>incorporated more Windows cleanup</li>
1579 <li>added xmlSaveFormatFile()</li>
1580 <li>fixed problems in copying nodes with entities references (gdome)</li>
1581 <li>removed some troubles surrounding the new validation module</li>
1582</ul>
1583
Daniel Veillarda41123c2001-04-22 19:31:20 +0000[diff] [blame]1584<h3>2.3.7: April 22 2001</h3>
1585<ul>
1586 <li>lots of small bug fixes, corrected XPointer</li>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000[diff] [blame]1587 <li>Non deterministic content model validation support</li>
Daniel Veillarda41123c2001-04-22 19:31:20 +0000[diff] [blame]1588 <li>added xmlDocCopyNode for gdome2</li>
1589 <li>revamped the way the HTML parser handles end of tags</li>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000[diff] [blame]1590 <li>XPath: corrections of namespaces support and number formatting</li>
Daniel Veillarda41123c2001-04-22 19:31:20 +0000[diff] [blame]1591 <li>Windows: Igor Zlatkovic patches for MSC compilation</li>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000[diff] [blame]1592 <li>HTML output fixes from P C Chow and William M. Brack</li>
Daniel Veillarda41123c2001-04-22 19:31:20 +0000[diff] [blame]1593 <li>Improved validation speed sensible for DocBook</li>
1594 <li>fixed a big bug with ID declared in external parsed entities</li>
1595 <li>portability fixes, update of Trio from Bjorn Reese</li>
1596</ul>
1597
Daniel Veillardafc73112001-04-11 11:51:41 +0000[diff] [blame]1598<h3>2.3.6: April 8 2001</h3>
1599<ul>
1600 <li>Code cleanup using extreme gcc compiler warning options, found and
1601 cleared half a dozen potential problem</li>
1602 <li>the Eazel team found an XML parser bug</li>
1603 <li>cleaned up the user of some of the string formatting function. used the
1604 trio library code to provide the one needed when the platform is missing
1605 them</li>
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame]1606 <li>xpath: removed a memory leak and fixed the predicate evaluation
1607 problem, extended the testsuite and cleaned up the result. XPointer seems
1608 broken ...</li>
Daniel Veillardafc73112001-04-11 11:51:41 +0000[diff] [blame]1609</ul>
1610
Daniel Veillard56a4cb82001-03-24 17:00:36 +0000[diff] [blame]1611<h3>2.3.5: Mar 23 2001</h3>
1612<ul>
1613 <li>Biggest change is separate parsing and evaluation of XPath expressions,
1614 there is some new APIs for this too</li>
1615 <li>included a number of bug fixes(XML push parser, 51876, notations,
1616 52299)</li>
1617 <li>Fixed some portability issues</li>
1618</ul>
1619
Daniel Veillarde356c282001-03-10 12:32:04 +0000[diff] [blame]1620<h3>2.3.4: Mar 10 2001</h3>
1621<ul>
1622 <li>Fixed bugs #51860 and #51861</li>
1623 <li>Added a global variable xmlDefaultBufferSize to allow default buffer
1624 size to be application tunable.</li>
1625 <li>Some cleanup in the validation code, still a bug left and this part
1626 should probably be rewritten to support ambiguous content model :-\</li>
1627 <li>Fix a couple of serious bugs introduced or raised by changes in 2.3.3
1628 parser</li>
1629 <li>Fixed another bug in xmlNodeGetContent()</li>
1630 <li>Bjorn fixed XPath node collection and Number formatting</li>
1631 <li>Fixed a loop reported in the HTML parsing</li>
1632 <li>blank space are reported even if the Dtd content model proves that they
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000[diff] [blame]1633 are formatting spaces, this is for XML conformance</li>
Daniel Veillarde356c282001-03-10 12:32:04 +0000[diff] [blame]1634</ul>
1635
Daniel Veillardb402c072001-03-01 17:28:58 +0000[diff] [blame]1636<h3>2.3.3: Mar 1 2001</h3>
1637<ul>
1638 <li>small change in XPath for XSLT</li>
1639 <li>documentation cleanups</li>
1640 <li>fix in validation by Gary Pennington</li>
1641 <li>serious parsing performances improvements</li>
1642</ul>
1643
Daniel Veillardec70e912001-02-26 20:10:45 +0000[diff] [blame]1644<h3>2.3.2: Feb 24 2001</h3>
Daniel Veillard71681102001-02-24 17:48:53 +0000[diff] [blame]1645<ul>
1646 <li>chasing XPath bugs, found a bunch, completed some TODO</li>
1647 <li>fixed a Dtd parsing bug</li>
1648 <li>fixed a bug in xmlNodeGetContent</li>
1649 <li>ID/IDREF support partly rewritten by Gary Pennington</li>
1650</ul>
1651
Daniel Veillardec70e912001-02-26 20:10:45 +0000[diff] [blame]1652<h3>2.3.1: Feb 15 2001</h3>
Daniel Veillard6e6a6cc2001-02-15 15:55:44 +0000[diff] [blame]1653<ul>
1654 <li>some XPath and HTML bug fixes for XSLT</li>
1655 <li>small extension of the hash table interfaces for DOM gdome2
1656 implementation</li>
1657 <li>A few bug fixes</li>
1658</ul>
1659
Daniel Veillardec70e912001-02-26 20:10:45 +0000[diff] [blame]1660<h3>2.3.0: Feb 8 2001 (2.2.12 was on 25 Jan but I didn't kept track)</h3>
Daniel Veillard6e6a6cc2001-02-15 15:55:44 +0000[diff] [blame]1661<ul>
1662 <li>Lots of XPath bug fixes</li>
1663 <li>Add a mode with Dtd lookup but without validation error reporting for
1664 XSLT</li>
1665 <li>Add support for text node without escaping (XSLT)</li>
1666 <li>bug fixes for xmlCheckFilename</li>
1667 <li>validation code bug fixes from Gary Pennington</li>
1668 <li>Patch from Paul D. Smith correcting URI path normalization</li>
1669 <li>Patch to allow simultaneous install of libxml-devel and
1670 libxml2-devel</li>
1671 <li>the example Makefile is now fixed</li>
1672 <li>added HTML to the RPM packages</li>
1673 <li>tree copying bugfixes</li>
1674 <li>updates to Windows makefiles</li>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000[diff] [blame]1675 <li>optimization patch from Bjorn Reese</li>
Daniel Veillard6e6a6cc2001-02-15 15:55:44 +0000[diff] [blame]1676</ul>
1677
Daniel Veillardec70e912001-02-26 20:10:45 +0000[diff] [blame]1678<h3>2.2.11: Jan 4 2001</h3>
Daniel Veillard503b8932001-01-05 06:36:31 +0000[diff] [blame]1679<ul>
1680 <li>bunch of bug fixes (memory I/O, xpath, ftp/http, ...)</li>
1681 <li>added htmlHandleOmittedElem()</li>
1682 <li>Applied Bjorn Reese's IPV6 first patch</li>
1683 <li>Applied Paul D. Smith patches for validation of XInclude results</li>
Daniel Veillard82687162001-01-22 15:32:01 +0000[diff] [blame]1684 <li>added XPointer xmlns() new scheme support</li>
Daniel Veillard503b8932001-01-05 06:36:31 +0000[diff] [blame]1685</ul>
1686
Daniel Veillard2ddd23d2000-11-25 10:42:19 +0000[diff] [blame]1687<h3>2.2.10: Nov 25 2000</h3>
Daniel Veillard9d343c42000-11-25 10:12:43 +0000[diff] [blame]1688<ul>
1689 <li>Fix the Windows problems of 2.2.8</li>
1690 <li>integrate OpenVMS patches</li>
1691 <li>better handling of some nasty HTML input</li>
1692 <li>Improved the XPointer implementation</li>
1693 <li>integrate a number of provided patches</li>
1694</ul>
1695
Daniel Veillard2ddd23d2000-11-25 10:42:19 +0000[diff] [blame]1696<h3>2.2.9: Nov 25 2000</h3>
1697<ul>
1698 <li>erroneous release :-(</li>
1699</ul>
1700
Daniel Veillard28929b22000-11-13 18:22:49 +0000[diff] [blame]1701<h3>2.2.8: Nov 13 2000</h3>
1702<ul>
1703 <li>First version of <a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xinclude">XInclude</a>
1704 support</li>
1705 <li>Patch in conditional section handling</li>
1706 <li>updated MS compiler project</li>
1707 <li>fixed some XPath problems</li>
1708 <li>added an URI escaping function</li>
1709 <li>some other bug fixes</li>
1710</ul>
1711
1712<h3>2.2.7: Oct 31 2000</h3>
1713<ul>
1714 <li>added message redirection</li>
1715 <li>XPath improvements (thanks TOM !)</li>
1716 <li>xmlIOParseDTD() added</li>
1717 <li>various small fixes in the HTML, URI, HTTP and XPointer support</li>
1718 <li>some cleanup of the Makefile, autoconf and the distribution content</li>
1719</ul>
1720
Daniel Veillard29a11cc2000-10-25 13:32:39 +0000[diff] [blame]1721<h3>2.2.6: Oct 25 2000:</h3>
1722<ul>
1723 <li>Added an hash table module, migrated a number of internal structure to
1724 those</li>
1725 <li>Fixed a posteriori validation problems</li>
1726 <li>HTTP module cleanups</li>
1727 <li>HTML parser improvements (tag errors, script/style handling, attribute
1728 normalization)</li>
1729 <li>coalescing of adjacent text nodes</li>
1730 <li>couple of XPath bug fixes, exported the internal API</li>
1731</ul>
1732
Daniel Veillardab8500d2000-10-15 21:06:19 +0000[diff] [blame]1733<h3>2.2.5: Oct 15 2000:</h3>
Daniel Veillard4c3a2031999-11-19 17:46:26 +0000[diff] [blame]1734<ul>
Daniel Veillard189446d2000-10-13 10:23:06 +0000[diff] [blame]1735 <li>XPointer implementation and testsuite</li>
1736 <li>Lot of XPath fixes, added variable and functions registration, more
1737 tests</li>
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame]1738 <li>Portability fixes, lots of enhancements toward an easy Windows build
1739 and release</li>
Daniel Veillard189446d2000-10-13 10:23:06 +0000[diff] [blame]1740 <li>Late validation fixes</li>
1741 <li>Integrated a lot of contributed patches</li>
1742 <li>added memory management docs</li>
Daniel Veillardab8500d2000-10-15 21:06:19 +0000[diff] [blame]1743 <li>a performance problem when using large buffer seems fixed</li>
Daniel Veillard189446d2000-10-13 10:23:06 +0000[diff] [blame]1744</ul>
1745
1746<h3>2.2.4: Oct 1 2000:</h3>
1747<ul>
1748 <li>main XPath problem fixed</li>
1749 <li>Integrated portability patches for Windows</li>
1750 <li>Serious bug fixes on the URI and HTML code</li>
Daniel Veillard361d8452000-04-03 19:48:13 +0000[diff] [blame]1751</ul>
1752
Daniel Veillardd5f97f82000-09-17 16:38:14 +0000[diff] [blame]1753<h3>2.2.3: Sep 17 2000</h3>
1754<ul>
1755 <li>bug fixes</li>
1756 <li>cleanup of entity handling code</li>
1757 <li>overall review of all loops in the parsers, all sprintf usage has been
1758 checked too</li>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000[diff] [blame]1759 <li>Far better handling of larges Dtd. Validating against DocBook XML Dtd
Daniel Veillardd5f97f82000-09-17 16:38:14 +0000[diff] [blame]1760 works smoothly now.</li>
1761</ul>
1762
1763<h3>1.8.10: Sep 6 2000</h3>
1764<ul>
1765 <li>bug fix release for some Gnome projects</li>
1766</ul>
1767
1768<h3>2.2.2: August 12 2000</h3>
Daniel Veillard786d7c82000-08-12 23:38:57 +0000[diff] [blame]1769<ul>
1770 <li>mostly bug fixes</li>
Daniel Veillardec78c0f2000-08-25 10:25:23 +0000[diff] [blame]1771 <li>started adding routines to access xml parser context options</li>
Daniel Veillard786d7c82000-08-12 23:38:57 +0000[diff] [blame]1772</ul>
1773
Daniel Veillardd5f97f82000-09-17 16:38:14 +0000[diff] [blame]1774<h3>2.2.1: July 21 2000</h3>
Daniel Veillarda2679fa2000-07-22 02:38:15 +0000[diff] [blame]1775<ul>
1776 <li>a purely bug fixes release</li>
1777 <li>fixed an encoding support problem when parsing from a memory block</li>
1778 <li>fixed a DOCTYPE parsing problem</li>
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame]1779 <li>removed a bug in the function allowing to override the memory
1780 allocation routines</li>
Daniel Veillarda2679fa2000-07-22 02:38:15 +0000[diff] [blame]1781</ul>
1782
Daniel Veillardd5f97f82000-09-17 16:38:14 +0000[diff] [blame]1783<h3>2.2.0: July 14 2000</h3>
Daniel Veillard94e90602000-07-17 14:38:19 +0000[diff] [blame]1784<ul>
1785 <li>applied a lot of portability fixes</li>
1786 <li>better encoding support/cleanup and saving (content is now always
1787 encoded in UTF-8)</li>
1788 <li>the HTML parser now correctly handles encodings</li>
1789 <li>added xmlHasProp()</li>
1790 <li>fixed a serious problem with &amp;#38;</li>
1791 <li>propagated the fix to FTP client</li>
1792 <li>cleanup, bugfixes, etc ...</li>
1793 <li>Added a page about <a href="encoding.html">libxml Internationalization
1794 support</a></li>
1795</ul>
1796
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]1797<h3>1.8.9: July 9 2000</h3>
1798<ul>
1799 <li>fixed the spec the RPMs should be better</li>
1800 <li>fixed a serious bug in the FTP implementation, released 1.8.9 to solve
1801 rpmfind users problem</li>
1802</ul>
1803
Daniel Veillard6388e172000-07-03 16:07:19 +0000[diff] [blame]1804<h3>2.1.1: July 1 2000</h3>
1805<ul>
1806 <li>fixes a couple of bugs in the 2.1.0 packaging</li>
1807 <li>improvements on the HTML parser</li>
1808</ul>
1809
Daniel Veillard3f6f7f62000-06-30 17:58:25 +0000[diff] [blame]1810<h3>2.1.0 and 1.8.8: June 29 2000</h3>
1811<ul>
Daniel Veillardc0801af2002-05-28 16:28:42 +0000[diff] [blame]1812 <li>1.8.8 is mostly a commodity package for upgrading to libxml2 according
1813 to <a href="upgrade.html">new instructions</a>. It fixes a nasty problem
Daniel Veillard3f6f7f62000-06-30 17:58:25 +0000[diff] [blame]1814 about &amp;#38; charref parsing</li>
1815 <li>2.1.0 also ease the upgrade from libxml v1 to the recent version. it
1816 also contains numerous fixes and enhancements:
1817 <ul>
1818 <li>added xmlStopParser() to stop parsing</li>
1819 <li>improved a lot parsing speed when there is large CDATA blocs</li>
1820 <li>includes XPath patches provided by Picdar Technology</li>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000[diff] [blame]1821 <li>tried to fix as much as possible DTD validation and namespace
Daniel Veillard3f6f7f62000-06-30 17:58:25 +0000[diff] [blame]1822 related problems</li>
1823 <li>output to a given encoding has been added/tested</li>
1824 <li>lot of various fixes</li>
1825 </ul>
1826 </li>
1827</ul>
1828
Daniel Veillarde0aed302000-04-16 08:52:20 +0000[diff] [blame]1829<h3>2.0.0: Apr 12 2000</h3>
Daniel Veillard361d8452000-04-03 19:48:13 +0000[diff] [blame]1830<ul>
1831 <li>First public release of libxml2. If you are using libxml, it's a good
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000[diff] [blame]1832 idea to check the 1.x to 2.x upgrade instructions. NOTE: while initially
1833 scheduled for Apr 3 the release occurred only on Apr 12 due to massive
Daniel Veillarde0aed302000-04-16 08:52:20 +0000[diff] [blame]1834 workload.</li>
Daniel Veillard361d8452000-04-03 19:48:13 +0000[diff] [blame]1835 <li>The include are now located under $prefix/include/libxml (instead of
Daniel Veillarde0aed302000-04-16 08:52:20 +0000[diff] [blame]1836 $prefix/include/gnome-xml), they also are referenced by
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]1837 <pre>#include &lt;libxml/xxx.h&gt;</pre>
Daniel Veillarde0aed302000-04-16 08:52:20 +0000[diff] [blame]1838 <p>instead of</p>
Daniel Veillard361d8452000-04-03 19:48:13 +0000[diff] [blame]1839 <pre>#include "xxx.h"</pre>
1840 </li>
Daniel Veillard8f621982000-03-20 13:07:15 +0000[diff] [blame]1841 <li>a new URI module for parsing URIs and following strictly RFC 2396</li>
1842 <li>the memory allocation routines used by libxml can now be overloaded
1843 dynamically by using xmlMemSetup()</li>
Daniel Veillard361d8452000-04-03 19:48:13 +0000[diff] [blame]1844 <li>The previously CVS only tool tester has been renamed
1845 <strong>xmllint</strong> and is now installed as part of the libxml2
1846 package</li>
Daniel Veillarde0aed302000-04-16 08:52:20 +0000[diff] [blame]1847 <li>The I/O interface has been revamped. There is now ways to plug in
1848 specific I/O modules, either at the URI scheme detection level using
1849 xmlRegisterInputCallbacks() or by passing I/O functions when creating a
1850 parser context using xmlCreateIOParserCtxt()</li>
1851 <li>there is a C preprocessor macro LIBXML_VERSION providing the version
1852 number of the libxml module in use</li>
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame]1853 <li>a number of optional features of libxml can now be excluded at
1854 configure time (FTP/HTTP/HTML/XPath/Debug)</li>
Daniel Veillardedfb29b2000-03-14 19:59:05 +0000[diff] [blame]1855</ul>
1856
1857<h3>2.0.0beta: Mar 14 2000</h3>
1858<ul>
1859 <li>This is a first Beta release of libxml version 2</li>
Daniel Veillarde356c282001-03-10 12:32:04 +0000[diff] [blame]1860 <li>It's available only from<a href="ftp://xmlsoft.org/">xmlsoft.org
1861 FTP</a>, it's packaged as libxml2-2.0.0beta and available as tar and
1862 RPMs</li>
Daniel Veillardedfb29b2000-03-14 19:59:05 +0000[diff] [blame]1863 <li>This version is now the head in the Gnome CVS base, the old one is
1864 available under the tag LIB_XML_1_X</li>
Daniel Veillardc0801af2002-05-28 16:28:42 +0000[diff] [blame]1865 <li>This includes a very large set of changes. From a programmatic point
1866 of view applications should not have to be modified too much, check the
1867 <a href="upgrade.html">upgrade page</a></li>
Daniel Veillardedfb29b2000-03-14 19:59:05 +0000[diff] [blame]1868 <li>Some interfaces may changes (especially a bit about encoding).</li>
1869 <li>the updates includes:
Daniel Veillard6c8b1172000-03-01 00:40:41 +0000[diff] [blame]1870 <ul>
Daniel Veillardedfb29b2000-03-14 19:59:05 +0000[diff] [blame]1871 <li>fix I18N support. ISO-Latin-x/UTF-8/UTF-16 (nearly) seems correctly
1872 handled now</li>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000[diff] [blame]1873 <li>Better handling of entities, especially well-formedness checking
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame]1874 and proper PEref extensions in external subsets</li>
Daniel Veillard6c8b1172000-03-01 00:40:41 +0000[diff] [blame]1875 <li>DTD conditional sections</li>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000[diff] [blame]1876 <li>Validation now correctly handle entities content</li>
Daniel Veillard6c8b1172000-03-01 00:40:41 +0000[diff] [blame]1877 <li><a href="http://rpmfind.net/tools/gdome/messages/0039.html">change
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000[diff] [blame]1878 structures to accommodate DOM</a></li>
Daniel Veillard6c8b1172000-03-01 00:40:41 +0000[diff] [blame]1879 </ul>
1880 </li>
Daniel Veillardedfb29b2000-03-14 19:59:05 +0000[diff] [blame]1881 <li>Serious progress were made toward compliance, <a
1882 href="conf/result.html">here are the result of the test</a> against the
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000[diff] [blame]1883 OASIS testsuite (except the Japanese tests since I don't support that
Daniel Veillardedfb29b2000-03-14 19:59:05 +0000[diff] [blame]1884 encoding yet). This URL is rebuilt every couple of hours using the CVS
1885 head version.</li>
Daniel Veillarde41f2b72000-01-30 20:00:07 +0000[diff] [blame]1886</ul>
1887
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +0000[diff] [blame]1888<h3>1.8.7: Mar 6 2000</h3>
1889<ul>
1890 <li>This is a bug fix release:</li>
1891 <li>It is possible to disable the ignorable blanks heuristic used by
1892 libxml-1.x, a new function xmlKeepBlanksDefault(0) will allow this. Note
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame]1893 that for adherence to XML spec, this behaviour will be disabled by
1894 default in 2.x . The same function will allow to keep compatibility for
1895 old code.</li>
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]1896 <li>Blanks in &lt;a&gt; &lt;/a&gt; constructs are not ignored anymore,
1897 avoiding heuristic is really the Right Way :-\</li>
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +0000[diff] [blame]1898 <li>The unchecked use of snprintf which was breaking libxml-1.8.6
1899 compilation on some platforms has been fixed</li>
1900 <li>nanoftp.c nanohttp.c: Fixed '#' and '?' stripping when processing
1901 URIs</li>
1902</ul>
1903
Daniel Veillarde41f2b72000-01-30 20:00:07 +0000[diff] [blame]1904<h3>1.8.6: Jan 31 2000</h3>
1905<ul>
1906 <li>added a nanoFTP transport module, debugged until the new version of <a
1907 href="http://rpmfind.net/linux/rpm2html/rpmfind.html">rpmfind</a> can use
1908 it without troubles</li>
Daniel Veillardda07c342000-01-25 18:31:22 +0000[diff] [blame]1909</ul>
1910
1911<h3>1.8.5: Jan 21 2000</h3>
1912<ul>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000[diff] [blame]1913 <li>adding APIs to parse a well balanced chunk of XML (production <a
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame]1914 href="http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml#NT-content">[43] content</a> of the
1915 XML spec)</li>
Daniel Veillard461a66c2000-01-18 18:01:01 +0000[diff] [blame]1916 <li>fixed a hideous bug in xmlGetProp pointed by Rune.Djurhuus@fast.no</li>
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]1917 <li>Jody Goldberg &lt;jgoldberg@home.com&gt; provided another patch trying
1918 to solve the zlib checks problems</li>
Daniel Veillard461a66c2000-01-18 18:01:01 +0000[diff] [blame]1919 <li>The current state in gnome CVS base is expected to ship as 1.8.5 with
1920 gnumeric soon</li>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000[diff] [blame]1921</ul>
1922
1923<h3>1.8.4: Jan 13 2000</h3>
1924<ul>
1925 <li>bug fixes, reintroduced xmlNewGlobalNs(), fixed xmlNewNs()</li>
1926 <li>all exit() call should have been removed from libxml</li>
1927 <li>fixed a problem with INCLUDE_WINSOCK on WIN32 platform</li>
1928 <li>added newDocFragment()</li>
Daniel Veillardf84f71f2000-01-05 19:54:23 +0000[diff] [blame]1929</ul>
1930
1931<h3>1.8.3: Jan 5 2000</h3>
1932<ul>
1933 <li>a Push interface for the XML and HTML parsers</li>
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +0000[diff] [blame]1934 <li>a shell-like interface to the document tree (try tester --shell :-)</li>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000[diff] [blame]1935 <li>lots of bug fixes and improvement added over XMas holidays</li>
Daniel Veillard437b87b2000-01-03 17:30:46 +0000[diff] [blame]1936 <li>fixed the DTD parsing code to work with the xhtml DTD</li>
Daniel Veillardf84f71f2000-01-05 19:54:23 +0000[diff] [blame]1937 <li>added xmlRemoveProp(), xmlRemoveID() and xmlRemoveRef()</li>
1938 <li>Fixed bugs in xmlNewNs()</li>
Daniel Veillard437b87b2000-01-03 17:30:46 +0000[diff] [blame]1939 <li>External entity loading code has been revamped, now it uses
Daniel Veillardf84f71f2000-01-05 19:54:23 +0000[diff] [blame]1940 xmlLoadExternalEntity(), some fix on entities processing were added</li>
Daniel Veillard437b87b2000-01-03 17:30:46 +0000[diff] [blame]1941 <li>cleaned up WIN32 includes of socket stuff</li>
Daniel Veillard5cb5ab81999-12-21 15:35:29 +0000[diff] [blame]1942</ul>
1943
1944<h3>1.8.2: Dec 21 1999</h3>
1945<ul>
Daniel Veillardb24054a1999-12-18 15:32:46 +0000[diff] [blame]1946 <li>I got another problem with includes and C++, I hope this issue is fixed
1947 for good this time</li>
Daniel Veillard5cb5ab81999-12-21 15:35:29 +0000[diff] [blame]1948 <li>Added a few tree modification functions: xmlReplaceNode,
1949 xmlAddPrevSibling, xmlAddNextSibling, xmlNodeSetName and
1950 xmlDocSetRootElement</li>
1951 <li>Tried to improve the HTML output with help from <a
1952 href="mailto:clahey@umich.edu">Chris Lahey</a></li>
Daniel Veillarde4e51311999-12-18 15:32:46 +0000[diff] [blame]1953</ul>
Daniel Veillardb24054a1999-12-18 15:32:46 +0000[diff] [blame]1954
Daniel Veillarde4e51311999-12-18 15:32:46 +0000[diff] [blame]1955<h3>1.8.1: Dec 18 1999</h3>
1956<ul>
1957 <li>various patches to avoid troubles when using libxml with C++ compilers
1958 the "namespace" keyword and C escaping in include files</li>
1959 <li>a problem in one of the core macros IS_CHAR was corrected</li>
1960 <li>fixed a bug introduced in 1.8.0 breaking default namespace processing,
1961 and more specifically the Dia application</li>
Daniel Veillard944b5ff1999-12-15 19:08:24 +0000[diff] [blame]1962 <li>fixed a posteriori validation (validation after parsing, or by using a
1963 Dtd not specified in the original document)</li>
Daniel Veillardb24054a1999-12-18 15:32:46 +0000[diff] [blame]1964 <li>fixed a bug in</li>
Daniel Veillard10a2c651999-12-12 13:03:50 +0000[diff] [blame]1965</ul>
1966
1967<h3>1.8.0: Dec 12 1999</h3>
1968<ul>
1969 <li>cleanup, especially memory wise</li>
1970 <li>the parser should be more reliable, especially the HTML one, it should
1971 not crash, whatever the input !</li>
1972 <li>Integrated various patches, especially a speedup improvement for large
1973 dataset from <a href="mailto:cnygard@bellatlantic.net">Carl Nygard</a>,
1974 configure with --with-buffers to enable them.</li>
1975 <li>attribute normalization, oops should have been added long ago !</li>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000[diff] [blame]1976 <li>attributes defaulted from DTDs should be available, xmlSetProp() now
1977 does entities escaping by default.</li>
Daniel Veillard4c3a2031999-11-19 17:46:26 +0000[diff] [blame]1978</ul>
Daniel Veillard35008381999-10-25 13:15:52 +0000[diff] [blame]1979
1980<h3>1.7.4: Oct 25 1999</h3>
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000[diff] [blame]1981<ul>
Daniel Veillard35008381999-10-25 13:15:52 +0000[diff] [blame]1982 <li>Lots of HTML improvement</li>
1983 <li>Fixed some errors when saving both XML and HTML</li>
1984 <li>More examples, the regression tests should now look clean</li>
1985 <li>Fixed a bug with contiguous charref</li>
1986</ul>
1987
1988<h3>1.7.3: Sep 29 1999</h3>
1989<ul>
1990 <li>portability problems fixed</li>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000[diff] [blame]1991 <li>snprintf was used unconditionally, leading to link problems on system
Daniel Veillard35008381999-10-25 13:15:52 +0000[diff] [blame]1992 were it's not available, fixed</li>
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000[diff] [blame]1993</ul>
1994
1995<h3>1.7.1: Sep 24 1999</h3>
1996<ul>
1997 <li>The basic type for strings manipulated by libxml has been renamed in
1998 1.7.1 from <strong>CHAR</strong> to <strong>xmlChar</strong>. The reason
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame]1999 is that CHAR was conflicting with a predefined type on Windows. However
2000 on non WIN32 environment, compatibility is provided by the way of a
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000[diff] [blame]2001 <strong>#define </strong>.</li>
2002 <li>Changed another error : the use of a structure field called errno, and
2003 leading to troubles on platforms where it's a macro</li>
2004</ul>
2005
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000[diff] [blame]2006<h3>1.7.0: Sep 23 1999</h3>
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000[diff] [blame]2007<ul>
2008 <li>Added the ability to fetch remote DTD or parsed entities, see the <a
Daniel Veillard9cb5ff42001-01-29 08:22:21 +0000[diff] [blame]2009 href="html/libxml-nanohttp.html">nanohttp</a> module.</li>
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000[diff] [blame]2010 <li>Added an errno to report errors by another mean than a simple printf
2011 like callback</li>
2012 <li>Finished ID/IDREF support and checking when validation</li>
2013 <li>Serious memory leaks fixed (there is now a <a
Daniel Veillard9cb5ff42001-01-29 08:22:21 +0000[diff] [blame]2014 href="html/libxml-xmlmemory.html">memory wrapper</a> module)</li>
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000[diff] [blame]2015 <li>Improvement of <a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xpath">XPath</a>
2016 implementation</li>
2017 <li>Added an HTML parser front-end</li>
2018</ul>
2019
2020<h2><a name="XML">XML</a></h2>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]2021
Daniel Veillard402e8c82000-02-29 22:57:47 +0000[diff] [blame]2022<p><a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml">XML is a standard</a> for
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +0000[diff] [blame]2023markup-based structured documents. Here is <a name="example">an example XML
2024document</a>:</p>
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]2025<pre>&lt;?xml version="1.0"?&gt;
2026&lt;EXAMPLE prop1="gnome is great" prop2="&amp;amp; linux too"&gt;
2027 &lt;head&gt;
2028 &lt;title&gt;Welcome to Gnome&lt;/title&gt;
2029 &lt;/head&gt;
2030 &lt;chapter&gt;
2031 &lt;title&gt;The Linux adventure&lt;/title&gt;
2032 &lt;p&gt;bla bla bla ...&lt;/p&gt;
2033 &lt;image href="linus.gif"/&gt;
2034 &lt;p&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;
2035 &lt;/chapter&gt;
2036&lt;/EXAMPLE&gt;</pre>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]2037
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000[diff] [blame]2038<p>The first line specifies that it is an XML document and gives useful
Daniel Veillard42766c02002-08-22 20:52:17 +0000[diff] [blame]2039information about its encoding. Then the rest of the document is a text
2040format whose structure is specified by tags between brackets. <strong>Each
2041tag opened has to be closed</strong>. XML is pedantic about this. However, if
2042a tag is empty (no content), a single tag can serve as both the opening and
2043closing tag if it ends with <code>/&gt;</code> rather than with
2044<code>&gt;</code>. Note that, for example, the image tag has no content (just
2045an attribute) and is closed by ending the tag with <code>/&gt;</code>.</p>
Daniel Veillardccb09631998-10-27 06:21:04 +0000[diff] [blame]2046
Daniel Veillard42766c02002-08-22 20:52:17 +0000[diff] [blame]2047<p>XML can be applied successfully to a wide range of tasks, ranging from
2048long term structured document maintenance (where it follows the steps of
2049SGML) to simple data encoding mechanisms like configuration file formatting
2050(glade), spreadsheets (gnumeric), or even shorter lived documents such as
2051WebDAV where it is used to encode remote calls between a client and a
2052server.</p>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]2053
Daniel Veillard82687162001-01-22 15:32:01 +0000[diff] [blame]2054<h2><a name="XSLT">XSLT</a></h2>
2055
Daniel Veillard6e6a6cc2001-02-15 15:55:44 +0000[diff] [blame]2056<p>Check <a href="http://xmlsoft.org/XSLT">the separate libxslt page</a></p>
2057
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame]2058<p><a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xslt">XSL Transformations</a>, is a
2059language for transforming XML documents into other XML documents (or
2060HTML/textual output).</p>
Daniel Veillard82687162001-01-22 15:32:01 +0000[diff] [blame]2061
Daniel Veillard560c2a42003-07-06 21:13:49 +0000[diff] [blame]2062<p>A separate library called libxslt is available implementing XSLT-1.0 for
2063libxml2. This module "libxslt" too can be found in the Gnome CVS base.</p>
Daniel Veillard82687162001-01-22 15:32:01 +0000[diff] [blame]2064
Daniel Veillard383b1472001-01-23 11:39:52 +0000[diff] [blame]2065<p>You can check the <a
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame]2066href="http://cvs.gnome.org/lxr/source/libxslt/FEATURES">features</a>
2067supported and the progresses on the <a
Daniel Veillard6dbcaf82002-02-20 14:37:47 +0000[diff] [blame]2068href="http://cvs.gnome.org/lxr/source/libxslt/ChangeLog"
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000[diff] [blame]2069name="Changelog">Changelog</a>.</p>
Daniel Veillard6dbcaf82002-02-20 14:37:47 +0000[diff] [blame]2070
2071<h2><a name="Python">Python and bindings</a></h2>
2072
Daniel Veillard42766c02002-08-22 20:52:17 +0000[diff] [blame]2073<p>There are a number of language bindings and wrappers available for
2074libxml2, the list below is not exhaustive. Please contact the <a
Daniel Veillard6dbcaf82002-02-20 14:37:47 +0000[diff] [blame]2075href="http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/xml-bindings">xml-bindings@gnome.org</a>
2076(<a href="http://mail.gnome.org/archives/xml-bindings/">archives</a>) in
2077order to get updates to this list or to discuss the specific topic of libxml2
2078or libxslt wrappers or bindings:</p>
2079<ul>
Daniel Veillardc14401e2002-11-20 14:28:17 +0000[diff] [blame]2080 <li><a href="http://libxmlplusplus.sourceforge.net/">Libxml++</a> seems the
2081 most up-to-date C++ bindings for libxml2, check the <a
2082 href="http://libxmlplusplus.sourceforge.net/reference/html/hierarchy.html">documentation</a>
2083 and the <a
2084 href="http://cvs.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/libxmlplusplus/libxml%2b%2b/examples/">examples</a>.</li>
Daniel Veillard6dbcaf82002-02-20 14:37:47 +0000[diff] [blame]2085 <li>There is another <a href="http://libgdome-cpp.berlios.de/">C++ wrapper
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000[diff] [blame]2086 based on the gdome2 bindings</a> maintained by Tobias Peters.</li>
Daniel Veillard9b6fd302002-05-13 12:06:47 +0000[diff] [blame]2087 <li>and a third C++ wrapper by Peter Jones &lt;pjones@pmade.org&gt;
2088 <p>Website: <a
2089 href="http://pmade.org/pjones/software/xmlwrapp/">http://pmade.org/pjones/software/xmlwrapp/</a></p>
2090 </li>
Daniel Veillard6dbcaf82002-02-20 14:37:47 +0000[diff] [blame]2091 <li><a
2092 href="http://mail.gnome.org/archives/xml/2001-March/msg00014.html">Matt
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000[diff] [blame]2093 Sergeant</a> developed <a
2094 href="http://axkit.org/download/">XML::LibXSLT</a>, a Perl wrapper for
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +0000[diff] [blame]2095 libxml2/libxslt as part of the <a href="http://axkit.com/">AxKit XML
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000[diff] [blame]2096 application server</a>.</li>
Daniel Veillard4ac494b2003-09-18 15:08:00 +0000[diff] [blame]2097 <li>If you're interested into scripting XML processing, have a look at <a
2098 href="http://xsh.sourceforge.net/">XSH</a> an XML editing shell based on
2099 Libxml2 Perl bindings.</li>
Daniel Veillard21473672002-06-17 07:29:22 +0000[diff] [blame]2100 <li><a href="mailto:dkuhlman@cutter.rexx.com">Dave Kuhlman</a> provides an
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +0000[diff] [blame]2101 earlier version of the libxml/libxslt <a
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000[diff] [blame]2102 href="http://www.rexx.com/~dkuhlman">wrappers for Python</a>.</li>
Daniel Veillard21473672002-06-17 07:29:22 +0000[diff] [blame]2103 <li>Gopal.V and Peter Minten develop <a
2104 href="http://savannah.gnu.org/projects/libxmlsharp">libxml#</a>, a set of
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000[diff] [blame]2105 C# libxml2 bindings.</li>
Daniel Veillard6dbcaf82002-02-20 14:37:47 +0000[diff] [blame]2106 <li>Petr Kozelka provides <a
2107 href="http://sourceforge.net/projects/libxml2-pas">Pascal units to glue
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000[diff] [blame]2108 libxml2</a> with Kylix, Delphi and other Pascal compilers.</li>
Daniel Veillardb2fb8ed2002-04-01 09:33:12 +0000[diff] [blame]2109 <li>Uwe Fechner also provides <a
2110 href="http://sourceforge.net/projects/idom2-pas/">idom2</a>, a DOM2
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000[diff] [blame]2111 implementation for Kylix2/D5/D6 from Borland.</li>
Daniel Veillard6dbcaf82002-02-20 14:37:47 +0000[diff] [blame]2112 <li>Wai-Sun "Squidster" Chia provides <a
2113 href="http://www.rubycolor.org/arc/redist/">bindings for Ruby</a> and
2114 libxml2 bindings are also available in Ruby through the <a
2115 href="http://libgdome-ruby.berlios.de/">libgdome-ruby</a> module
2116 maintained by Tobias Peters.</li>
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +0000[diff] [blame]2117 <li>Steve Ball and contributors maintains <a
2118 href="http://tclxml.sourceforge.net/">libxml2 and libxslt bindings for
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000[diff] [blame]2119 Tcl</a>.</li>
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +0000[diff] [blame]2120 <li>There is support for libxml2 in the DOM module of PHP.</li>
Daniel Veillard41b01a82003-02-27 11:09:06 +0000[diff] [blame]2121 <li><a href="http://savannah.gnu.org/projects/classpathx/">LibxmlJ</a> is
Daniel Veillard806cada2003-03-19 21:58:59 +0000[diff] [blame]2122 an effort to create a 100% JAXP-compatible Java wrapper for libxml2 and
2123 libxslt as part of GNU ClasspathX project.</li>
Daniel Veillard6d373a22003-11-04 10:26:43 +0000[diff] [blame]2124 <li>Patrick McPhee provides Rexx bindings fof libxml2 and libxslt, look for
2125 <a href="http://www.interlog.com/~ptjm/software.html">RexxXML</a>.</li>
Daniel Veillard6dbcaf82002-02-20 14:37:47 +0000[diff] [blame]2126</ul>
2127
Daniel Veillardc0801af2002-05-28 16:28:42 +0000[diff] [blame]2128<p>The distribution includes a set of Python bindings, which are guaranteed
2129to be maintained as part of the library in the future, though the Python
Daniel Veillard41b01a82003-02-27 11:09:06 +0000[diff] [blame]2130interface have not yet reached the completeness of the C API.</p>
Daniel Veillard7b4b2f92003-01-06 13:11:20 +0000[diff] [blame]2131
Daniel Veillard27907c72002-12-16 16:05:58 +0000[diff] [blame]2132<p><a href="mailto:stephane.bidoul@softwareag.com">Stéphane Bidoul</a>
Daniel Veillard7b4b2f92003-01-06 13:11:20 +0000[diff] [blame]2133maintains <a href="http://users.skynet.be/sbi/libxml-python/">a Windows port
2134of the Python bindings</a>.</p>
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +0000[diff] [blame]2135
Daniel Veillard7ef0fcb2002-12-14 10:38:55 +0000[diff] [blame]2136<p>Note to people interested in building bindings, the API is formalized as
2137<a href="libxml2-api.xml">an XML API description file</a> which allows to
2138automate a large part of the Python bindings, this includes function
Daniel Veillard7b4b2f92003-01-06 13:11:20 +0000[diff] [blame]2139descriptions, enums, structures, typedefs, etc... The Python script used to
2140build the bindings is python/generator.py in the source distribution.</p>
Daniel Veillard7ef0fcb2002-12-14 10:38:55 +0000[diff] [blame]2141
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +0000[diff] [blame]2142<p>To install the Python bindings there are 2 options:</p>
Daniel Veillard0b79dfe2002-02-23 13:02:31 +0000[diff] [blame]2143<ul>
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +0000[diff] [blame]2144 <li>If you use an RPM based distribution, simply install the <a
2145 href="http://rpmfind.net/linux/rpm2html/search.php?query=libxml2-python">libxml2-python
2146 RPM</a> (and if needed the <a
2147 href="http://rpmfind.net/linux/rpm2html/search.php?query=libxslt-python">libxslt-python
2148 RPM</a>).</li>
2149 <li>Otherwise use the <a href="ftp://xmlsoft.org/python/">libxml2-python
2150 module distribution</a> corresponding to your installed version of
2151 libxml2 and libxslt. Note that to install it you will need both libxml2
2152 and libxslt installed and run "python setup.py build install" in the
2153 module tree.</li>
Daniel Veillard0b79dfe2002-02-23 13:02:31 +0000[diff] [blame]2154</ul>
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +0000[diff] [blame]2155
2156<p>The distribution includes a set of examples and regression tests for the
2157python bindings in the <code>python/tests</code> directory. Here are some
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000[diff] [blame]2158excerpts from those tests:</p>
Daniel Veillard6dbcaf82002-02-20 14:37:47 +0000[diff] [blame]2159
2160<h3>tst.py:</h3>
2161
2162<p>This is a basic test of the file interface and DOM navigation:</p>
MST 2003 John Fleck2dffb762003-11-29 04:41:24 +0000[diff] [blame]2163<pre>import libxml2, sys
Daniel Veillard6dbcaf82002-02-20 14:37:47 +0000[diff] [blame]2164
2165doc = libxml2.parseFile("tst.xml")
2166if doc.name != "tst.xml":
2167 print "doc.name failed"
2168 sys.exit(1)
2169root = doc.children
2170if root.name != "doc":
2171 print "root.name failed"
2172 sys.exit(1)
2173child = root.children
2174if child.name != "foo":
2175 print "child.name failed"
2176 sys.exit(1)
2177doc.freeDoc()</pre>
2178
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000[diff] [blame]2179<p>The Python module is called libxml2; parseFile is the equivalent of
Daniel Veillard6dbcaf82002-02-20 14:37:47 +0000[diff] [blame]2180xmlParseFile (most of the bindings are automatically generated, and the xml
2181prefix is removed and the casing convention are kept). All node seen at the
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000[diff] [blame]2182binding level share the same subset of accessors:</p>
Daniel Veillard6dbcaf82002-02-20 14:37:47 +0000[diff] [blame]2183<ul>
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +0000[diff] [blame]2184 <li><code>name</code> : returns the node name</li>
Daniel Veillardc0801af2002-05-28 16:28:42 +0000[diff] [blame]2185 <li><code>type</code> : returns a string indicating the node type</li>
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +0000[diff] [blame]2186 <li><code>content</code> : returns the content of the node, it is based on
2187 xmlNodeGetContent() and hence is recursive.</li>
2188 <li><code>parent</code> , <code>children</code>, <code>last</code>,
2189 <code>next</code>, <code>prev</code>, <code>doc</code>,
2190 <code>properties</code>: pointing to the associated element in the tree,
2191 those may return None in case no such link exists.</li>
Daniel Veillard6dbcaf82002-02-20 14:37:47 +0000[diff] [blame]2192</ul>
2193
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000[diff] [blame]2194<p>Also note the need to explicitly deallocate documents with freeDoc() .
Daniel Veillard6dbcaf82002-02-20 14:37:47 +0000[diff] [blame]2195Reference counting for libxml2 trees would need quite a lot of work to
2196function properly, and rather than risk memory leaks if not implemented
2197correctly it sounds safer to have an explicit function to free a tree. The
2198wrapper python objects like doc, root or child are them automatically garbage
2199collected.</p>
2200
2201<h3>validate.py:</h3>
2202
2203<p>This test check the validation interfaces and redirection of error
2204messages:</p>
2205<pre>import libxml2
2206
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000[diff] [blame]2207#deactivate error messages from the validation
Daniel Veillard6dbcaf82002-02-20 14:37:47 +0000[diff] [blame]2208def noerr(ctx, str):
2209 pass
2210
2211libxml2.registerErrorHandler(noerr, None)
2212
2213ctxt = libxml2.createFileParserCtxt("invalid.xml")
2214ctxt.validate(1)
2215ctxt.parseDocument()
2216doc = ctxt.doc()
2217valid = ctxt.isValid()
2218doc.freeDoc()
2219if valid != 0:
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000[diff] [blame]2220 print "validity check failed"</pre>
Daniel Veillard6dbcaf82002-02-20 14:37:47 +0000[diff] [blame]2221
2222<p>The first thing to notice is the call to registerErrorHandler(), it
2223defines a new error handler global to the library. It is used to avoid seeing
2224the error messages when trying to validate the invalid document.</p>
2225
2226<p>The main interest of that test is the creation of a parser context with
2227createFileParserCtxt() and how the behaviour can be changed before calling
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000[diff] [blame]2228parseDocument() . Similarly the informations resulting from the parsing phase
Daniel Veillard6dbcaf82002-02-20 14:37:47 +0000[diff] [blame]2229are also available using context methods.</p>
2230
2231<p>Contexts like nodes are defined as class and the libxml2 wrappers maps the
2232C function interfaces in terms of objects method as much as possible. The
2233best to get a complete view of what methods are supported is to look at the
2234libxml2.py module containing all the wrappers.</p>
2235
2236<h3>push.py:</h3>
2237
2238<p>This test show how to activate the push parser interface:</p>
2239<pre>import libxml2
2240
2241ctxt = libxml2.createPushParser(None, "&lt;foo", 4, "test.xml")
2242ctxt.parseChunk("/&gt;", 2, 1)
2243doc = ctxt.doc()
2244
2245doc.freeDoc()</pre>
2246
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000[diff] [blame]2247<p>The context is created with a special call based on the
Daniel Veillard6dbcaf82002-02-20 14:37:47 +0000[diff] [blame]2248xmlCreatePushParser() from the C library. The first argument is an optional
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000[diff] [blame]2249SAX callback object, then the initial set of data, the length and the name of
Daniel Veillard6dbcaf82002-02-20 14:37:47 +0000[diff] [blame]2250the resource in case URI-References need to be computed by the parser.</p>
2251
2252<p>Then the data are pushed using the parseChunk() method, the last call
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000[diff] [blame]2253setting the third argument terminate to 1.</p>
Daniel Veillard6dbcaf82002-02-20 14:37:47 +0000[diff] [blame]2254
2255<h3>pushSAX.py:</h3>
2256
2257<p>this test show the use of the event based parsing interfaces. In this case
2258the parser does not build a document, but provides callback information as
2259the parser makes progresses analyzing the data being provided:</p>
2260<pre>import libxml2
2261log = ""
2262
2263class callback:
2264 def startDocument(self):
2265 global log
2266 log = log + "startDocument:"
2267
2268 def endDocument(self):
2269 global log
2270 log = log + "endDocument:"
2271
2272 def startElement(self, tag, attrs):
2273 global log
2274 log = log + "startElement %s %s:" % (tag, attrs)
2275
2276 def endElement(self, tag):
2277 global log
2278 log = log + "endElement %s:" % (tag)
2279
2280 def characters(self, data):
2281 global log
2282 log = log + "characters: %s:" % (data)
2283
2284 def warning(self, msg):
2285 global log
2286 log = log + "warning: %s:" % (msg)
2287
2288 def error(self, msg):
2289 global log
2290 log = log + "error: %s:" % (msg)
2291
2292 def fatalError(self, msg):
2293 global log
2294 log = log + "fatalError: %s:" % (msg)
2295
2296handler = callback()
2297
2298ctxt = libxml2.createPushParser(handler, "&lt;foo", 4, "test.xml")
2299chunk = " url='tst'&gt;b"
2300ctxt.parseChunk(chunk, len(chunk), 0)
2301chunk = "ar&lt;/foo&gt;"
2302ctxt.parseChunk(chunk, len(chunk), 1)
2303
Daniel Veillardfcbfa2d2002-02-21 17:54:27 +0000[diff] [blame]2304reference = "startDocument:startElement foo {'url': 'tst'}:" + \
2305 "characters: bar:endElement foo:endDocument:"
Daniel Veillard6dbcaf82002-02-20 14:37:47 +0000[diff] [blame]2306if log != reference:
2307 print "Error got: %s" % log
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000[diff] [blame]2308 print "Expected: %s" % reference</pre>
Daniel Veillard6dbcaf82002-02-20 14:37:47 +0000[diff] [blame]2309
2310<p>The key object in that test is the handler, it provides a number of entry
2311points which can be called by the parser as it makes progresses to indicate
2312the information set obtained. The full set of callback is larger than what
2313the callback class in that specific example implements (see the SAX
2314definition for a complete list). The wrapper will only call those supplied by
2315the object when activated. The startElement receives the names of the element
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000[diff] [blame]2316and a dictionary containing the attributes carried by this element.</p>
Daniel Veillard6dbcaf82002-02-20 14:37:47 +0000[diff] [blame]2317
2318<p>Also note that the reference string generated from the callback shows a
2319single character call even though the string "bar" is passed to the parser
2320from 2 different call to parseChunk()</p>
2321
2322<h3>xpath.py:</h3>
2323
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000[diff] [blame]2324<p>This is a basic test of XPath wrappers support</p>
Daniel Veillard6dbcaf82002-02-20 14:37:47 +0000[diff] [blame]2325<pre>import libxml2
2326
2327doc = libxml2.parseFile("tst.xml")
2328ctxt = doc.xpathNewContext()
2329res = ctxt.xpathEval("//*")
2330if len(res) != 2:
2331 print "xpath query: wrong node set size"
2332 sys.exit(1)
2333if res[0].name != "doc" or res[1].name != "foo":
2334 print "xpath query: wrong node set value"
2335 sys.exit(1)
2336doc.freeDoc()
2337ctxt.xpathFreeContext()</pre>
2338
2339<p>This test parses a file, then create an XPath context to evaluate XPath
2340expression on it. The xpathEval() method execute an XPath query and returns
2341the result mapped in a Python way. String and numbers are natively converted,
2342and node sets are returned as a tuple of libxml2 Python nodes wrappers. Like
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000[diff] [blame]2343the document, the XPath context need to be freed explicitly, also not that
Daniel Veillard6dbcaf82002-02-20 14:37:47 +0000[diff] [blame]2344the result of the XPath query may point back to the document tree and hence
2345the document must be freed after the result of the query is used.</p>
2346
2347<h3>xpathext.py:</h3>
2348
2349<p>This test shows how to extend the XPath engine with functions written in
2350python:</p>
2351<pre>import libxml2
2352
2353def foo(ctx, x):
2354 return x + 1
2355
2356doc = libxml2.parseFile("tst.xml")
2357ctxt = doc.xpathNewContext()
2358libxml2.registerXPathFunction(ctxt._o, "foo", None, foo)
2359res = ctxt.xpathEval("foo(1)")
2360if res != 2:
2361 print "xpath extension failure"
2362doc.freeDoc()
2363ctxt.xpathFreeContext()</pre>
2364
2365<p>Note how the extension function is registered with the context (but that
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000[diff] [blame]2366part is not yet finalized, this may change slightly in the future).</p>
Daniel Veillard6dbcaf82002-02-20 14:37:47 +0000[diff] [blame]2367
2368<h3>tstxpath.py:</h3>
2369
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000[diff] [blame]2370<p>This test is similar to the previous one but shows how the extension
Daniel Veillard6dbcaf82002-02-20 14:37:47 +0000[diff] [blame]2371function can access the XPath evaluation context:</p>
2372<pre>def foo(ctx, x):
2373 global called
2374
2375 #
2376 # test that access to the XPath evaluation contexts
2377 #
2378 pctxt = libxml2.xpathParserContext(_obj=ctx)
2379 ctxt = pctxt.context()
2380 called = ctxt.function()
2381 return x + 1</pre>
2382
2383<p>All the interfaces around the XPath parser(or rather evaluation) context
2384are not finalized, but it should be sufficient to do contextual work at the
2385evaluation point.</p>
2386
2387<h3>Memory debugging:</h3>
2388
2389<p>last but not least, all tests starts with the following prologue:</p>
2390<pre>#memory debug specific
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +0000[diff] [blame]2391libxml2.debugMemory(1)</pre>
Daniel Veillard6dbcaf82002-02-20 14:37:47 +0000[diff] [blame]2392
2393<p>and ends with the following epilogue:</p>
2394<pre>#memory debug specific
2395libxml2.cleanupParser()
2396if libxml2.debugMemory(1) == 0:
2397 print "OK"
2398else:
2399 print "Memory leak %d bytes" % (libxml2.debugMemory(1))
2400 libxml2.dumpMemory()</pre>
2401
2402<p>Those activate the memory debugging interface of libxml2 where all
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000[diff] [blame]2403allocated block in the library are tracked. The prologue then cleans up the
Daniel Veillard6dbcaf82002-02-20 14:37:47 +0000[diff] [blame]2404library state and checks that all allocated memory has been freed. If not it
2405calls dumpMemory() which saves that list in a <code>.memdump</code> file.</p>
Daniel Veillard82687162001-01-22 15:32:01 +0000[diff] [blame]2406
Daniel Veillard8a469172003-06-12 16:05:07 +0000[diff] [blame]2407<h2><a name="architecture">libxml2 architecture</a></h2>
Daniel Veillard4540be42000-08-19 16:40:28 +0000[diff] [blame]2408
Daniel Veillard560c2a42003-07-06 21:13:49 +0000[diff] [blame]2409<p>Libxml2 is made of multiple components; some of them are optional, and
2410most of the block interfaces are public. The main components are:</p>
Daniel Veillard4540be42000-08-19 16:40:28 +0000[diff] [blame]2411<ul>
2412 <li>an Input/Output layer</li>
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000[diff] [blame]2413 <li>FTP and HTTP client layers (optional)</li>
Daniel Veillard4540be42000-08-19 16:40:28 +0000[diff] [blame]2414 <li>an Internationalization layer managing the encodings support</li>
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000[diff] [blame]2415 <li>a URI module</li>
Daniel Veillard4540be42000-08-19 16:40:28 +0000[diff] [blame]2416 <li>the XML parser and its basic SAX interface</li>
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000[diff] [blame]2417 <li>an HTML parser using the same SAX interface (optional)</li>
Daniel Veillard4540be42000-08-19 16:40:28 +0000[diff] [blame]2418 <li>a SAX tree module to build an in-memory DOM representation</li>
2419 <li>a tree module to manipulate the DOM representation</li>
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000[diff] [blame]2420 <li>a validation module using the DOM representation (optional)</li>
Daniel Veillard4540be42000-08-19 16:40:28 +0000[diff] [blame]2421 <li>an XPath module for global lookup in a DOM representation
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000[diff] [blame]2422 (optional)</li>
2423 <li>a debug module (optional)</li>
Daniel Veillard4540be42000-08-19 16:40:28 +0000[diff] [blame]2424</ul>
2425
2426<p>Graphically this gives the following:</p>
2427
2428<p><img src="libxml.gif" alt="a graphical view of the various"></p>
2429
2430<p></p>
2431
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000[diff] [blame]2432<h2><a name="tree">The tree output</a></h2>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]2433
2434<p>The parser returns a tree built during the document analysis. The value
Daniel Veillard402e8c82000-02-29 22:57:47 +0000[diff] [blame]2435returned is an <strong>xmlDocPtr</strong> (i.e., a pointer to an
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +0000[diff] [blame]2436<strong>xmlDoc</strong> structure). This structure contains information such
Daniel Veillard306be992000-07-03 12:38:45 +0000[diff] [blame]2437as the file name, the document type, and a <strong>children</strong> pointer
2438which is the root of the document (or more exactly the first child under the
2439root which is the document). The tree is made of <strong>xmlNode</strong>s,
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000[diff] [blame]2440chained in double-linked lists of siblings and with a children&lt;-&gt;parent
Daniel Veillard306be992000-07-03 12:38:45 +0000[diff] [blame]2441relationship. An xmlNode can also carry properties (a chain of xmlAttr
2442structures). An attribute may have a value which is a list of TEXT or
2443ENTITY_REF nodes.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]2444
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]2445<p>Here is an example (erroneous with respect to the XML spec since there
2446should be only one ELEMENT under the root):</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]2447
2448<p><img src="structure.gif" alt=" structure.gif "></p>
2449
2450<p>In the source package there is a small program (not installed by default)
Daniel Veillard361d8452000-04-03 19:48:13 +0000[diff] [blame]2451called <strong>xmllint</strong> which parses XML files given as argument and
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +0000[diff] [blame]2452prints them back as parsed. This is useful for detecting errors both in XML
2453code and in the XML parser itself. It has an option <strong>--debug</strong>
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000[diff] [blame]2454which prints the actual in-memory structure of the document; here is the
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +0000[diff] [blame]2455result with the <a href="#example">example</a> given before:</p>
Daniel Veillard10c6a8f1998-10-28 01:00:12 +0000[diff] [blame]2456<pre>DOCUMENT
2457version=1.0
2458standalone=true
2459 ELEMENT EXAMPLE
2460 ATTRIBUTE prop1
2461 TEXT
2462 content=gnome is great
2463 ATTRIBUTE prop2
2464 ENTITY_REF
2465 TEXT
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000[diff] [blame]2466 content= linux too
Daniel Veillard402e8c82000-02-29 22:57:47 +0000[diff] [blame]2467 ELEMENT head
Daniel Veillard10c6a8f1998-10-28 01:00:12 +0000[diff] [blame]2468 ELEMENT title
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +0000[diff] [blame]2469 TEXT
2470 content=Welcome to Gnome
Daniel Veillard10c6a8f1998-10-28 01:00:12 +0000[diff] [blame]2471 ELEMENT chapter
2472 ELEMENT title
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +0000[diff] [blame]2473 TEXT
2474 content=The Linux adventure
Daniel Veillard10c6a8f1998-10-28 01:00:12 +0000[diff] [blame]2475 ELEMENT p
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +0000[diff] [blame]2476 TEXT
2477 content=bla bla bla ...
Daniel Veillard10c6a8f1998-10-28 01:00:12 +0000[diff] [blame]2478 ELEMENT image
2479 ATTRIBUTE href
2480 TEXT
2481 content=linus.gif
2482 ELEMENT p
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +0000[diff] [blame]2483 TEXT
2484 content=...</pre>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]2485
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]2486<p>This should be useful for learning the internal representation model.</p>
Daniel Veillardccb09631998-10-27 06:21:04 +0000[diff] [blame]2487
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000[diff] [blame]2488<h2><a name="interface">The SAX interface</a></h2>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]2489
Daniel Veillard402e8c82000-02-29 22:57:47 +0000[diff] [blame]2490<p>Sometimes the DOM tree output is just too large to fit reasonably into
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]2491memory. In that case (and if you don't expect to save back the XML document
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame]2492loaded using libxml), it's better to use the SAX interface of libxml. SAX is
2493a <strong>callback-based interface</strong> to the parser. Before parsing,
2494the application layer registers a customized set of callbacks which are
2495called by the library as it progresses through the XML input.</p>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]2496
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]2497<p>To get more detailed step-by-step guidance on using the SAX interface of
Daniel Veillard4540be42000-08-19 16:40:28 +0000[diff] [blame]2498libxml, see the <a
2499href="http://www.daa.com.au/~james/gnome/xml-sax/xml-sax.html">nice
2500documentation</a>.written by <a href="mailto:james@daa.com.au">James
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]2501Henstridge</a>.</p>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]2502
2503<p>You can debug the SAX behaviour by using the <strong>testSAX</strong>
2504program located in the gnome-xml module (it's usually not shipped in the
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]2505binary packages of libxml, but you can find it in the tar source
Daniel Veillard402e8c82000-02-29 22:57:47 +0000[diff] [blame]2506distribution). Here is the sequence of callbacks that would be reported by
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]2507testSAX when parsing the example XML document shown earlier:</p>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]2508<pre>SAX.setDocumentLocator()
2509SAX.startDocument()
2510SAX.getEntity(amp)
2511SAX.startElement(EXAMPLE, prop1='gnome is great', prop2='&amp;amp; linux too')
2512SAX.characters( , 3)
2513SAX.startElement(head)
2514SAX.characters( , 4)
2515SAX.startElement(title)
2516SAX.characters(Welcome to Gnome, 16)
2517SAX.endElement(title)
2518SAX.characters( , 3)
2519SAX.endElement(head)
2520SAX.characters( , 3)
2521SAX.startElement(chapter)
2522SAX.characters( , 4)
2523SAX.startElement(title)
2524SAX.characters(The Linux adventure, 19)
2525SAX.endElement(title)
2526SAX.characters( , 4)
2527SAX.startElement(p)
2528SAX.characters(bla bla bla ..., 15)
2529SAX.endElement(p)
2530SAX.characters( , 4)
2531SAX.startElement(image, href='linus.gif')
2532SAX.endElement(image)
2533SAX.characters( , 4)
2534SAX.startElement(p)
2535SAX.characters(..., 3)
2536SAX.endElement(p)
2537SAX.characters( , 3)
2538SAX.endElement(chapter)
2539SAX.characters( , 1)
2540SAX.endElement(EXAMPLE)
2541SAX.endDocument()</pre>
2542
Daniel Veillard8a469172003-06-12 16:05:07 +0000[diff] [blame]2543<p>Most of the other interfaces of libxml2 are based on the DOM tree-building
Daniel Veillardec70e912001-02-26 20:10:45 +0000[diff] [blame]2544facility, so nearly everything up to the end of this document presupposes the
2545use of the standard DOM tree build. Note that the DOM tree itself is built by
2546a set of registered default callbacks, without internal specific
2547interface.</p>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]2548
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]2549<h2><a name="Validation">Validation &amp; DTDs</a></h2>
2550
2551<p>Table of Content:</p>
2552<ol>
2553 <li><a href="#General5">General overview</a></li>
2554 <li><a href="#definition">The definition</a></li>
2555 <li><a href="#Simple">Simple rules</a>
2556 <ol>
Daniel Veillard9c466822001-10-25 12:03:39 +0000[diff] [blame]2557 <li><a href="#reference">How to reference a DTD from a document</a></li>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]2558 <li><a href="#Declaring">Declaring elements</a></li>
2559 <li><a href="#Declaring1">Declaring attributes</a></li>
2560 </ol>
2561 </li>
2562 <li><a href="#Some">Some examples</a></li>
2563 <li><a href="#validate">How to validate</a></li>
2564 <li><a href="#Other">Other resources</a></li>
2565</ol>
2566
2567<h3><a name="General5">General overview</a></h3>
2568
2569<p>Well what is validation and what is a DTD ?</p>
2570
2571<p>DTD is the acronym for Document Type Definition. This is a description of
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000[diff] [blame]2572the content for a family of XML files. This is part of the XML 1.0
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000[diff] [blame]2573specification, and allows one to describe and verify that a given document
2574instance conforms to the set of rules detailing its structure and content.</p>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]2575
2576<p>Validation is the process of checking a document against a DTD (more
2577generally against a set of construction rules).</p>
2578
2579<p>The validation process and building DTDs are the two most difficult parts
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000[diff] [blame]2580of the XML life cycle. Briefly a DTD defines all the possible elements to be
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]2581found within your document, what is the formal shape of your document tree
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000[diff] [blame]2582(by defining the allowed content of an element; either text, a regular
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]2583expression for the allowed list of children, or mixed content i.e. both text
Daniel Veillard42766c02002-08-22 20:52:17 +0000[diff] [blame]2584and children). The DTD also defines the valid attributes for all elements and
2585the types of those attributes.</p>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]2586
2587<h3><a name="definition1">The definition</a></h3>
2588
2589<p>The <a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml">W3C XML Recommendation</a> (<a
2590href="http://www.xml.com/axml/axml.html">Tim Bray's annotated version of
2591Rev1</a>):</p>
2592<ul>
2593 <li><a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml#elemdecls">Declaring
2594 elements</a></li>
2595 <li><a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml#attdecls">Declaring
2596 attributes</a></li>
2597</ul>
2598
2599<p>(unfortunately) all this is inherited from the SGML world, the syntax is
2600ancient...</p>
2601
2602<h3><a name="Simple1">Simple rules</a></h3>
2603
Daniel Veillard42766c02002-08-22 20:52:17 +0000[diff] [blame]2604<p>Writing DTDs can be done in many ways. The rules to build them if you need
2605something permanent or something which can evolve over time can be radically
2606different. Really complex DTDs like DocBook ones are flexible but quite
2607harder to design. I will just focus on DTDs for a formats with a fixed simple
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]2608structure. It is just a set of basic rules, and definitely not exhaustive nor
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000[diff] [blame]2609usable for complex DTD design.</p>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]2610
2611<h4><a name="reference1">How to reference a DTD from a document</a>:</h4>
2612
2613<p>Assuming the top element of the document is <code>spec</code> and the dtd
2614is placed in the file <code>mydtd</code> in the subdirectory
2615<code>dtds</code> of the directory from where the document were loaded:</p>
2616
2617<p><code>&lt;!DOCTYPE spec SYSTEM "dtds/mydtd"&gt;</code></p>
2618
2619<p>Notes:</p>
2620<ul>
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000[diff] [blame]2621 <li>The system string is actually an URI-Reference (as defined in <a
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]2622 href="http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2396.txt">RFC 2396</a>) so you can use a
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000[diff] [blame]2623 full URL string indicating the location of your DTD on the Web. This is a
2624 really good thing to do if you want others to validate your document.</li>
2625 <li>It is also possible to associate a <code>PUBLIC</code> identifier (a
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000[diff] [blame]2626 magic string) so that the DTD is looked up in catalogs on the client side
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000[diff] [blame]2627 without having to locate it on the web.</li>
2628 <li>A DTD contains a set of element and attribute declarations, but they
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000[diff] [blame]2629 don't define what the root of the document should be. This is explicitly
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]2630 told to the parser/validator as the first element of the
2631 <code>DOCTYPE</code> declaration.</li>
2632</ul>
2633
2634<h4><a name="Declaring2">Declaring elements</a>:</h4>
2635
2636<p>The following declares an element <code>spec</code>:</p>
2637
2638<p><code>&lt;!ELEMENT spec (front, body, back?)&gt;</code></p>
2639
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000[diff] [blame]2640<p>It also expresses that the spec element contains one <code>front</code>,
Daniel Veillardc0801af2002-05-28 16:28:42 +0000[diff] [blame]2641one <code>body</code> and one optional <code>back</code> children elements in
2642this order. The declaration of one element of the structure and its content
2643are done in a single declaration. Similarly the following declares
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]2644<code>div1</code> elements:</p>
2645
Daniel Veillard51737272002-01-23 23:10:38 +0000[diff] [blame]2646<p><code>&lt;!ELEMENT div1 (head, (p | list | note)*, div2?)&gt;</code></p>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]2647
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000[diff] [blame]2648<p>which means div1 contains one <code>head</code> then a series of optional
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]2649<code>p</code>, <code>list</code>s and <code>note</code>s and then an
2650optional <code>div2</code>. And last but not least an element can contain
2651text:</p>
2652
2653<p><code>&lt;!ELEMENT b (#PCDATA)&gt;</code></p>
2654
2655<p><code>b</code> contains text or being of mixed content (text and elements
2656in no particular order):</p>
2657
2658<p><code>&lt;!ELEMENT p (#PCDATA|a|ul|b|i|em)*&gt;</code></p>
2659
2660<p><code>p </code>can contain text or <code>a</code>, <code>ul</code>,
2661<code>b</code>, <code>i </code>or <code>em</code> elements in no particular
2662order.</p>
2663
2664<h4><a name="Declaring1">Declaring attributes</a>:</h4>
2665
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000[diff] [blame]2666<p>Again the attributes declaration includes their content definition:</p>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]2667
2668<p><code>&lt;!ATTLIST termdef name CDATA #IMPLIED&gt;</code></p>
2669
2670<p>means that the element <code>termdef</code> can have a <code>name</code>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000[diff] [blame]2671attribute containing text (<code>CDATA</code>) and which is optional
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]2672(<code>#IMPLIED</code>). The attribute value can also be defined within a
2673set:</p>
2674
2675<p><code>&lt;!ATTLIST list type (bullets|ordered|glossary)
2676"ordered"&gt;</code></p>
2677
2678<p>means <code>list</code> element have a <code>type</code> attribute with 3
2679allowed values "bullets", "ordered" or "glossary" and which default to
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000[diff] [blame]2680"ordered" if the attribute is not explicitly specified.</p>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]2681
2682<p>The content type of an attribute can be text (<code>CDATA</code>),
2683anchor/reference/references
2684(<code>ID</code>/<code>IDREF</code>/<code>IDREFS</code>), entity(ies)
2685(<code>ENTITY</code>/<code>ENTITIES</code>) or name(s)
2686(<code>NMTOKEN</code>/<code>NMTOKENS</code>). The following defines that a
2687<code>chapter</code> element can have an optional <code>id</code> attribute
2688of type <code>ID</code>, usable for reference from attribute of type
2689IDREF:</p>
2690
2691<p><code>&lt;!ATTLIST chapter id ID #IMPLIED&gt;</code></p>
2692
2693<p>The last value of an attribute definition can be <code>#REQUIRED
2694</code>meaning that the attribute has to be given, <code>#IMPLIED</code>
2695meaning that it is optional, or the default value (possibly prefixed by
2696<code>#FIXED</code> if it is the only allowed).</p>
2697
2698<p>Notes:</p>
2699<ul>
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000[diff] [blame]2700 <li>Usually the attributes pertaining to a given element are declared in a
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]2701 single expression, but it is just a convention adopted by a lot of DTD
2702 writers:
2703 <pre>&lt;!ATTLIST termdef
2704 id ID #REQUIRED
2705 name CDATA #IMPLIED&gt;</pre>
2706 <p>The previous construct defines both <code>id</code> and
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000[diff] [blame]2707 <code>name</code> attributes for the element <code>termdef</code>.</p>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]2708 </li>
2709</ul>
2710
2711<h3><a name="Some1">Some examples</a></h3>
2712
Daniel Veillard8a469172003-06-12 16:05:07 +0000[diff] [blame]2713<p>The directory <code>test/valid/dtds/</code> in the libxml2 distribution
Daniel Veillard42766c02002-08-22 20:52:17 +0000[diff] [blame]2714contains some complex DTD examples. The example in the file
2715<code>test/valid/dia.xml</code> shows an XML file where the simple DTD is
2716directly included within the document.</p>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]2717
2718<h3><a name="validate1">How to validate</a></h3>
2719
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000[diff] [blame]2720<p>The simplest way is to use the xmllint program included with libxml. The
2721<code>--valid</code> option turns-on validation of the files given as input.
2722For example the following validates a copy of the first revision of the XML
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]27231.0 specification:</p>
2724
2725<p><code>xmllint --valid --noout test/valid/REC-xml-19980210.xml</code></p>
2726
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000[diff] [blame]2727<p>the -- noout is used to disable output of the resulting tree.</p>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]2728
Daniel Veillard42766c02002-08-22 20:52:17 +0000[diff] [blame]2729<p>The <code>--dtdvalid dtd</code> allows validation of the document(s)
2730against a given DTD.</p>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]2731
Daniel Veillard8a469172003-06-12 16:05:07 +0000[diff] [blame]2732<p>Libxml2 exports an API to handle DTDs and validation, check the <a
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]2733href="http://xmlsoft.org/html/libxml-valid.html">associated
2734description</a>.</p>
2735
2736<h3><a name="Other1">Other resources</a></h3>
2737
2738<p>DTDs are as old as SGML. So there may be a number of examples on-line, I
2739will just list one for now, others pointers welcome:</p>
2740<ul>
2741 <li><a href="http://www.xml101.com:8081/dtd/">XML-101 DTD</a></li>
2742</ul>
2743
2744<p>I suggest looking at the examples found under test/valid/dtd and any of
2745the large number of books available on XML. The dia example in test/valid
2746should be both simple and complete enough to allow you to build your own.</p>
2747
2748<p></p>
2749
2750<h2><a name="Memory">Memory Management</a></h2>
2751
2752<p>Table of Content:</p>
2753<ol>
2754 <li><a href="#General3">General overview</a></li>
Daniel Veillard8a469172003-06-12 16:05:07 +0000[diff] [blame]2755 <li><a href="#setting">Setting libxml2 set of memory routines</a></li>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]2756 <li><a href="#cleanup">Cleaning up after parsing</a></li>
2757 <li><a href="#Debugging">Debugging routines</a></li>
2758 <li><a href="#General4">General memory requirements</a></li>
2759</ol>
2760
2761<h3><a name="General3">General overview</a></h3>
2762
2763<p>The module <code><a
2764href="http://xmlsoft.org/html/libxml-xmlmemory.html">xmlmemory.h</a></code>
Daniel Veillard8a469172003-06-12 16:05:07 +0000[diff] [blame]2765provides the interfaces to the libxml2 memory system:</p>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]2766<ul>
Daniel Veillard8a469172003-06-12 16:05:07 +0000[diff] [blame]2767 <li>libxml2 does not use the libc memory allocator directly but xmlFree(),
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]2768 xmlMalloc() and xmlRealloc()</li>
2769 <li>those routines can be reallocated to a specific set of routine, by
2770 default the libc ones i.e. free(), malloc() and realloc()</li>
2771 <li>the xmlmemory.c module includes a set of debugging routine</li>
2772</ul>
2773
Daniel Veillard8a469172003-06-12 16:05:07 +0000[diff] [blame]2774<h3><a name="setting">Setting libxml2 set of memory routines</a></h3>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]2775
2776<p>It is sometimes useful to not use the default memory allocator, either for
2777debugging, analysis or to implement a specific behaviour on memory management
2778(like on embedded systems). Two function calls are available to do so:</p>
2779<ul>
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +0000[diff] [blame]2780 <li><a href="http://xmlsoft.org/html/libxml-xmlmemory.html">xmlMemGet
2781 ()</a> which return the current set of functions in use by the parser</li>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]2782 <li><a
2783 href="http://xmlsoft.org/html/libxml-xmlmemory.html">xmlMemSetup()</a>
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +0000[diff] [blame]2784 which allow to set up a new set of memory allocation functions</li>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]2785</ul>
2786
2787<p>Of course a call to xmlMemSetup() should probably be done before calling
Daniel Veillard8a469172003-06-12 16:05:07 +0000[diff] [blame]2788any other libxml2 routines (unless you are sure your allocations routines are
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]2789compatibles).</p>
2790
2791<h3><a name="cleanup">Cleaning up after parsing</a></h3>
2792
Daniel Veillard8a469172003-06-12 16:05:07 +0000[diff] [blame]2793<p>Libxml2 is not stateless, there is a few set of memory structures needing
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000[diff] [blame]2794allocation before the parser is fully functional (some encoding structures
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]2795for example). This also mean that once parsing is finished there is a tiny
2796amount of memory (a few hundred bytes) which can be recollected if you don't
2797reuse the parser immediately:</p>
2798<ul>
2799 <li><a href="http://xmlsoft.org/html/libxml-parser.html">xmlCleanupParser
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +0000[diff] [blame]2800 ()</a> is a centralized routine to free the parsing states. Note that it
2801 won't deallocate any produced tree if any (use the xmlFreeDoc() and
2802 related routines for this).</li>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]2803 <li><a href="http://xmlsoft.org/html/libxml-parser.html">xmlInitParser
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +0000[diff] [blame]2804 ()</a> is the dual routine allowing to preallocate the parsing state
2805 which can be useful for example to avoid initialization reentrancy
Daniel Veillard8a469172003-06-12 16:05:07 +0000[diff] [blame]2806 problems when using libxml2 in multithreaded applications</li>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]2807</ul>
2808
2809<p>Generally xmlCleanupParser() is safe, if needed the state will be rebuild
2810at the next invocation of parser routines, but be careful of the consequences
2811in multithreaded applications.</p>
2812
2813<h3><a name="Debugging">Debugging routines</a></h3>
2814
Daniel Veillard8a469172003-06-12 16:05:07 +0000[diff] [blame]2815<p>When configured using --with-mem-debug flag (off by default), libxml2 uses
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000[diff] [blame]2816a set of memory allocation debugging routines keeping track of all allocated
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]2817blocks and the location in the code where the routine was called. A couple of
2818other debugging routines allow to dump the memory allocated infos to a file
2819or call a specific routine when a given block number is allocated:</p>
2820<ul>
2821 <li><a
2822 href="http://xmlsoft.org/html/libxml-xmlmemory.html">xmlMallocLoc()</a>
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +0000[diff] [blame]2823 <a
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]2824 href="http://xmlsoft.org/html/libxml-xmlmemory.html">xmlReallocLoc()</a>
2825 and <a
2826 href="http://xmlsoft.org/html/libxml-xmlmemory.html">xmlMemStrdupLoc()</a>
2827 are the memory debugging replacement allocation routines</li>
2828 <li><a href="http://xmlsoft.org/html/libxml-xmlmemory.html">xmlMemoryDump
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +0000[diff] [blame]2829 ()</a> dumps all the informations about the allocated memory block lefts
2830 in the <code>.memdump</code> file</li>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]2831</ul>
2832
Daniel Veillard8a469172003-06-12 16:05:07 +0000[diff] [blame]2833<p>When developing libxml2 memory debug is enabled, the tests programs call
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]2834xmlMemoryDump () and the "make test" regression tests will check for any
2835memory leak during the full regression test sequence, this helps a lot
Daniel Veillard8a469172003-06-12 16:05:07 +0000[diff] [blame]2836ensuring that libxml2 does not leak memory and bullet proof memory
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]2837allocations use (some libc implementations are known to be far too permissive
2838resulting in major portability problems!).</p>
2839
2840<p>If the .memdump reports a leak, it displays the allocation function and
2841also tries to give some informations about the content and structure of the
2842allocated blocks left. This is sufficient in most cases to find the culprit,
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000[diff] [blame]2843but not always. Assuming the allocation problem is reproducible, it is
2844possible to find more easily:</p>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]2845<ol>
2846 <li>write down the block number xxxx not allocated</li>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000[diff] [blame]2847 <li>export the environment variable XML_MEM_BREAKPOINT=xxxx , the easiest
Daniel Veillard75794822002-04-11 16:24:32 +0000[diff] [blame]2848 when using GDB is to simply give the command
2849 <p><code>set environment XML_MEM_BREAKPOINT xxxx</code></p>
2850 <p>before running the program.</p>
2851 </li>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]2852 <li>run the program under a debugger and set a breakpoint on
2853 xmlMallocBreakpoint() a specific function called when this precise block
2854 is allocated</li>
2855 <li>when the breakpoint is reached you can then do a fine analysis of the
2856 allocation an step to see the condition resulting in the missing
2857 deallocation.</li>
2858</ol>
2859
Daniel Veillard8a469172003-06-12 16:05:07 +0000[diff] [blame]2860<p>I used to use a commercial tool to debug libxml2 memory problems but after
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]2861noticing that it was not detecting memory leaks that simple mechanism was
Daniel Veillard75794822002-04-11 16:24:32 +0000[diff] [blame]2862used and proved extremely efficient until now. Lately I have also used <a
2863href="http://developer.kde.org/~sewardj/">valgrind</a> with quite some
2864success, it is tied to the i386 architecture since it works by emulating the
2865processor and instruction set, it is slow but extremely efficient, i.e. it
2866spot memory usage errors in a very precise way.</p>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]2867
2868<h3><a name="General4">General memory requirements</a></h3>
2869
Daniel Veillard8a469172003-06-12 16:05:07 +0000[diff] [blame]2870<p>How much libxml2 memory require ? It's hard to tell in average it depends
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]2871of a number of things:</p>
2872<ul>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000[diff] [blame]2873 <li>the parser itself should work in a fixed amount of memory, except for
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]2874 information maintained about the stacks of names and entities locations.
2875 The I/O and encoding handlers will probably account for a few KBytes.
2876 This is true for both the XML and HTML parser (though the HTML parser
2877 need more state).</li>
2878 <li>If you are generating the DOM tree then memory requirements will grow
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000[diff] [blame]2879 nearly linear with the size of the data. In general for a balanced
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]2880 textual document the internal memory requirement is about 4 times the
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000[diff] [blame]2881 size of the UTF8 serialization of this document (example the XML-1.0
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]2882 recommendation is a bit more of 150KBytes and takes 650KBytes of main
2883 memory when parsed). Validation will add a amount of memory required for
2884 maintaining the external Dtd state which should be linear with the
2885 complexity of the content model defined by the Dtd</li>
Daniel Veillardce192eb2003-04-16 15:58:05 +0000[diff] [blame]2886 <li>If you need to work with fixed memory requirements or don't need the
2887 full DOM tree then using the <a href="xmlreader.html">xmlReader
2888 interface</a> is probably the best way to proceed, it still allows to
2889 validate or operate on subset of the tree if needed.</li>
Daniel Veillard8a469172003-06-12 16:05:07 +0000[diff] [blame]2890 <li>If you don't care about the advanced features of libxml2 like
Daniel Veillardce192eb2003-04-16 15:58:05 +0000[diff] [blame]2891 validation, DOM, XPath or XPointer, don't use entities, need to work with
2892 fixed memory requirements, and try to get the fastest parsing possible
2893 then the SAX interface should be used, but it has known restrictions.</li>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]2894</ul>
2895
2896<p></p>
2897
2898<h2><a name="Encodings">Encodings support</a></h2>
2899
2900<p>Table of Content:</p>
2901<ol>
2902 <li><a href="encoding.html#What">What does internationalization support
2903 mean ?</a></li>
2904 <li><a href="encoding.html#internal">The internal encoding, how and
2905 why</a></li>
2906 <li><a href="encoding.html#implemente">How is it implemented ?</a></li>
2907 <li><a href="encoding.html#Default">Default supported encodings</a></li>
2908 <li><a href="encoding.html#extend">How to extend the existing
2909 support</a></li>
2910</ol>
2911
2912<h3><a name="What">What does internationalization support mean ?</a></h3>
2913
Daniel Veillarde6e59cd2003-12-24 11:56:44 +0000[diff] [blame]2914<p>If you are not really familiar with Internationalization (usual shortcut
2915is I18N) , Unicode, characters and glyphs, I suggest you read a <a
Daniel Veillard238836e2003-04-07 22:57:29 +0000[diff] [blame]2916href="http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2003/04/06/Unicode">presentation</a>
2917by Tim Bray on Unicode and why you should care about it.</p>
2918
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]2919<p>XML was designed from the start to allow the support of any character set
2920by using Unicode. Any conformant XML parser has to support the UTF-8 and
2921UTF-16 default encodings which can both express the full unicode ranges. UTF8
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000[diff] [blame]2922is a variable length encoding whose greatest points are to reuse the same
2923encoding for ASCII and to save space for Western encodings, but it is a bit
Daniel Veillardabfca612004-01-07 23:38:02 +0000[diff] [blame]2924more complex to handle in practice. UTF-16 use 2 bytes per character (and
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]2925sometimes combines two pairs), it makes implementation easier, but looks a
2926bit overkill for Western languages encoding. Moreover the XML specification
Daniel Veillard189f46b2004-01-25 21:03:04 +0000[diff] [blame]2927allows the document to be encoded in other encodings at the condition that
2928they are clearly labeled as such. For example the following is a wellformed
2929XML document encoded in ISO-8859-1 and using accentuated letters that we
2930French like for both markup and content:</p>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]2931<pre>&lt;?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?&gt;
2932&lt;très&gt;là&lt;/très&gt;</pre>
2933
Daniel Veillard8a469172003-06-12 16:05:07 +0000[diff] [blame]2934<p>Having internationalization support in libxml2 means the following:</p>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]2935<ul>
2936 <li>the document is properly parsed</li>
2937 <li>informations about it's encoding are saved</li>
2938 <li>it can be modified</li>
2939 <li>it can be saved in its original encoding</li>
Daniel Veillard8a469172003-06-12 16:05:07 +0000[diff] [blame]2940 <li>it can also be saved in another encoding supported by libxml2 (for
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]2941 example straight UTF8 or even an ASCII form)</li>
2942</ul>
2943
Daniel Veillard8a469172003-06-12 16:05:07 +0000[diff] [blame]2944<p>Another very important point is that the whole libxml2 API, with the
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]2945exception of a few routines to read with a specific encoding or save to a
2946specific encoding, is completely agnostic about the original encoding of the
2947document.</p>
2948
Daniel Veillard8a469172003-06-12 16:05:07 +0000[diff] [blame]2949<p>It should be noted too that the HTML parser embedded in libxml2 now obey
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]2950the same rules too, the following document will be (as of 2.2.2) handled in
Daniel Veillard8a469172003-06-12 16:05:07 +0000[diff] [blame]2951an internationalized fashion by libxml2 too:</p>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]2952<pre>&lt;!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN"
2953 "http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd"&gt;
2954&lt;html lang="fr"&gt;
2955&lt;head&gt;
2956 &lt;META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Type" CONTENT="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1"&gt;
2957&lt;/head&gt;
2958&lt;body&gt;
2959&lt;p&gt;W3C crée des standards pour le Web.&lt;/body&gt;
2960&lt;/html&gt;</pre>
2961
2962<h3><a name="internal">The internal encoding, how and why</a></h3>
2963
Daniel Veillardabfca612004-01-07 23:38:02 +0000[diff] [blame]2964<p>One of the core decisions was to force all documents to be converted to a
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]2965default internal encoding, and that encoding to be UTF-8, here are the
Daniel Veillardabfca612004-01-07 23:38:02 +0000[diff] [blame]2966rationales for those choices:</p>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]2967<ul>
2968 <li>keeping the native encoding in the internal form would force the libxml
2969 users (or the code associated) to be fully aware of the encoding of the
2970 original document, for examples when adding a text node to a document,
2971 the content would have to be provided in the document encoding, i.e. the
2972 client code would have to check it before hand, make sure it's conformant
2973 to the encoding, etc ... Very hard in practice, though in some specific
2974 cases this may make sense.</li>
2975 <li>the second decision was which encoding. From the XML spec only UTF8 and
2976 UTF16 really makes sense as being the two only encodings for which there
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000[diff] [blame]2977 is mandatory support. UCS-4 (32 bits fixed size encoding) could be
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]2978 considered an intelligent choice too since it's a direct Unicode mapping
2979 support. I selected UTF-8 on the basis of efficiency and compatibility
2980 with surrounding software:
2981 <ul>
2982 <li>UTF-8 while a bit more complex to convert from/to (i.e. slightly
2983 more costly to import and export CPU wise) is also far more compact
2984 than UTF-16 (and UCS-4) for a majority of the documents I see it used
2985 for right now (RPM RDF catalogs, advogato data, various configuration
2986 file formats, etc.) and the key point for today's computer
2987 architecture is efficient uses of caches. If one nearly double the
2988 memory requirement to store the same amount of data, this will trash
2989 caches (main memory/external caches/internal caches) and my take is
2990 that this harms the system far more than the CPU requirements needed
2991 for the conversion to UTF-8</li>
Daniel Veillard8a469172003-06-12 16:05:07 +0000[diff] [blame]2992 <li>Most of libxml2 version 1 users were using it with straight ASCII
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]2993 most of the time, doing the conversion with an internal encoding
2994 requiring all their code to be rewritten was a serious show-stopper
2995 for using UTF-16 or UCS-4.</li>
2996 <li>UTF-8 is being used as the de-facto internal encoding standard for
2997 related code like the <a href="http://www.pango.org/">pango</a>
Daniel Veillardabfca612004-01-07 23:38:02 +0000[diff] [blame]2998 upcoming Gnome text widget, and a lot of Unix code (yet another place
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]2999 where Unix programmer base takes a different approach from Microsoft
3000 - they are using UTF-16)</li>
3001 </ul>
3002 </li>
3003</ul>
3004
Daniel Veillard8a469172003-06-12 16:05:07 +0000[diff] [blame]3005<p>What does this mean in practice for the libxml2 user:</p>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]3006<ul>
Daniel Veillard8a469172003-06-12 16:05:07 +0000[diff] [blame]3007 <li>xmlChar, the libxml2 data type is a byte, those bytes must be assembled
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]3008 as UTF-8 valid strings. The proper way to terminate an xmlChar * string
3009 is simply to append 0 byte, as usual.</li>
3010 <li>One just need to make sure that when using chars outside the ASCII set,
3011 the values has been properly converted to UTF-8</li>
3012</ul>
3013
3014<h3><a name="implemente">How is it implemented ?</a></h3>
3015
3016<p>Let's describe how all this works within libxml, basically the I18N
3017(internationalization) support get triggered only during I/O operation, i.e.
3018when reading a document or saving one. Let's look first at the reading
3019sequence:</p>
3020<ol>
3021 <li>when a document is processed, we usually don't know the encoding, a
Daniel Veillard189f46b2004-01-25 21:03:04 +0000[diff] [blame]3022 simple heuristic allows to detect UTF-16 and UCS-4 from encodings where
3023 the ASCII range (0-0x7F) maps with ASCII</li>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]3024 <li>the xml declaration if available is parsed, including the encoding
3025 declaration. At that point, if the autodetected encoding is different
3026 from the one declared a call to xmlSwitchEncoding() is issued.</li>
3027 <li>If there is no encoding declaration, then the input has to be in either
3028 UTF-8 or UTF-16, if it is not then at some point when processing the
3029 input, the converter/checker of UTF-8 form will raise an encoding error.
3030 You may end-up with a garbled document, or no document at all ! Example:
3031 <pre>~/XML -&gt; ./xmllint err.xml
3032err.xml:1: error: Input is not proper UTF-8, indicate encoding !
3033&lt;très&gt;là&lt;/très&gt;
3034 ^
3035err.xml:1: error: Bytes: 0xE8 0x73 0x3E 0x6C
3036&lt;très&gt;là&lt;/très&gt;
3037 ^</pre>
3038 </li>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000[diff] [blame]3039 <li>xmlSwitchEncoding() does an encoding name lookup, canonicalize it, and
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]3040 then search the default registered encoding converters for that encoding.
3041 If it's not within the default set and iconv() support has been compiled
3042 it, it will ask iconv for such an encoder. If this fails then the parser
3043 will report an error and stops processing:
3044 <pre>~/XML -&gt; ./xmllint err2.xml
3045err2.xml:1: error: Unsupported encoding UnsupportedEnc
3046&lt;?xml version="1.0" encoding="UnsupportedEnc"?&gt;
3047 ^</pre>
3048 </li>
Daniel Veillard46c5c1d2002-05-20 07:15:54 +0000[diff] [blame]3049 <li>From that point the encoder processes progressively the input (it is
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]3050 plugged as a front-end to the I/O module) for that entity. It captures
Daniel Veillardabfca612004-01-07 23:38:02 +0000[diff] [blame]3051 and converts on-the-fly the document to be parsed to UTF-8. The parser
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]3052 itself just does UTF-8 checking of this input and process it
3053 transparently. The only difference is that the encoding information has
3054 been added to the parsing context (more precisely to the input
3055 corresponding to this entity).</li>
3056 <li>The result (when using DOM) is an internal form completely in UTF-8
3057 with just an encoding information on the document node.</li>
3058</ol>
3059
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000[diff] [blame]3060<p>Ok then what happens when saving the document (assuming you
3061collected/built an xmlDoc DOM like structure) ? It depends on the function
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]3062called, xmlSaveFile() will just try to save in the original encoding, while
3063xmlSaveFileTo() and xmlSaveFileEnc() can optionally save to a given
3064encoding:</p>
3065<ol>
Daniel Veillard8a469172003-06-12 16:05:07 +0000[diff] [blame]3066 <li>if no encoding is given, libxml2 will look for an encoding value
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]3067 associated to the document and if it exists will try to save to that
3068 encoding,
3069 <p>otherwise everything is written in the internal form, i.e. UTF-8</p>
3070 </li>
3071 <li>so if an encoding was specified, either at the API level or on the
Daniel Veillard8a469172003-06-12 16:05:07 +0000[diff] [blame]3072 document, libxml2 will again canonicalize the encoding name, lookup for a
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]3073 converter in the registered set or through iconv. If not found the
3074 function will return an error code</li>
3075 <li>the converter is placed before the I/O buffer layer, as another kind of
Daniel Veillard8a469172003-06-12 16:05:07 +0000[diff] [blame]3076 buffer, then libxml2 will simply push the UTF-8 serialization to through
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]3077 that buffer, which will then progressively be converted and pushed onto
3078 the I/O layer.</li>
3079 <li>It is possible that the converter code fails on some input, for example
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000[diff] [blame]3080 trying to push an UTF-8 encoded Chinese character through the UTF-8 to
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]3081 ISO-8859-1 converter won't work. Since the encoders are progressive they
3082 will just report the error and the number of bytes converted, at that
Daniel Veillard8a469172003-06-12 16:05:07 +0000[diff] [blame]3083 point libxml2 will decode the offending character, remove it from the
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]3084 buffer and replace it with the associated charRef encoding &amp;#123; and
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000[diff] [blame]3085 resume the conversion. This guarantees that any document will be saved
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]3086 without losses (except for markup names where this is not legal, this is
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000[diff] [blame]3087 a problem in the current version, in practice avoid using non-ascii
Daniel Veillard189f46b2004-01-25 21:03:04 +0000[diff] [blame]3088 characters for tag or attribute names). A special "ascii" encoding name
3089 is used to save documents to a pure ascii form can be used when
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]3090 portability is really crucial</li>
3091</ol>
3092
Daniel Veillardabfca612004-01-07 23:38:02 +0000[diff] [blame]3093<p>Here are a few examples based on the same test document:</p>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]3094<pre>~/XML -&gt; ./xmllint isolat1
3095&lt;?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?&gt;
3096&lt;très&gt;là&lt;/très&gt;
3097~/XML -&gt; ./xmllint --encode UTF-8 isolat1
3098&lt;?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?&gt;
3099&lt;très&gt;là  &lt;/très&gt;
3100~/XML -&gt; </pre>
3101
3102<p>The same processing is applied (and reuse most of the code) for HTML I18N
3103processing. Looking up and modifying the content encoding is a bit more
3104difficult since it is located in a &lt;meta&gt; tag under the &lt;head&gt;,
3105so a couple of functions htmlGetMetaEncoding() and htmlSetMetaEncoding() have
3106been provided. The parser also attempts to switch encoding on the fly when
3107detecting such a tag on input. Except for that the processing is the same
3108(and again reuses the same code).</p>
3109
3110<h3><a name="Default">Default supported encodings</a></h3>
3111
Daniel Veillard8a469172003-06-12 16:05:07 +0000[diff] [blame]3112<p>libxml2 has a set of default converters for the following encodings
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]3113(located in encoding.c):</p>
3114<ol>
3115 <li>UTF-8 is supported by default (null handlers)</li>
3116 <li>UTF-16, both little and big endian</li>
3117 <li>ISO-Latin-1 (ISO-8859-1) covering most western languages</li>
3118 <li>ASCII, useful mostly for saving</li>
3119 <li>HTML, a specific handler for the conversion of UTF-8 to ASCII with HTML
3120 predefined entities like &amp;copy; for the Copyright sign.</li>
3121</ol>
3122
Daniel Veillardc0801af2002-05-28 16:28:42 +0000[diff] [blame]3123<p>More over when compiled on an Unix platform with iconv support the full
3124set of encodings supported by iconv can be instantly be used by libxml. On a
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]3125linux machine with glibc-2.1 the list of supported encodings and aliases fill
31263 full pages, and include UCS-4, the full set of ISO-Latin encodings, and the
3127various Japanese ones.</p>
3128
3129<h4>Encoding aliases</h4>
3130
Daniel Veillard8a469172003-06-12 16:05:07 +0000[diff] [blame]3131<p>From 2.2.3, libxml2 has support to register encoding names aliases. The
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]3132goal is to be able to parse document whose encoding is supported but where
3133the name differs (for example from the default set of names accepted by
3134iconv). The following functions allow to register and handle new aliases for
Daniel Veillard8a469172003-06-12 16:05:07 +0000[diff] [blame]3135existing encodings. Once registered libxml2 will automatically lookup the
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]3136aliases when handling a document:</p>
3137<ul>
3138 <li>int xmlAddEncodingAlias(const char *name, const char *alias);</li>
3139 <li>int xmlDelEncodingAlias(const char *alias);</li>
3140 <li>const char * xmlGetEncodingAlias(const char *alias);</li>
3141 <li>void xmlCleanupEncodingAliases(void);</li>
3142</ul>
3143
3144<h3><a name="extend">How to extend the existing support</a></h3>
3145
3146<p>Well adding support for new encoding, or overriding one of the encoders
Daniel Veillardabfca612004-01-07 23:38:02 +0000[diff] [blame]3147(assuming it is buggy) should not be hard, just write input and output
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]3148conversion routines to/from UTF-8, and register them using
3149xmlNewCharEncodingHandler(name, xxxToUTF8, UTF8Toxxx), and they will be
3150called automatically if the parser(s) encounter such an encoding name
3151(register it uppercase, this will help). The description of the encoders,
3152their arguments and expected return values are described in the encoding.h
3153header.</p>
3154
3155<p>A quick note on the topic of subverting the parser to use a different
3156internal encoding than UTF-8, in some case people will absolutely want to
3157keep the internal encoding different, I think it's still possible (but the
3158encoding must be compliant with ASCII on the same subrange) though I didn't
3159tried it. The key is to override the default conversion routines (by
3160registering null encoders/decoders for your charsets), and bypass the UTF-8
3161checking of the parser by setting the parser context charset
3162(ctxt-&gt;charset) to something different than XML_CHAR_ENCODING_UTF8, but
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000[diff] [blame]3163there is no guarantee that this will work. You may also have some troubles
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]3164saving back.</p>
3165
3166<p>Basically proper I18N support is important, this requires at least
3167libxml-2.0.0, but a lot of features and corrections are really available only
3168starting 2.2.</p>
3169
3170<h2><a name="IO">I/O Interfaces</a></h2>
3171
3172<p>Table of Content:</p>
3173<ol>
3174 <li><a href="#General1">General overview</a></li>
3175 <li><a href="#basic">The basic buffer type</a></li>
3176 <li><a href="#Input">Input I/O handlers</a></li>
3177 <li><a href="#Output">Output I/O handlers</a></li>
3178 <li><a href="#entities">The entities loader</a></li>
3179 <li><a href="#Example2">Example of customized I/O</a></li>
3180</ol>
3181
3182<h3><a name="General1">General overview</a></h3>
3183
3184<p>The module <code><a
3185href="http://xmlsoft.org/html/libxml-xmlio.html">xmlIO.h</a></code> provides
Daniel Veillard8a469172003-06-12 16:05:07 +0000[diff] [blame]3186the interfaces to the libxml2 I/O system. This consists of 4 main parts:</p>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]3187<ul>
3188 <li>Entities loader, this is a routine which tries to fetch the entities
3189 (files) based on their PUBLIC and SYSTEM identifiers. The default loader
Daniel Veillard8a469172003-06-12 16:05:07 +0000[diff] [blame]3190 don't look at the public identifier since libxml2 do not maintain a
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]3191 catalog. You can redefine you own entity loader by using
3192 <code>xmlGetExternalEntityLoader()</code> and
Daniel Veillard9c466822001-10-25 12:03:39 +0000[diff] [blame]3193 <code>xmlSetExternalEntityLoader()</code>. <a href="#entities">Check the
3194 example</a>.</li>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]3195 <li>Input I/O buffers which are a commodity structure used by the parser(s)
3196 input layer to handle fetching the informations to feed the parser. This
3197 provides buffering and is also a placeholder where the encoding
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000[diff] [blame]3198 converters to UTF8 are piggy-backed.</li>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]3199 <li>Output I/O buffers are similar to the Input ones and fulfill similar
3200 task but when generating a serialization from a tree.</li>
3201 <li>A mechanism to register sets of I/O callbacks and associate them with
3202 specific naming schemes like the protocol part of the URIs.
3203 <p>This affect the default I/O operations and allows to use specific I/O
3204 handlers for certain names.</p>
3205 </li>
3206</ul>
3207
3208<p>The general mechanism used when loading http://rpmfind.net/xml.html for
3209example in the HTML parser is the following:</p>
3210<ol>
3211 <li>The default entity loader calls <code>xmlNewInputFromFile()</code> with
3212 the parsing context and the URI string.</li>
3213 <li>the URI string is checked against the existing registered handlers
3214 using their match() callback function, if the HTTP module was compiled
3215 in, it is registered and its match() function will succeeds</li>
3216 <li>the open() function of the handler is called and if successful will
3217 return an I/O Input buffer</li>
3218 <li>the parser will the start reading from this buffer and progressively
3219 fetch information from the resource, calling the read() function of the
3220 handler until the resource is exhausted</li>
3221 <li>if an encoding change is detected it will be installed on the input
3222 buffer, providing buffering and efficient use of the conversion
3223 routines</li>
3224 <li>once the parser has finished, the close() function of the handler is
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000[diff] [blame]3225 called once and the Input buffer and associated resources are
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]3226 deallocated.</li>
3227</ol>
3228
3229<p>The user defined callbacks are checked first to allow overriding of the
Daniel Veillard8a469172003-06-12 16:05:07 +0000[diff] [blame]3230default libxml2 I/O routines.</p>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]3231
3232<h3><a name="basic">The basic buffer type</a></h3>
3233
3234<p>All the buffer manipulation handling is done using the
3235<code>xmlBuffer</code> type define in <code><a
3236href="http://xmlsoft.org/html/libxml-tree.html">tree.h</a> </code>which is a
3237resizable memory buffer. The buffer allocation strategy can be selected to be
3238either best-fit or use an exponential doubling one (CPU vs. memory use
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000[diff] [blame]3239trade-off). The values are <code>XML_BUFFER_ALLOC_EXACT</code> and
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]3240<code>XML_BUFFER_ALLOC_DOUBLEIT</code>, and can be set individually or on a
3241system wide basis using <code>xmlBufferSetAllocationScheme()</code>. A number
3242of functions allows to manipulate buffers with names starting with the
3243<code>xmlBuffer...</code> prefix.</p>
3244
3245<h3><a name="Input">Input I/O handlers</a></h3>
3246
3247<p>An Input I/O handler is a simple structure
3248<code>xmlParserInputBuffer</code> containing a context associated to the
3249resource (file descriptor, or pointer to a protocol handler), the read() and
3250close() callbacks to use and an xmlBuffer. And extra xmlBuffer and a charset
3251encoding handler are also present to support charset conversion when
3252needed.</p>
3253
3254<h3><a name="Output">Output I/O handlers</a></h3>
3255
3256<p>An Output handler <code>xmlOutputBuffer</code> is completely similar to an
3257Input one except the callbacks are write() and close().</p>
3258
3259<h3><a name="entities">The entities loader</a></h3>
3260
3261<p>The entity loader resolves requests for new entities and create inputs for
3262the parser. Creating an input from a filename or an URI string is done
3263through the xmlNewInputFromFile() routine. The default entity loader do not
3264handle the PUBLIC identifier associated with an entity (if any). So it just
3265calls xmlNewInputFromFile() with the SYSTEM identifier (which is mandatory in
3266XML).</p>
3267
3268<p>If you want to hook up a catalog mechanism then you simply need to
3269override the default entity loader, here is an example:</p>
3270<pre>#include &lt;libxml/xmlIO.h&gt;
3271
3272xmlExternalEntityLoader defaultLoader = NULL;
3273
3274xmlParserInputPtr
3275xmlMyExternalEntityLoader(const char *URL, const char *ID,
3276 xmlParserCtxtPtr ctxt) {
3277 xmlParserInputPtr ret;
3278 const char *fileID = NULL;
3279 /* lookup for the fileID depending on ID */
3280
3281 ret = xmlNewInputFromFile(ctxt, fileID);
3282 if (ret != NULL)
3283 return(ret);
3284 if (defaultLoader != NULL)
3285 ret = defaultLoader(URL, ID, ctxt);
3286 return(ret);
3287}
3288
3289int main(..) {
3290 ...
3291
3292 /*
3293 * Install our own entity loader
3294 */
3295 defaultLoader = xmlGetExternalEntityLoader();
3296 xmlSetExternalEntityLoader(xmlMyExternalEntityLoader);
3297
3298 ...
3299}</pre>
3300
3301<h3><a name="Example2">Example of customized I/O</a></h3>
3302
3303<p>This example come from <a href="http://xmlsoft.org/messages/0708.html">a
3304real use case</a>, xmlDocDump() closes the FILE * passed by the application
3305and this was a problem. The <a
3306href="http://xmlsoft.org/messages/0711.html">solution</a> was to redefine a
3307new output handler with the closing call deactivated:</p>
3308<ol>
Daniel Veillardc0801af2002-05-28 16:28:42 +0000[diff] [blame]3309 <li>First define a new I/O output allocator where the output don't close
3310 the file:
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]3311 <pre>xmlOutputBufferPtr
3312xmlOutputBufferCreateOwn(FILE *file, xmlCharEncodingHandlerPtr encoder) {
3313    xmlOutputBufferPtr ret;
3314    
3315    if (xmlOutputCallbackInitialized == 0)
3316        xmlRegisterDefaultOutputCallbacks();
3317
3318    if (file == NULL) return(NULL);
3319    ret = xmlAllocOutputBuffer(encoder);
3320    if (ret != NULL) {
3321        ret-&gt;context = file;
3322        ret-&gt;writecallback = xmlFileWrite;
3323        ret-&gt;closecallback = NULL; /* No close callback */
3324    }
Daniel Veillardf83a2c72003-04-08 13:48:40 +0000[diff] [blame]3325    return(ret);
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]3326} </pre>
3327 </li>
3328 <li>And then use it to save the document:
3329 <pre>FILE *f;
3330xmlOutputBufferPtr output;
3331xmlDocPtr doc;
3332int res;
3333
3334f = ...
3335doc = ....
3336
3337output = xmlOutputBufferCreateOwn(f, NULL);
3338res = xmlSaveFileTo(output, doc, NULL);
3339 </pre>
3340 </li>
3341</ol>
3342
3343<h2><a name="Catalog">Catalog support</a></h2>
3344
3345<p>Table of Content:</p>
3346<ol>
3347 <li><a href="General2">General overview</a></li>
3348 <li><a href="#definition">The definition</a></li>
3349 <li><a href="#Simple">Using catalogs</a></li>
3350 <li><a href="#Some">Some examples</a></li>
3351 <li><a href="#reference">How to tune catalog usage</a></li>
3352 <li><a href="#validate">How to debug catalog processing</a></li>
3353 <li><a href="#Declaring">How to create and maintain catalogs</a></li>
3354 <li><a href="#implemento">The implementor corner quick review of the
3355 API</a></li>
3356 <li><a href="#Other">Other resources</a></li>
3357</ol>
3358
3359<h3><a name="General2">General overview</a></h3>
3360
3361<p>What is a catalog? Basically it's a lookup mechanism used when an entity
3362(a file or a remote resource) references another entity. The catalog lookup
3363is inserted between the moment the reference is recognized by the software
3364(XML parser, stylesheet processing, or even images referenced for inclusion
3365in a rendering) and the time where loading that resource is actually
3366started.</p>
3367
3368<p>It is basically used for 3 things:</p>
3369<ul>
3370 <li>mapping from "logical" names, the public identifiers and a more
3371 concrete name usable for download (and URI). For example it can associate
3372 the logical name
3373 <p>"-//OASIS//DTD DocBook XML V4.1.2//EN"</p>
3374 <p>of the DocBook 4.1.2 XML DTD with the actual URL where it can be
3375 downloaded</p>
3376 <p>http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/xml/4.1.2/docbookx.dtd</p>
3377 </li>
3378 <li>remapping from a given URL to another one, like an HTTP indirection
3379 saying that
3380 <p>"http://www.oasis-open.org/committes/tr.xsl"</p>
3381 <p>should really be looked at</p>
3382 <p>"http://www.oasis-open.org/committes/entity/stylesheets/base/tr.xsl"</p>
3383 </li>
3384 <li>providing a local cache mechanism allowing to load the entities
3385 associated to public identifiers or remote resources, this is a really
3386 important feature for any significant deployment of XML or SGML since it
3387 allows to avoid the aleas and delays associated to fetching remote
3388 resources.</li>
3389</ul>
3390
3391<h3><a name="definition">The definitions</a></h3>
3392
3393<p>Libxml, as of 2.4.3 implements 2 kind of catalogs:</p>
3394<ul>
3395 <li>the older SGML catalogs, the official spec is SGML Open Technical
3396 Resolution TR9401:1997, but is better understood by reading <a
3397 href="http://www.jclark.com/sp/catalog.htm">the SP Catalog page</a> from
3398 James Clark. This is relatively old and not the preferred mode of
3399 operation of libxml.</li>
3400 <li><a href="http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/entity/spec.html">XML
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +0000[diff] [blame]3401 Catalogs</a> is far more flexible, more recent, uses an XML syntax and
3402 should scale quite better. This is the default option of libxml.</li>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]3403</ul>
3404
3405<p></p>
3406
3407<h3><a name="Simple">Using catalog</a></h3>
3408
Daniel Veillard8a469172003-06-12 16:05:07 +0000[diff] [blame]3409<p>In a normal environment libxml2 will by default check the presence of a
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]3410catalog in /etc/xml/catalog, and assuming it has been correctly populated,
3411the processing is completely transparent to the document user. To take a
3412concrete example, suppose you are authoring a DocBook document, this one
3413starts with the following DOCTYPE definition:</p>
3414<pre>&lt;?xml version='1.0'?&gt;
3415&lt;!DOCTYPE book PUBLIC "-//Norman Walsh//DTD DocBk XML V3.1.4//EN"
3416 "http://nwalsh.com/docbook/xml/3.1.4/db3xml.dtd"&gt;</pre>
3417
3418<p>When validating the document with libxml, the catalog will be
3419automatically consulted to lookup the public identifier "-//Norman Walsh//DTD
3420DocBk XML V3.1.4//EN" and the system identifier
3421"http://nwalsh.com/docbook/xml/3.1.4/db3xml.dtd", and if these entities have
3422been installed on your system and the catalogs actually point to them, libxml
3423will fetch them from the local disk.</p>
3424
3425<p style="font-size: 10pt"><strong>Note</strong>: Really don't use this
3426DOCTYPE example it's a really old version, but is fine as an example.</p>
3427
Daniel Veillard8a469172003-06-12 16:05:07 +0000[diff] [blame]3428<p>Libxml2 will check the catalog each time that it is requested to load an
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]3429entity, this includes DTD, external parsed entities, stylesheets, etc ... If
3430your system is correctly configured all the authoring phase and processing
3431should use only local files, even if your document stays portable because it
3432uses the canonical public and system ID, referencing the remote document.</p>
3433
3434<h3><a name="Some">Some examples:</a></h3>
3435
Daniel Veillard8a469172003-06-12 16:05:07 +0000[diff] [blame]3436<p>Here is a couple of fragments from XML Catalogs used in libxml2 early
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]3437regression tests in <code>test/catalogs</code> :</p>
3438<pre>&lt;?xml version="1.0"?&gt;
3439&lt;!DOCTYPE catalog PUBLIC
3440 "-//OASIS//DTD Entity Resolution XML Catalog V1.0//EN"
3441 "http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/entity/release/1.0/catalog.dtd"&gt;
3442&lt;catalog xmlns="urn:oasis:names:tc:entity:xmlns:xml:catalog"&gt;
3443 &lt;public publicId="-//OASIS//DTD DocBook XML V4.1.2//EN"
3444 uri="http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/xml/4.1.2/docbookx.dtd"/&gt;
3445...</pre>
3446
3447<p>This is the beginning of a catalog for DocBook 4.1.2, XML Catalogs are
3448written in XML, there is a specific namespace for catalog elements
3449"urn:oasis:names:tc:entity:xmlns:xml:catalog". The first entry in this
3450catalog is a <code>public</code> mapping it allows to associate a Public
3451Identifier with an URI.</p>
3452<pre>...
3453 &lt;rewriteSystem systemIdStartString="http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/"
3454 rewritePrefix="file:///usr/share/xml/docbook/"/&gt;
3455...</pre>
3456
3457<p>A <code>rewriteSystem</code> is a very powerful instruction, it says that
3458any URI starting with a given prefix should be looked at another URI
3459constructed by replacing the prefix with an new one. In effect this acts like
3460a cache system for a full area of the Web. In practice it is extremely useful
3461with a file prefix if you have installed a copy of those resources on your
3462local system.</p>
3463<pre>...
3464&lt;delegatePublic publicIdStartString="-//OASIS//DTD XML Catalog //"
3465 catalog="file:///usr/share/xml/docbook.xml"/&gt;
3466&lt;delegatePublic publicIdStartString="-//OASIS//ENTITIES DocBook XML"
3467 catalog="file:///usr/share/xml/docbook.xml"/&gt;
3468&lt;delegatePublic publicIdStartString="-//OASIS//DTD DocBook XML"
3469 catalog="file:///usr/share/xml/docbook.xml"/&gt;
3470&lt;delegateSystem systemIdStartString="http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/"
3471 catalog="file:///usr/share/xml/docbook.xml"/&gt;
3472&lt;delegateURI uriStartString="http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/"
3473 catalog="file:///usr/share/xml/docbook.xml"/&gt;
3474...</pre>
3475
3476<p>Delegation is the core features which allows to build a tree of catalogs,
3477easier to maintain than a single catalog, based on Public Identifier, System
3478Identifier or URI prefixes it instructs the catalog software to look up
3479entries in another resource. This feature allow to build hierarchies of
3480catalogs, the set of entries presented should be sufficient to redirect the
3481resolution of all DocBook references to the specific catalog in
3482<code>/usr/share/xml/docbook.xml</code> this one in turn could delegate all
3483references for DocBook 4.2.1 to a specific catalog installed at the same time
3484as the DocBook resources on the local machine.</p>
3485
3486<h3><a name="reference">How to tune catalog usage:</a></h3>
3487
3488<p>The user can change the default catalog behaviour by redirecting queries
3489to its own set of catalogs, this can be done by setting the
3490<code>XML_CATALOG_FILES</code> environment variable to a list of catalogs, an
3491empty one should deactivate loading the default <code>/etc/xml/catalog</code>
3492default catalog</p>
3493
3494<h3><a name="validate">How to debug catalog processing:</a></h3>
3495
3496<p>Setting up the <code>XML_DEBUG_CATALOG</code> environment variable will
Daniel Veillard8a469172003-06-12 16:05:07 +0000[diff] [blame]3497make libxml2 output debugging informations for each catalog operations, for
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]3498example:</p>
3499<pre>orchis:~/XML -&gt; xmllint --memory --noout test/ent2
3500warning: failed to load external entity "title.xml"
3501orchis:~/XML -&gt; export XML_DEBUG_CATALOG=
3502orchis:~/XML -&gt; xmllint --memory --noout test/ent2
3503Failed to parse catalog /etc/xml/catalog
3504Failed to parse catalog /etc/xml/catalog
3505warning: failed to load external entity "title.xml"
3506Catalogs cleanup
3507orchis:~/XML -&gt; </pre>
3508
3509<p>The test/ent2 references an entity, running the parser from memory makes
3510the base URI unavailable and the the "title.xml" entity cannot be loaded.
3511Setting up the debug environment variable allows to detect that an attempt is
3512made to load the <code>/etc/xml/catalog</code> but since it's not present the
3513resolution fails.</p>
3514
3515<p>But the most advanced way to debug XML catalog processing is to use the
3516<strong>xmlcatalog</strong> command shipped with libxml2, it allows to load
3517catalogs and make resolution queries to see what is going on. This is also
3518used for the regression tests:</p>
3519<pre>orchis:~/XML -&gt; ./xmlcatalog test/catalogs/docbook.xml \
3520 "-//OASIS//DTD DocBook XML V4.1.2//EN"
3521http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/xml/4.1.2/docbookx.dtd
3522orchis:~/XML -&gt; </pre>
3523
3524<p>For debugging what is going on, adding one -v flags increase the verbosity
3525level to indicate the processing done (adding a second flag also indicate
3526what elements are recognized at parsing):</p>
3527<pre>orchis:~/XML -&gt; ./xmlcatalog -v test/catalogs/docbook.xml \
3528 "-//OASIS//DTD DocBook XML V4.1.2//EN"
3529Parsing catalog test/catalogs/docbook.xml's content
3530Found public match -//OASIS//DTD DocBook XML V4.1.2//EN
3531http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/xml/4.1.2/docbookx.dtd
3532Catalogs cleanup
3533orchis:~/XML -&gt; </pre>
3534
3535<p>A shell interface is also available to debug and process multiple queries
3536(and for regression tests):</p>
3537<pre>orchis:~/XML -&gt; ./xmlcatalog -shell test/catalogs/docbook.xml \
3538 "-//OASIS//DTD DocBook XML V4.1.2//EN"
3539&gt; help
3540Commands available:
3541public PublicID: make a PUBLIC identifier lookup
3542system SystemID: make a SYSTEM identifier lookup
3543resolve PublicID SystemID: do a full resolver lookup
3544add 'type' 'orig' 'replace' : add an entry
3545del 'values' : remove values
3546dump: print the current catalog state
3547debug: increase the verbosity level
3548quiet: decrease the verbosity level
3549exit: quit the shell
3550&gt; public "-//OASIS//DTD DocBook XML V4.1.2//EN"
3551http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/xml/4.1.2/docbookx.dtd
3552&gt; quit
3553orchis:~/XML -&gt; </pre>
3554
3555<p>This should be sufficient for most debugging purpose, this was actually
3556used heavily to debug the XML Catalog implementation itself.</p>
3557
3558<h3><a name="Declaring">How to create and maintain</a> catalogs:</h3>
3559
3560<p>Basically XML Catalogs are XML files, you can either use XML tools to
3561manage them or use <strong>xmlcatalog</strong> for this. The basic step is
3562to create a catalog the -create option provide this facility:</p>
3563<pre>orchis:~/XML -&gt; ./xmlcatalog --create tst.xml
3564&lt;?xml version="1.0"?&gt;
3565&lt;!DOCTYPE catalog PUBLIC "-//OASIS//DTD Entity Resolution XML Catalog V1.0//EN"
3566 "http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/entity/release/1.0/catalog.dtd"&gt;
3567&lt;catalog xmlns="urn:oasis:names:tc:entity:xmlns:xml:catalog"/&gt;
3568orchis:~/XML -&gt; </pre>
3569
3570<p>By default xmlcatalog does not overwrite the original catalog and save the
3571result on the standard output, this can be overridden using the -noout
3572option. The <code>-add</code> command allows to add entries in the
3573catalog:</p>
3574<pre>orchis:~/XML -&gt; ./xmlcatalog --noout --create --add "public" \
3575 "-//OASIS//DTD DocBook XML V4.1.2//EN" \
3576 http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/xml/4.1.2/docbookx.dtd tst.xml
3577orchis:~/XML -&gt; cat tst.xml
3578&lt;?xml version="1.0"?&gt;
3579&lt;!DOCTYPE catalog PUBLIC "-//OASIS//DTD Entity Resolution XML Catalog V1.0//EN" \
3580 "http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/entity/release/1.0/catalog.dtd"&gt;
3581&lt;catalog xmlns="urn:oasis:names:tc:entity:xmlns:xml:catalog"&gt;
3582&lt;public publicId="-//OASIS//DTD DocBook XML V4.1.2//EN"
3583 uri="http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/xml/4.1.2/docbookx.dtd"/&gt;
3584&lt;/catalog&gt;
3585orchis:~/XML -&gt; </pre>
3586
3587<p>The <code>-add</code> option will always take 3 parameters even if some of
3588the XML Catalog constructs (like nextCatalog) will have only a single
3589argument, just pass a third empty string, it will be ignored.</p>
3590
3591<p>Similarly the <code>-del</code> option remove matching entries from the
3592catalog:</p>
3593<pre>orchis:~/XML -&gt; ./xmlcatalog --del \
3594 "http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/xml/4.1.2/docbookx.dtd" tst.xml
3595&lt;?xml version="1.0"?&gt;
3596&lt;!DOCTYPE catalog PUBLIC "-//OASIS//DTD Entity Resolution XML Catalog V1.0//EN"
3597 "http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/entity/release/1.0/catalog.dtd"&gt;
3598&lt;catalog xmlns="urn:oasis:names:tc:entity:xmlns:xml:catalog"/&gt;
3599orchis:~/XML -&gt; </pre>
3600
3601<p>The catalog is now empty. Note that the matching of <code>-del</code> is
3602exact and would have worked in a similar fashion with the Public ID
3603string.</p>
3604
3605<p>This is rudimentary but should be sufficient to manage a not too complex
3606catalog tree of resources.</p>
3607
3608<h3><a name="implemento">The implementor corner quick review of the
3609API:</a></h3>
3610
3611<p>First, and like for every other module of libxml, there is an
3612automatically generated <a href="html/libxml-catalog.html">API page for
3613catalog support</a>.</p>
3614
3615<p>The header for the catalog interfaces should be included as:</p>
3616<pre>#include &lt;libxml/catalog.h&gt;</pre>
3617
3618<p>The API is voluntarily kept very simple. First it is not obvious that
3619applications really need access to it since it is the default behaviour of
Daniel Veillard560c2a42003-07-06 21:13:49 +0000[diff] [blame]3620libxml2 (Note: it is possible to completely override libxml2 default catalog
3621by using <a href="html/libxml-parser.html">xmlSetExternalEntityLoader</a> to
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]3622plug an application specific resolver).</p>
3623
Daniel Veillard8a469172003-06-12 16:05:07 +0000[diff] [blame]3624<p>Basically libxml2 support 2 catalog lists:</p>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]3625<ul>
3626 <li>the default one, global shared by all the application</li>
3627 <li>a per-document catalog, this one is built if the document uses the
3628 <code>oasis-xml-catalog</code> PIs to specify its own catalog list, it is
3629 associated to the parser context and destroyed when the parsing context
3630 is destroyed.</li>
3631</ul>
3632
3633<p>the document one will be used first if it exists.</p>
3634
3635<h4>Initialization routines:</h4>
3636
3637<p>xmlInitializeCatalog(), xmlLoadCatalog() and xmlLoadCatalogs() should be
3638used at startup to initialize the catalog, if the catalog should be
3639initialized with specific values xmlLoadCatalog() or xmlLoadCatalogs()
3640should be called before xmlInitializeCatalog() which would otherwise do a
3641default initialization first.</p>
3642
3643<p>The xmlCatalogAddLocal() call is used by the parser to grow the document
3644own catalog list if needed.</p>
3645
3646<h4>Preferences setup:</h4>
3647
3648<p>The XML Catalog spec requires the possibility to select default
3649preferences between public and system delegation,
3650xmlCatalogSetDefaultPrefer() allows this, xmlCatalogSetDefaults() and
3651xmlCatalogGetDefaults() allow to control if XML Catalogs resolution should
3652be forbidden, allowed for global catalog, for document catalog or both, the
3653default is to allow both.</p>
3654
3655<p>And of course xmlCatalogSetDebug() allows to generate debug messages
3656(through the xmlGenericError() mechanism).</p>
3657
3658<h4>Querying routines:</h4>
3659
3660<p>xmlCatalogResolve(), xmlCatalogResolveSystem(), xmlCatalogResolvePublic()
3661and xmlCatalogResolveURI() are relatively explicit if you read the XML
3662Catalog specification they correspond to section 7 algorithms, they should
3663also work if you have loaded an SGML catalog with a simplified semantic.</p>
3664
3665<p>xmlCatalogLocalResolve() and xmlCatalogLocalResolveURI() are the same but
3666operate on the document catalog list</p>
3667
3668<h4>Cleanup and Miscellaneous:</h4>
3669
3670<p>xmlCatalogCleanup() free-up the global catalog, xmlCatalogFreeLocal() is
3671the per-document equivalent.</p>
3672
3673<p>xmlCatalogAdd() and xmlCatalogRemove() are used to dynamically modify the
3674first catalog in the global list, and xmlCatalogDump() allows to dump a
3675catalog state, those routines are primarily designed for xmlcatalog, I'm not
3676sure that exposing more complex interfaces (like navigation ones) would be
3677really useful.</p>
3678
3679<p>The xmlParseCatalogFile() is a function used to load XML Catalog files,
3680it's similar as xmlParseFile() except it bypass all catalog lookups, it's
3681provided because this functionality may be useful for client tools.</p>
3682
3683<h4>threaded environments:</h4>
3684
3685<p>Since the catalog tree is built progressively, some care has been taken to
3686try to avoid troubles in multithreaded environments. The code is now thread
Daniel Veillard8a469172003-06-12 16:05:07 +0000[diff] [blame]3687safe assuming that the libxml2 library has been compiled with threads
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]3688support.</p>
3689
3690<p></p>
3691
3692<h3><a name="Other">Other resources</a></h3>
3693
3694<p>The XML Catalog specification is relatively recent so there isn't much
3695literature to point at:</p>
3696<ul>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000[diff] [blame]3697 <li>You can find a good rant from Norm Walsh about <a
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]3698 href="http://www.arbortext.com/Think_Tank/XML_Resources/Issue_Three/issue_three.html">the
3699 need for catalogs</a>, it provides a lot of context informations even if
Daniel Veillard93d3a472002-04-26 14:04:55 +0000[diff] [blame]3700 I don't agree with everything presented. Norm also wrote a more recent
3701 article <a
3702 href="http://wwws.sun.com/software/xml/developers/resolver/article/">XML
3703 entities and URI resolvers</a> describing them.</li>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]3704 <li>An <a href="http://home.ccil.org/~cowan/XML/XCatalog.html">old XML
3705 catalog proposal</a> from John Cowan</li>
3706 <li>The <a href="http://www.rddl.org/">Resource Directory Description
3707 Language</a> (RDDL) another catalog system but more oriented toward
3708 providing metadata for XML namespaces.</li>
3709 <li>the page from the OASIS Technical <a
3710 href="http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/entity/">Committee on Entity
3711 Resolution</a> who maintains XML Catalog, you will find pointers to the
3712 specification update, some background and pointers to others tools
3713 providing XML Catalog support</li>
Daniel Veillardabfca612004-01-07 23:38:02 +0000[diff] [blame]3714 <li>There is a <a href="buildDocBookCatalog">shell script</a> to generate
Daniel Veillard35e937a2002-01-19 22:21:54 +0000[diff] [blame]3715 XML Catalogs for DocBook 4.1.2 . If it can write to the /etc/xml/
3716 directory, it will set-up /etc/xml/catalog and /etc/xml/docbook based on
3717 the resources found on the system. Otherwise it will just create
3718 ~/xmlcatalog and ~/dbkxmlcatalog and doing:
Daniel Veillard8594de92003-04-25 10:08:44 +0000[diff] [blame]3719 <p><code>export XML_CATALOG_FILES=$HOME/xmlcatalog</code></p>
Daniel Veillard35e937a2002-01-19 22:21:54 +0000[diff] [blame]3720 <p>should allow to process DocBook documentations without requiring
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000[diff] [blame]3721 network accesses for the DTD or stylesheets</p>
Daniel Veillard35e937a2002-01-19 22:21:54 +0000[diff] [blame]3722 </li>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]3723 <li>I have uploaded <a href="ftp://xmlsoft.org/test/dbk412catalog.tar.gz">a
Daniel Veillard35e937a2002-01-19 22:21:54 +0000[diff] [blame]3724 small tarball</a> containing XML Catalogs for DocBook 4.1.2 which seems
3725 to work fine for me too</li>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]3726 <li>The <a href="http://www.xmlsoft.org/xmlcatalog_man.html">xmlcatalog
3727 manual page</a></li>
3728</ul>
3729
3730<p>If you have suggestions for corrections or additions, simply contact
3731me:</p>
3732
3733<h2><a name="library">The parser interfaces</a></h2>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]3734
3735<p>This section is directly intended to help programmers getting bootstrapped
Daniel Veillard8a469172003-06-12 16:05:07 +0000[diff] [blame]3736using the XML tollkit from the C language. It is not intended to be
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame]3737extensive. I hope the automatically generated documents will provide the
3738completeness required, but as a separate set of documents. The interfaces of
Daniel Veillard560c2a42003-07-06 21:13:49 +0000[diff] [blame]3739the XML parser are by principle low level, Those interested in a higher level
3740API should <a href="#DOM">look at DOM</a>.</p>
Daniel Veillardccb09631998-10-27 06:21:04 +0000[diff] [blame]3741
Daniel Veillard9cb5ff42001-01-29 08:22:21 +0000[diff] [blame]3742<p>The <a href="html/libxml-parser.html">parser interfaces for XML</a> are
3743separated from the <a href="html/libxml-htmlparser.html">HTML parser
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]3744interfaces</a>. Let's have a look at how the XML parser can be called:</p>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000[diff] [blame]3745
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]3746<h3><a name="Invoking">Invoking the parser : the pull method</a></h3>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]3747
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]3748<p>Usually, the first thing to do is to read an XML input. The parser accepts
3749documents either from in-memory strings or from files. The functions are
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]3750defined in "parser.h":</p>
Daniel Veillard10c6a8f1998-10-28 01:00:12 +0000[diff] [blame]3751<dl>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]3752 <dt><code>xmlDocPtr xmlParseMemory(char *buffer, int size);</code></dt>
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]3753 <dd><p>Parse a null-terminated string containing the document.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]3754 </dd>
Daniel Veillard10c6a8f1998-10-28 01:00:12 +0000[diff] [blame]3755</dl>
3756<dl>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]3757 <dt><code>xmlDocPtr xmlParseFile(const char *filename);</code></dt>
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +0000[diff] [blame]3758 <dd><p>Parse an XML document contained in a (possibly compressed)
3759 file.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]3760 </dd>
Daniel Veillard10c6a8f1998-10-28 01:00:12 +0000[diff] [blame]3761</dl>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]3762
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]3763<p>The parser returns a pointer to the document structure (or NULL in case of
Daniel Veillard10c6a8f1998-10-28 01:00:12 +0000[diff] [blame]3764failure).</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]3765
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]3766<h3 id="Invoking1">Invoking the parser: the push method</h3>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000[diff] [blame]3767
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame]3768<p>In order for the application to keep the control when the document is
Daniel Veillard560c2a42003-07-06 21:13:49 +0000[diff] [blame]3769being fetched (which is common for GUI based programs) libxml2 provides a
3770push interface, too, as of version 1.8.3. Here are the interface
3771functions:</p>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000[diff] [blame]3772<pre>xmlParserCtxtPtr xmlCreatePushParserCtxt(xmlSAXHandlerPtr sax,
3773 void *user_data,
3774 const char *chunk,
3775 int size,
3776 const char *filename);
3777int xmlParseChunk (xmlParserCtxtPtr ctxt,
3778 const char *chunk,
3779 int size,
3780 int terminate);</pre>
3781
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]3782<p>and here is a simple example showing how to use the interface:</p>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000[diff] [blame]3783<pre> FILE *f;
3784
3785 f = fopen(filename, "r");
3786 if (f != NULL) {
3787 int res, size = 1024;
3788 char chars[1024];
3789 xmlParserCtxtPtr ctxt;
3790
3791 res = fread(chars, 1, 4, f);
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]3792 if (res &gt; 0) {
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000[diff] [blame]3793 ctxt = xmlCreatePushParserCtxt(NULL, NULL,
3794 chars, res, filename);
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]3795 while ((res = fread(chars, 1, size, f)) &gt; 0) {
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000[diff] [blame]3796 xmlParseChunk(ctxt, chars, res, 0);
3797 }
3798 xmlParseChunk(ctxt, chars, 0, 1);
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]3799 doc = ctxt-&gt;myDoc;
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000[diff] [blame]3800 xmlFreeParserCtxt(ctxt);
3801 }
3802 }</pre>
3803
Daniel Veillard8a469172003-06-12 16:05:07 +0000[diff] [blame]3804<p>The HTML parser embedded into libxml2 also has a push interface; the
Daniel Veillardec70e912001-02-26 20:10:45 +0000[diff] [blame]3805functions are just prefixed by "html" rather than "xml".</p>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000[diff] [blame]3806
3807<h3 id="Invoking2">Invoking the parser: the SAX interface</h3>
3808
Daniel Veillardec70e912001-02-26 20:10:45 +0000[diff] [blame]3809<p>The tree-building interface makes the parser memory-hungry, first loading
3810the document in memory and then building the tree itself. Reading a document
3811without building the tree is possible using the SAX interfaces (see SAX.h and
3812<a href="http://www.daa.com.au/~james/gnome/xml-sax/xml-sax.html">James
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]3813Henstridge's documentation</a>). Note also that the push interface can be
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000[diff] [blame]3814limited to SAX: just use the two first arguments of
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000[diff] [blame]3815<code>xmlCreatePushParserCtxt()</code>.</p>
Daniel Veillardccb09631998-10-27 06:21:04 +0000[diff] [blame]3816
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000[diff] [blame]3817<h3><a name="Building">Building a tree from scratch</a></h3>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]3818
3819<p>The other way to get an XML tree in memory is by building it. Basically
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +0000[diff] [blame]3820there is a set of functions dedicated to building new elements. (These are
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame]3821also described in &lt;libxml/tree.h&gt;.) For example, here is a piece of
3822code that produces the XML document used in the previous examples:</p>
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]3823<pre> #include &lt;libxml/tree.h&gt;
Daniel Veillard361d8452000-04-03 19:48:13 +0000[diff] [blame]3824 xmlDocPtr doc;
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +0000[diff] [blame]3825 xmlNodePtr tree, subtree;
3826
3827 doc = xmlNewDoc("1.0");
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]3828 doc-&gt;children = xmlNewDocNode(doc, NULL, "EXAMPLE", NULL);
3829 xmlSetProp(doc-&gt;children, "prop1", "gnome is great");
3830 xmlSetProp(doc-&gt;children, "prop2", "&amp; linux too");
3831 tree = xmlNewChild(doc-&gt;children, NULL, "head", NULL);
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +0000[diff] [blame]3832 subtree = xmlNewChild(tree, NULL, "title", "Welcome to Gnome");
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]3833 tree = xmlNewChild(doc-&gt;children, NULL, "chapter", NULL);
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +0000[diff] [blame]3834 subtree = xmlNewChild(tree, NULL, "title", "The Linux adventure");
3835 subtree = xmlNewChild(tree, NULL, "p", "bla bla bla ...");
3836 subtree = xmlNewChild(tree, NULL, "image", NULL);
3837 xmlSetProp(subtree, "href", "linus.gif");</pre>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]3838
3839<p>Not really rocket science ...</p>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +0000[diff] [blame]3840
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000[diff] [blame]3841<h3><a name="Traversing">Traversing the tree</a></h3>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]3842
Daniel Veillard9cb5ff42001-01-29 08:22:21 +0000[diff] [blame]3843<p>Basically by <a href="html/libxml-tree.html">including "tree.h"</a> your
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame]3844code has access to the internal structure of all the elements of the tree.
3845The names should be somewhat simple like <strong>parent</strong>,
Daniel Veillard306be992000-07-03 12:38:45 +0000[diff] [blame]3846<strong>children</strong>, <strong>next</strong>, <strong>prev</strong>,
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]3847<strong>properties</strong>, etc... For example, still with the previous
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000[diff] [blame]3848example:</p>
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]3849<pre><code>doc-&gt;children-&gt;children-&gt;children</code></pre>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]3850
3851<p>points to the title element,</p>
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000[diff] [blame]3852<pre>doc-&gt;children-&gt;children-&gt;next-&gt;children-&gt;children</pre>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]3853
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +0000[diff] [blame]3854<p>points to the text node containing the chapter title "The Linux
3855adventure".</p>
Daniel Veillard10c6a8f1998-10-28 01:00:12 +0000[diff] [blame]3856
Daniel Veillardb24054a1999-12-18 15:32:46 +0000[diff] [blame]3857<p><strong>NOTE</strong>: XML allows <em>PI</em>s and <em>comments</em> to be
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]3858present before the document root, so <code>doc-&gt;children</code> may point
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000[diff] [blame]3859to an element which is not the document Root Element; a function
Daniel Veillard5cb5ab81999-12-21 15:35:29 +0000[diff] [blame]3860<code>xmlDocGetRootElement()</code> was added for this purpose.</p>
Daniel Veillardb24054a1999-12-18 15:32:46 +0000[diff] [blame]3861
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000[diff] [blame]3862<h3><a name="Modifying">Modifying the tree</a></h3>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]3863
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]3864<p>Functions are provided for reading and writing the document content. Here
Daniel Veillard9cb5ff42001-01-29 08:22:21 +0000[diff] [blame]3865is an excerpt from the <a href="html/libxml-tree.html">tree API</a>:</p>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +0000[diff] [blame]3866<dl>
Daniel Veillarddd6b3671999-09-23 22:19:22 +0000[diff] [blame]3867 <dt><code>xmlAttrPtr xmlSetProp(xmlNodePtr node, const xmlChar *name, const
3868 xmlChar *value);</code></dt>
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame]3869 <dd><p>This sets (or changes) an attribute carried by an ELEMENT node.
3870 The value can be NULL.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]3871 </dd>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +0000[diff] [blame]3872</dl>
3873<dl>
Daniel Veillarddd6b3671999-09-23 22:19:22 +0000[diff] [blame]3874 <dt><code>const xmlChar *xmlGetProp(xmlNodePtr node, const xmlChar
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]3875 *name);</code></dt>
Daniel Veillardc92c3042000-09-29 02:42:04 +0000[diff] [blame]3876 <dd><p>This function returns a pointer to new copy of the property
3877 content. Note that the user must deallocate the result.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]3878 </dd>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +0000[diff] [blame]3879</dl>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]3880
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame]3881<p>Two functions are provided for reading and writing the text associated
3882with elements:</p>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +0000[diff] [blame]3883<dl>
Daniel Veillarddd6b3671999-09-23 22:19:22 +0000[diff] [blame]3884 <dt><code>xmlNodePtr xmlStringGetNodeList(xmlDocPtr doc, const xmlChar
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]3885 *value);</code></dt>
Daniel Veillardec70e912001-02-26 20:10:45 +0000[diff] [blame]3886 <dd><p>This function takes an "external" string and converts it to one
3887 text node or possibly to a list of entity and text nodes. All
3888 non-predefined entity references like &amp;Gnome; will be stored
3889 internally as entity nodes, hence the result of the function may not be
3890 a single node.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]3891 </dd>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +0000[diff] [blame]3892</dl>
3893<dl>
Daniel Veillarddd6b3671999-09-23 22:19:22 +0000[diff] [blame]3894 <dt><code>xmlChar *xmlNodeListGetString(xmlDocPtr doc, xmlNodePtr list, int
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]3895 inLine);</code></dt>
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +0000[diff] [blame]3896 <dd><p>This function is the inverse of
3897 <code>xmlStringGetNodeList()</code>. It generates a new string
3898 containing the content of the text and entity nodes. Note the extra
3899 argument inLine. If this argument is set to 1, the function will expand
3900 entity references. For example, instead of returning the &amp;Gnome;
3901 XML encoding in the string, it will substitute it with its value (say,
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000[diff] [blame]3902 "GNU Network Object Model Environment").</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]3903 </dd>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +0000[diff] [blame]3904</dl>
Daniel Veillard10c6a8f1998-10-28 01:00:12 +0000[diff] [blame]3905
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000[diff] [blame]3906<h3><a name="Saving">Saving a tree</a></h3>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]3907
3908<p>Basically 3 options are possible:</p>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +0000[diff] [blame]3909<dl>
Daniel Veillarddd6b3671999-09-23 22:19:22 +0000[diff] [blame]3910 <dt><code>void xmlDocDumpMemory(xmlDocPtr cur, xmlChar**mem, int
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]3911 *size);</code></dt>
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]3912 <dd><p>Returns a buffer into which the document has been saved.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]3913 </dd>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +0000[diff] [blame]3914</dl>
3915<dl>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]3916 <dt><code>extern void xmlDocDump(FILE *f, xmlDocPtr doc);</code></dt>
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]3917 <dd><p>Dumps a document to an open file descriptor.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]3918 </dd>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +0000[diff] [blame]3919</dl>
3920<dl>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]3921 <dt><code>int xmlSaveFile(const char *filename, xmlDocPtr cur);</code></dt>
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +0000[diff] [blame]3922 <dd><p>Saves the document to a file. In this case, the compression
3923 interface is triggered if it has been turned on.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]3924 </dd>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +0000[diff] [blame]3925</dl>
Daniel Veillard10c6a8f1998-10-28 01:00:12 +0000[diff] [blame]3926
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000[diff] [blame]3927<h3><a name="Compressio">Compression</a></h3>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]3928
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]3929<p>The library transparently handles compression when doing file-based
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +0000[diff] [blame]3930accesses. The level of compression on saves can be turned on either globally
3931or individually for one file:</p>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +0000[diff] [blame]3932<dl>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]3933 <dt><code>int xmlGetDocCompressMode (xmlDocPtr doc);</code></dt>
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]3934 <dd><p>Gets the document compression ratio (0-9).</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]3935 </dd>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +0000[diff] [blame]3936</dl>
3937<dl>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]3938 <dt><code>void xmlSetDocCompressMode (xmlDocPtr doc, int mode);</code></dt>
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]3939 <dd><p>Sets the document compression ratio.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]3940 </dd>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +0000[diff] [blame]3941</dl>
3942<dl>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]3943 <dt><code>int xmlGetCompressMode(void);</code></dt>
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]3944 <dd><p>Gets the default compression ratio.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]3945 </dd>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +0000[diff] [blame]3946</dl>
3947<dl>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]3948 <dt><code>void xmlSetCompressMode(int mode);</code></dt>
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]3949 <dd><p>Sets the default compression ratio.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]3950 </dd>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +0000[diff] [blame]3951</dl>
3952
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000[diff] [blame]3953<h2><a name="Entities">Entities or no entities</a></h2>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]3954
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]3955<p>Entities in principle are similar to simple C macros. An entity defines an
3956abbreviation for a given string that you can reuse many times throughout the
3957content of your document. Entities are especially useful when a given string
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +0000[diff] [blame]3958may occur frequently within a document, or to confine the change needed to a
3959document to a restricted area in the internal subset of the document (at the
3960beginning). Example:</p>
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]3961<pre>1 &lt;?xml version="1.0"?&gt;
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]39622 &lt;!DOCTYPE EXAMPLE SYSTEM "example.dtd" [
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]39633 &lt;!ENTITY xml "Extensible Markup Language"&gt;
39644 ]&gt;
39655 &lt;EXAMPLE&gt;
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]39666 &amp;xml;
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]39677 &lt;/EXAMPLE&gt;</pre>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]3968
3969<p>Line 3 declares the xml entity. Line 6 uses the xml entity, by prefixing
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000[diff] [blame]3970its name with '&amp;' and following it by ';' without any spaces added. There
Daniel Veillard8a469172003-06-12 16:05:07 +0000[diff] [blame]3971are 5 predefined entities in libxml2 allowing you to escape characters with
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]3972predefined meaning in some parts of the xml document content:
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]3973<strong>&amp;lt;</strong> for the character '&lt;', <strong>&amp;gt;</strong>
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]3974for the character '&gt;', <strong>&amp;apos;</strong> for the character ''',
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]3975<strong>&amp;quot;</strong> for the character '"', and
3976<strong>&amp;amp;</strong> for the character '&amp;'.</p>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]3977
3978<p>One of the problems related to entities is that you may want the parser to
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +0000[diff] [blame]3979substitute an entity's content so that you can see the replacement text in
3980your application. Or you may prefer to keep entity references as such in the
3981content to be able to save the document back without losing this usually
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame]3982precious information (if the user went through the pain of explicitly
3983defining entities, he may have a a rather negative attitude if you blindly
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000[diff] [blame]3984substitute them as saving time). The <a
Daniel Veillard5373ea12003-07-24 13:09:13 +0000[diff] [blame]3985href="html/libxml-parser.html#xmlSubstituteEntitiesDefault">xmlSubstituteEntitiesDefault()</a>
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]3986function allows you to check and change the behaviour, which is to not
3987substitute entities by default.</p>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]3988
Daniel Veillard8a469172003-06-12 16:05:07 +0000[diff] [blame]3989<p>Here is the DOM tree built by libxml2 for the previous document in the
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]3990default case:</p>
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]3991<pre>/gnome/src/gnome-xml -&gt; ./xmllint --debug test/ent1
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]3992DOCUMENT
3993version=1.0
3994 ELEMENT EXAMPLE
3995 TEXT
3996 content=
3997 ENTITY_REF
3998 INTERNAL_GENERAL_ENTITY xml
3999 content=Extensible Markup Language
4000 TEXT
4001 content=</pre>
4002
4003<p>And here is the result when substituting entities:</p>
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]4004<pre>/gnome/src/gnome-xml -&gt; ./tester --debug --noent test/ent1
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]4005DOCUMENT
4006version=1.0
4007 ELEMENT EXAMPLE
4008 TEXT
4009 content= Extensible Markup Language</pre>
4010
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]4011<p>So, entities or no entities? Basically, it depends on your use case. I
4012suggest that you keep the non-substituting default behaviour and avoid using
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]4013entities in your XML document or data if you are not willing to handle the
4014entity references elements in the DOM tree.</p>
4015
Daniel Veillard8a469172003-06-12 16:05:07 +0000[diff] [blame]4016<p>Note that at save time libxml2 enforces the conversion of the predefined
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]4017entities where necessary to prevent well-formedness problems, and will also
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000[diff] [blame]4018transparently replace those with chars (i.e. it will not generate entity
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]4019reference elements in the DOM tree or call the reference() SAX callback when
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]4020finding them in the input).</p>
4021
Daniel Veillard7b9c4b72000-08-25 16:26:50 +0000[diff] [blame]4022<p><span style="background-color: #FF0000">WARNING</span>: handling entities
Daniel Veillard8a469172003-06-12 16:05:07 +0000[diff] [blame]4023on top of the libxml2 SAX interface is difficult!!! If you plan to use
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000[diff] [blame]4024non-predefined entities in your documents, then the learning curve to handle
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000[diff] [blame]4025then using the SAX API may be long. If you plan to use complex documents, I
Daniel Veillard7b9c4b72000-08-25 16:26:50 +0000[diff] [blame]4026strongly suggest you consider using the DOM interface instead and let libxml
Daniel Veillard8c6d6af2000-08-25 17:14:13 +0000[diff] [blame]4027deal with the complexity rather than trying to do it yourself.</p>
Daniel Veillard7b9c4b72000-08-25 16:26:50 +0000[diff] [blame]4028
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000[diff] [blame]4029<h2><a name="Namespaces">Namespaces</a></h2>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]4030
Daniel Veillard8a469172003-06-12 16:05:07 +0000[diff] [blame]4031<p>The libxml2 library implements <a
Daniel Veillardec303412000-03-24 13:41:54 +0000[diff] [blame]4032href="http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml-names/">XML namespaces</a> support by
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000[diff] [blame]4033recognizing namespace constructs in the input, and does namespace lookup
Daniel Veillardec303412000-03-24 13:41:54 +0000[diff] [blame]4034automatically when building the DOM tree. A namespace declaration is
4035associated with an in-memory structure and all elements or attributes within
4036that namespace point to it. Hence testing the namespace is a simple and fast
4037equality operation at the user level.</p>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]4038
Daniel Veillard8a469172003-06-12 16:05:07 +0000[diff] [blame]4039<p>I suggest that people using libxml2 use a namespace, and declare it in the
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +0000[diff] [blame]4040root element of their document as the default namespace. Then they don't need
4041to use the prefix in the content but we will have a basis for future semantic
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000[diff] [blame]4042refinement and merging of data from different sources. This doesn't increase
Daniel Veillardec70e912001-02-26 20:10:45 +0000[diff] [blame]4043the size of the XML output significantly, but significantly increases its
4044value in the long-term. Example:</p>
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]4045<pre>&lt;mydoc xmlns="http://mydoc.example.org/schemas/"&gt;
4046 &lt;elem1&gt;...&lt;/elem1&gt;
4047 &lt;elem2&gt;...&lt;/elem2&gt;
4048&lt;/mydoc&gt;</pre>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]4049
Daniel Veillardec70e912001-02-26 20:10:45 +0000[diff] [blame]4050<p>The namespace value has to be an absolute URL, but the URL doesn't have to
4051point to any existing resource on the Web. It will bind all the element and
Daniel Veillardc0801af2002-05-28 16:28:42 +0000[diff] [blame]4052attributes with that URL. I suggest to use an URL within a domain you
4053control, and that the URL should contain some kind of version information if
4054possible. For example, <code>"http://www.gnome.org/gnumeric/1.0/"</code> is a
4055good namespace scheme.</p>
Daniel Veillardec303412000-03-24 13:41:54 +0000[diff] [blame]4056
4057<p>Then when you load a file, make sure that a namespace carrying the
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]4058version-independent prefix is installed on the root element of your document,
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]4059and if the version information don't match something you know, warn the user
4060and be liberal in what you accept as the input. Also do *not* try to base
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]4061namespace checking on the prefix value. &lt;foo:text&gt; may be exactly the
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000[diff] [blame]4062same as &lt;bar:text&gt; in another document. What really matters is the URI
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]4063associated with the element or the attribute, not the prefix string (which is
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000[diff] [blame]4064just a shortcut for the full URI). In libxml, element and attributes have an
Daniel Veillardec303412000-03-24 13:41:54 +0000[diff] [blame]4065<code>ns</code> field pointing to an xmlNs structure detailing the namespace
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000[diff] [blame]4066prefix and its URI.</p>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]4067
4068<p>@@Interfaces@@</p>
Daniel Veillard3e35f8e2003-10-21 00:05:38 +0000[diff] [blame]4069<pre>xmlNodePtr node;
Daniel Veillardfc8dc352003-10-18 09:07:46 +0000[diff] [blame]4070if(!strncmp(node-&gt;name,"mytag",5)
4071 &amp;&amp; node-&gt;ns
4072 &amp;&amp; !strcmp(node-&gt;ns-&gt;href,"http://www.mysite.com/myns/1.0")) {
4073 ...
Daniel Veillard3e35f8e2003-10-21 00:05:38 +0000[diff] [blame]4074}</pre>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]4075
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000[diff] [blame]4076<p>Usually people object to using namespaces together with validity checking.
4077I will try to make sure that using namespaces won't break validity checking,
4078so even if you plan to use or currently are using validation I strongly
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +0000[diff] [blame]4079suggest adding namespaces to your document. A default namespace scheme
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]4080<code>xmlns="http://...."</code> should not break validity even on less
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000[diff] [blame]4081flexible parsers. Using namespaces to mix and differentiate content coming
Daniel Veillard3e35f8e2003-10-21 00:05:38 +0000[diff] [blame]4082from multiple DTDs will certainly break current validation schemes. To check
4083such documents one needs to use schema-validation, which is supported in
4084libxml2 as well. See <a href="http://www.relaxng.org/">relagx-ng</a> and <a
4085href="http://www.w3c.org/XML/Schema">w3c-schema</a>.</p>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]4086
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]4087<h2><a name="Upgrading">Upgrading 1.x code</a></h2>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]4088
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]4089<p>Incompatible changes:</p>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]4090
Daniel Veillard8a469172003-06-12 16:05:07 +0000[diff] [blame]4091<p>Version 2 of libxml2 is the first version introducing serious backward
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]4092incompatible changes. The main goals were:</p>
4093<ul>
4094 <li>a general cleanup. A number of mistakes inherited from the very early
4095 versions couldn't be changed due to compatibility constraints. Example
4096 the "childs" element in the nodes.</li>
4097 <li>Uniformization of the various nodes, at least for their header and link
4098 parts (doc, parent, children, prev, next), the goal is a simpler
4099 programming model and simplifying the task of the DOM implementors.</li>
4100 <li>better conformances to the XML specification, for example version 1.x
4101 had an heuristic to try to detect ignorable white spaces. As a result the
4102 SAX event generated were ignorableWhitespace() while the spec requires
4103 character() in that case. This also mean that a number of DOM node
4104 containing blank text may populate the DOM tree which were not present
4105 before.</li>
4106</ul>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]4107
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]4108<h3>How to fix libxml-1.x code:</h3>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]4109
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]4110<p>So client code of libxml designed to run with version 1.x may have to be
4111changed to compile against version 2.x of libxml. Here is a list of changes
4112that I have collected, they may not be sufficient, so in case you find other
Daniel Veillardfc8dc352003-10-18 09:07:46 +0000[diff] [blame]4113change which are required, <a href="mailto:Daniel.Veillard@w3.org">drop me a
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]4114mail</a>:</p>
4115<ol>
4116 <li>The package name have changed from libxml to libxml2, the library name
4117 is now -lxml2 . There is a new xml2-config script which should be used to
4118 select the right parameters libxml2</li>
4119 <li>Node <strong>childs</strong> field has been renamed
4120 <strong>children</strong> so s/childs/children/g should be applied
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000[diff] [blame]4121 (probability of having "childs" anywhere else is close to 0+</li>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]4122 <li>The document don't have anymore a <strong>root</strong> element it has
4123 been replaced by <strong>children</strong> and usually you will get a
4124 list of element here. For example a Dtd element for the internal subset
4125 and it's declaration may be found in that list, as well as processing
4126 instructions or comments found before or after the document root element.
4127 Use <strong>xmlDocGetRootElement(doc)</strong> to get the root element of
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000[diff] [blame]4128 a document. Alternatively if you are sure to not reference DTDs nor have
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]4129 PIs or comments before or after the root element
4130 s/-&gt;root/-&gt;children/g will probably do it.</li>
4131 <li>The white space issue, this one is more complex, unless special case of
4132 validating parsing, the line breaks and spaces usually used for indenting
4133 and formatting the document content becomes significant. So they are
4134 reported by SAX and if your using the DOM tree, corresponding nodes are
4135 generated. Too approach can be taken:
4136 <ol>
4137 <li>lazy one, use the compatibility call
4138 <strong>xmlKeepBlanksDefault(0)</strong> but be aware that you are
4139 relying on a special (and possibly broken) set of heuristics of
4140 libxml to detect ignorable blanks. Don't complain if it breaks or
4141 make your application not 100% clean w.r.t. to it's input.</li>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000[diff] [blame]4142 <li>the Right Way: change you code to accept possibly insignificant
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]4143 blanks characters, or have your tree populated with weird blank text
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000[diff] [blame]4144 nodes. You can spot them using the commodity function
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]4145 <strong>xmlIsBlankNode(node)</strong> returning 1 for such blank
4146 nodes.</li>
4147 </ol>
4148 <p>Note also that with the new default the output functions don't add any
4149 extra indentation when saving a tree in order to be able to round trip
4150 (read and save) without inflating the document with extra formatting
4151 chars.</p>
4152 </li>
4153 <li>The include path has changed to $prefix/libxml/ and the includes
4154 themselves uses this new prefix in includes instructions... If you are
4155 using (as expected) the
4156 <pre>xml2-config --cflags</pre>
4157 <p>output to generate you compile commands this will probably work out of
4158 the box</p>
4159 </li>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000[diff] [blame]4160 <li>xmlDetectCharEncoding takes an extra argument indicating the length in
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]4161 byte of the head of the document available for character detection.</li>
4162</ol>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]4163
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]4164<h3>Ensuring both libxml-1.x and libxml-2.x compatibility</h3>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]4165
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]4166<p>Two new version of libxml (1.8.11) and libxml2 (2.3.4) have been released
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000[diff] [blame]4167to allow smooth upgrade of existing libxml v1code while retaining
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]4168compatibility. They offers the following:</p>
4169<ol>
4170 <li>similar include naming, one should use
4171 <strong>#include&lt;libxml/...&gt;</strong> in both cases.</li>
4172 <li>similar identifiers defined via macros for the child and root fields:
4173 respectively <strong>xmlChildrenNode</strong> and
4174 <strong>xmlRootNode</strong></li>
4175 <li>a new macro <strong>LIBXML_TEST_VERSION</strong> which should be
4176 inserted once in the client code</li>
4177</ol>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]4178
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]4179<p>So the roadmap to upgrade your existing libxml applications is the
4180following:</p>
4181<ol>
4182 <li>install the libxml-1.8.8 (and libxml-devel-1.8.8) packages</li>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000[diff] [blame]4183 <li>find all occurrences where the xmlDoc <strong>root</strong> field is
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]4184 used and change it to <strong>xmlRootNode</strong></li>
Daniel Veillardc0801af2002-05-28 16:28:42 +0000[diff] [blame]4185 <li>similarly find all occurrences where the xmlNode
4186 <strong>childs</strong> field is used and change it to
4187 <strong>xmlChildrenNode</strong></li>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]4188 <li>add a <strong>LIBXML_TEST_VERSION</strong> macro somewhere in your
4189 <strong>main()</strong> or in the library init entry point</li>
4190 <li>Recompile, check compatibility, it should still work</li>
Daniel Veillardc0801af2002-05-28 16:28:42 +0000[diff] [blame]4191 <li>Change your configure script to look first for xml2-config and fall
4192 back using xml-config . Use the --cflags and --libs output of the command
4193 as the Include and Linking parameters needed to use libxml.</li>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]4194 <li>install libxml2-2.3.x and libxml2-devel-2.3.x (libxml-1.8.y and
4195 libxml-devel-1.8.y can be kept simultaneously)</li>
4196 <li>remove your config.cache, relaunch your configuration mechanism, and
4197 recompile, if steps 2 and 3 were done right it should compile as-is</li>
4198 <li>Test that your application is still running correctly, if not this may
4199 be due to extra empty nodes due to formating spaces being kept in libxml2
4200 contrary to libxml1, in that case insert xmlKeepBlanksDefault(1) in your
4201 code before calling the parser (next to
4202 <strong>LIBXML_TEST_VERSION</strong> is a fine place).</li>
4203</ol>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]4204
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]4205<p>Following those steps should work. It worked for some of my own code.</p>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]4206
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]4207<p>Let me put some emphasis on the fact that there is far more changes from
4208libxml 1.x to 2.x than the ones you may have to patch for. The overall code
4209has been considerably cleaned up and the conformance to the XML specification
4210has been drastically improved too. Don't take those changes as an excuse to
4211not upgrade, it may cost a lot on the long term ...</p>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]4212
Daniel Veillard52dcab32001-10-30 12:51:17 +0000[diff] [blame]4213<h2><a name="Thread">Thread safety</a></h2>
4214
Daniel Veillard8a469172003-06-12 16:05:07 +0000[diff] [blame]4215<p>Starting with 2.4.7, libxml2 makes provisions to ensure that concurrent
Daniel Veillard52dcab32001-10-30 12:51:17 +0000[diff] [blame]4216threads can safely work in parallel parsing different documents. There is
4217however a couple of things to do to ensure it:</p>
4218<ul>
4219 <li>configure the library accordingly using the --with-threads options</li>
4220 <li>call xmlInitParser() in the "main" thread before using any of the
Daniel Veillard8a469172003-06-12 16:05:07 +0000[diff] [blame]4221 libxml2 API (except possibly selecting a different memory allocator)</li>
Daniel Veillard52dcab32001-10-30 12:51:17 +0000[diff] [blame]4222</ul>
4223
4224<p>Note that the thread safety cannot be ensured for multiple threads sharing
4225the same document, the locking must be done at the application level, libxml
4226exports a basic mutex and reentrant mutexes API in &lt;libxml/threads.h&gt;.
4227The parts of the library checked for thread safety are:</p>
4228<ul>
4229 <li>concurrent loading</li>
4230 <li>file access resolution</li>
4231 <li>catalog access</li>
4232 <li>catalog building</li>
4233 <li>entities lookup/accesses</li>
4234 <li>validation</li>
4235 <li>global variables per-thread override</li>
4236 <li>memory handling</li>
4237</ul>
4238
4239<p>XPath is supposed to be thread safe now, but this wasn't tested
4240seriously.</p>
4241
Daniel Veillard35008381999-10-25 13:15:52 +0000[diff] [blame]4242<h2><a name="DOM"></a><a name="Principles">DOM Principles</a></h2>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]4243
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame]4244<p><a href="http://www.w3.org/DOM/">DOM</a> stands for the <em>Document
4245Object Model</em>; this is an API for accessing XML or HTML structured
4246documents. Native support for DOM in Gnome is on the way (module gnome-dom),
4247and will be based on gnome-xml. This will be a far cleaner interface to
4248manipulate XML files within Gnome since it won't expose the internal
4249structure.</p>
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +0000[diff] [blame]4250
Daniel Veillard8a469172003-06-12 16:05:07 +0000[diff] [blame]4251<p>The current DOM implementation on top of libxml2 is the <a
Daniel Veillarda47fb3d2001-03-25 17:23:49 +0000[diff] [blame]4252href="http://cvs.gnome.org/lxr/source/gdome2/">gdome2 Gnome module</a>, this
4253is a full DOM interface, thanks to Paolo Casarini, check the <a
4254href="http://www.cs.unibo.it/~casarini/gdome2/">Gdome2 homepage</a> for more
4255informations.</p>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]4256
Daniel Veillard35008381999-10-25 13:15:52 +0000[diff] [blame]4257<h2><a name="Example"></a><a name="real">A real example</a></h2>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]4258
4259<p>Here is a real size example, where the actual content of the application
4260data is not kept in the DOM tree but uses internal structures. It is based on
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +0000[diff] [blame]4261a proposal to keep a database of jobs related to Gnome, with an XML based
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]4262storage structure. Here is an <a href="gjobs.xml">XML encoded jobs
4263base</a>:</p>
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]4264<pre>&lt;?xml version="1.0"?&gt;
4265&lt;gjob:Helping xmlns:gjob="http://www.gnome.org/some-location"&gt;
4266 &lt;gjob:Jobs&gt;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +0000[diff] [blame]4267
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]4268 &lt;gjob:Job&gt;
4269 &lt;gjob:Project ID="3"/&gt;
4270 &lt;gjob:Application&gt;GBackup&lt;/gjob:Application&gt;
4271 &lt;gjob:Category&gt;Development&lt;/gjob:Category&gt;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +0000[diff] [blame]4272
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]4273 &lt;gjob:Update&gt;
4274 &lt;gjob:Status&gt;Open&lt;/gjob:Status&gt;
4275 &lt;gjob:Modified&gt;Mon, 07 Jun 1999 20:27:45 -0400 MET DST&lt;/gjob:Modified&gt;
4276 &lt;gjob:Salary&gt;USD 0.00&lt;/gjob:Salary&gt;
4277 &lt;/gjob:Update&gt;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +0000[diff] [blame]4278
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]4279 &lt;gjob:Developers&gt;
4280 &lt;gjob:Developer&gt;
4281 &lt;/gjob:Developer&gt;
4282 &lt;/gjob:Developers&gt;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +0000[diff] [blame]4283
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]4284 &lt;gjob:Contact&gt;
4285 &lt;gjob:Person&gt;Nathan Clemons&lt;/gjob:Person&gt;
4286 &lt;gjob:Email&gt;nathan@windsofstorm.net&lt;/gjob:Email&gt;
4287 &lt;gjob:Company&gt;
4288 &lt;/gjob:Company&gt;
4289 &lt;gjob:Organisation&gt;
4290 &lt;/gjob:Organisation&gt;
4291 &lt;gjob:Webpage&gt;
4292 &lt;/gjob:Webpage&gt;
4293 &lt;gjob:Snailmail&gt;
4294 &lt;/gjob:Snailmail&gt;
4295 &lt;gjob:Phone&gt;
4296 &lt;/gjob:Phone&gt;
4297 &lt;/gjob:Contact&gt;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +0000[diff] [blame]4298
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]4299 &lt;gjob:Requirements&gt;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +0000[diff] [blame]4300 The program should be released as free software, under the GPL.
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]4301 &lt;/gjob:Requirements&gt;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +0000[diff] [blame]4302
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]4303 &lt;gjob:Skills&gt;
4304 &lt;/gjob:Skills&gt;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +0000[diff] [blame]4305
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]4306 &lt;gjob:Details&gt;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +0000[diff] [blame]4307 A GNOME based system that will allow a superuser to configure
4308 compressed and uncompressed files and/or file systems to be backed
4309 up with a supported media in the system. This should be able to
4310 perform via find commands generating a list of files that are passed
4311 to tar, dd, cpio, cp, gzip, etc., to be directed to the tape machine
4312 or via operations performed on the filesystem itself. Email
4313 notification and GUI status display very important.
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]4314 &lt;/gjob:Details&gt;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +0000[diff] [blame]4315
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]4316 &lt;/gjob:Job&gt;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +0000[diff] [blame]4317
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]4318 &lt;/gjob:Jobs&gt;
4319&lt;/gjob:Helping&gt;</pre>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]4320
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame]4321<p>While loading the XML file into an internal DOM tree is a matter of
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000[diff] [blame]4322calling only a couple of functions, browsing the tree to gather the data and
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame]4323generate the internal structures is harder, and more error prone.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]4324
4325<p>The suggested principle is to be tolerant with respect to the input
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame]4326structure. For example, the ordering of the attributes is not significant,
4327the XML specification is clear about it. It's also usually a good idea not to
Daniel Veillardec70e912001-02-26 20:10:45 +0000[diff] [blame]4328depend on the order of the children of a given node, unless it really makes
4329things harder. Here is some code to parse the information for a person:</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]4330<pre>/*
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +0000[diff] [blame]4331 * A person record
4332 */
4333typedef struct person {
4334 char *name;
4335 char *email;
4336 char *company;
4337 char *organisation;
4338 char *smail;
4339 char *webPage;
4340 char *phone;
4341} person, *personPtr;
4342
4343/*
4344 * And the code needed to parse it
4345 */
4346personPtr parsePerson(xmlDocPtr doc, xmlNsPtr ns, xmlNodePtr cur) {
4347 personPtr ret = NULL;
4348
4349DEBUG("parsePerson\n");
4350 /*
4351 * allocate the struct
4352 */
4353 ret = (personPtr) malloc(sizeof(person));
4354 if (ret == NULL) {
4355 fprintf(stderr,"out of memory\n");
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]4356 return(NULL);
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +0000[diff] [blame]4357 }
4358 memset(ret, 0, sizeof(person));
4359
4360 /* We don't care what the top level element name is */
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]4361 cur = cur-&gt;xmlChildrenNode;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +0000[diff] [blame]4362 while (cur != NULL) {
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]4363 if ((!strcmp(cur-&gt;name, "Person")) &amp;&amp; (cur-&gt;ns == ns))
4364 ret-&gt;name = xmlNodeListGetString(doc, cur-&gt;xmlChildrenNode, 1);
4365 if ((!strcmp(cur-&gt;name, "Email")) &amp;&amp; (cur-&gt;ns == ns))
4366 ret-&gt;email = xmlNodeListGetString(doc, cur-&gt;xmlChildrenNode, 1);
4367 cur = cur-&gt;next;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +0000[diff] [blame]4368 }
4369
4370 return(ret);
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]4371}</pre>
4372
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000[diff] [blame]4373<p>Here are a couple of things to notice:</p>
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +0000[diff] [blame]4374<ul>
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000[diff] [blame]4375 <li>Usually a recursive parsing style is the more convenient one: XML data
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000[diff] [blame]4376 is by nature subject to repetitive constructs and usually exhibits highly
4377 structured patterns.</li>
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame]4378 <li>The two arguments of type <em>xmlDocPtr</em> and <em>xmlNsPtr</em>,
4379 i.e. the pointer to the global XML document and the namespace reserved to
4380 the application. Document wide information are needed for example to
4381 decode entities and it's a good coding practice to define a namespace for
4382 your application set of data and test that the element and attributes
4383 you're analyzing actually pertains to your application space. This is
4384 done by a simple equality test (cur-&gt;ns == ns).</li>
Daniel Veillardec70e912001-02-26 20:10:45 +0000[diff] [blame]4385 <li>To retrieve text and attributes value, you can use the function
4386 <em>xmlNodeListGetString</em> to gather all the text and entity reference
4387 nodes generated by the DOM output and produce an single text string.</li>
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +0000[diff] [blame]4388</ul>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]4389
4390<p>Here is another piece of code used to parse another level of the
4391structure:</p>
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]4392<pre>#include &lt;libxml/tree.h&gt;
Daniel Veillard361d8452000-04-03 19:48:13 +0000[diff] [blame]4393/*
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +0000[diff] [blame]4394 * a Description for a Job
4395 */
4396typedef struct job {
4397 char *projectID;
4398 char *application;
4399 char *category;
4400 personPtr contact;
4401 int nbDevelopers;
4402 personPtr developers[100]; /* using dynamic alloc is left as an exercise */
4403} job, *jobPtr;
4404
4405/*
4406 * And the code needed to parse it
4407 */
4408jobPtr parseJob(xmlDocPtr doc, xmlNsPtr ns, xmlNodePtr cur) {
4409 jobPtr ret = NULL;
4410
4411DEBUG("parseJob\n");
4412 /*
4413 * allocate the struct
4414 */
4415 ret = (jobPtr) malloc(sizeof(job));
4416 if (ret == NULL) {
4417 fprintf(stderr,"out of memory\n");
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]4418 return(NULL);
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +0000[diff] [blame]4419 }
4420 memset(ret, 0, sizeof(job));
4421
4422 /* We don't care what the top level element name is */
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]4423 cur = cur-&gt;xmlChildrenNode;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +0000[diff] [blame]4424 while (cur != NULL) {
4425
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]4426 if ((!strcmp(cur-&gt;name, "Project")) &amp;&amp; (cur-&gt;ns == ns)) {
4427 ret-&gt;projectID = xmlGetProp(cur, "ID");
4428 if (ret-&gt;projectID == NULL) {
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]4429 fprintf(stderr, "Project has no ID\n");
4430 }
4431 }
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]4432 if ((!strcmp(cur-&gt;name, "Application")) &amp;&amp; (cur-&gt;ns == ns))
4433 ret-&gt;application = xmlNodeListGetString(doc, cur-&gt;xmlChildrenNode, 1);
4434 if ((!strcmp(cur-&gt;name, "Category")) &amp;&amp; (cur-&gt;ns == ns))
4435 ret-&gt;category = xmlNodeListGetString(doc, cur-&gt;xmlChildrenNode, 1);
4436 if ((!strcmp(cur-&gt;name, "Contact")) &amp;&amp; (cur-&gt;ns == ns))
4437 ret-&gt;contact = parsePerson(doc, ns, cur);
4438 cur = cur-&gt;next;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +0000[diff] [blame]4439 }
4440
4441 return(ret);
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]4442}</pre>
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +0000[diff] [blame]4443
Daniel Veillardec70e912001-02-26 20:10:45 +0000[diff] [blame]4444<p>Once you are used to it, writing this kind of code is quite simple, but
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000[diff] [blame]4445boring. Ultimately, it could be possible to write stubbers taking either C
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame]4446data structure definitions, a set of XML examples or an XML DTD and produce
4447the code needed to import and export the content between C data and XML
4448storage. This is left as an exercise to the reader :-)</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]4449
Daniel Veillard6f0adb52000-07-03 11:41:26 +0000[diff] [blame]4450<p>Feel free to use <a href="example/gjobread.c">the code for the full C
4451parsing example</a> as a template, it is also available with Makefile in the
4452Gnome CVS base under gnome-xml/example</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]4453
Daniel Veillardc310d562000-06-23 18:32:15 +0000[diff] [blame]4454<h2><a name="Contributi">Contributions</a></h2>
4455<ul>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]4456 <li>Bjorn Reese, William Brack and Thomas Broyer have provided a number of
4457 patches, Gary Pennington worked on the validation API, threading support
4458 and Solaris port.</li>
4459 <li>John Fleck helps maintaining the documentation and man pages.</li>
Daniel Veillard7b4b2f92003-01-06 13:11:20 +0000[diff] [blame]4460 <li><a href="mailto:igor@zlatkovic.com">Igor Zlatkovic</a> is now the
4461 maintainer of the Windows port, <a
4462 href="http://www.zlatkovic.com/projects/libxml/index.html">he provides
4463 binaries</a></li>
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +0000[diff] [blame]4464 <li><a href="mailto:Gary.Pennington@sun.com">Gary Pennington</a> provides
4465 <a href="http://garypennington.net/libxml2/">Solaris binaries</a></li>
Daniel Veillarde356c282001-03-10 12:32:04 +0000[diff] [blame]4466 <li><a
4467 href="http://mail.gnome.org/archives/xml/2001-March/msg00014.html">Matt
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000[diff] [blame]4468 Sergeant</a> developed <a
4469 href="http://axkit.org/download/">XML::LibXSLT</a>, a Perl wrapper for
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +0000[diff] [blame]4470 libxml2/libxslt as part of the <a href="http://axkit.com/">AxKit XML
4471 application server</a></li>
4472 <li><a href="mailto:fnatter@gmx.net">Felix Natter</a> and <a
4473 href="mailto:geertk@ai.rug.nl">Geert Kloosterman</a> provide <a
Daniel Veillardca989762001-06-23 17:39:29 +0000[diff] [blame]4474 href="libxml-doc.el">an emacs module</a> to lookup libxml(2) functions
Daniel Veillard3f6f7f62000-06-30 17:58:25 +0000[diff] [blame]4475 documentation</li>
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +0000[diff] [blame]4476 <li><a href="mailto:sherwin@nlm.nih.gov">Ziying Sherwin</a> provided <a
4477 href="http://xmlsoft.org/messages/0488.html">man pages</a></li>
Daniel Veillard5168dbf2001-07-07 00:18:23 +0000[diff] [blame]4478 <li>there is a module for <a
4479 href="http://acs-misc.sourceforge.net/nsxml.html">libxml/libxslt support
4480 in OpenNSD/AOLServer</a></li>
Daniel Veillard2d347fa2002-03-17 10:34:11 +0000[diff] [blame]4481 <li><a href="mailto:dkuhlman@cutter.rexx.com">Dave Kuhlman</a> provided the
4482 first version of libxml/libxslt <a
4483 href="http://www.rexx.com/~dkuhlman">wrappers for Python</a></li>
Daniel Veillard1aadc442001-11-28 13:10:32 +0000[diff] [blame]4484 <li>Petr Kozelka provides <a
4485 href="http://sourceforge.net/projects/libxml2-pas">Pascal units to glue
4486 libxml2</a> with Kylix and Delphi and other Pascal compilers</li>
Daniel Veillard2d347fa2002-03-17 10:34:11 +0000[diff] [blame]4487 <li><a href="mailto:aleksey@aleksey.com">Aleksey Sanin</a> implemented the
4488 <a href="http://www.w3.org/Signature/">XML Canonicalization and XML
4489 Digital Signature</a> <a
4490 href="http://www.aleksey.com/xmlsec/">implementations for libxml2</a></li>
Daniel Veillard17bed982003-02-24 20:11:43 +0000[diff] [blame]4491 <li><a href="mailto:Steve.Ball@zveno.com">Steve Ball</a>, <a
4492 href="http://www.zveno.com/">Zveno</a> and contributors maintain <a
4493 href="http://tclxml.sourceforge.net/">tcl bindings for libxml2 and
4494 libxslt</a>, as well as <a
4495 href="http://tclxml.sf.net/tkxmllint.html">tkxmllint</a> a GUI for
4496 xmllint and <a href="http://tclxml.sf.net/tkxsltproc.html">tkxsltproc</a>
4497 a GUI for xsltproc.</li>
Daniel Veillardc310d562000-06-23 18:32:15 +0000[diff] [blame]4498</ul>
4499
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]4500<p></p>
Daniel Veillardccb09631998-10-27 06:21:04 +0000[diff] [blame]4501</body>
4502</html>