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blob: b2422f13712927f9cdcd19050256c641e003b40c [file] [log] [blame]
Daniel Veillardccb09631998-10-27 06:21:04 +0000[diff] [blame]1<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN"
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]2 "http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd">
Daniel Veillardccb09631998-10-27 06:21:04 +0000[diff] [blame]3<html>
4<head>
Daniel Veillardec78c0f2000-08-25 10:25:23 +0000[diff] [blame]5 <title>The XML C library for Gnome</title>
Daniel Veillard29a11cc2000-10-25 13:32:39 +0000[diff] [blame^]6 <meta name="GENERATOR" content="amaya V3.2.1">
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 Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]11<p><a href="http://www.gnome.org/"><img src="smallfootonly.gif"
12alt="Gnome Logo"></a><a href="http://www.w3.org/Status"><img src="w3c.png"
13alt="W3C Logo"></a></p>
Daniel Veillardec303412000-03-24 13:41:54 +0000[diff] [blame]14
Daniel Veillardec78c0f2000-08-25 10:25:23 +0000[diff] [blame]15<h1 align="center">The XML C library for Gnome</h1>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]16
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]17<h2 style="text-align: center">libxml, a.k.a. gnome-xml</h2>
18
19<p></p>
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000[diff] [blame]20<ul>
21 <li><a href="#Introducti">Introduction</a></li>
22 <li><a href="#Documentat">Documentation</a></li>
Daniel Veillardd5f97f82000-09-17 16:38:14 +0000[diff] [blame]23 <li><a href="#Reporting">Reporting bugs and getting help</a></li>
24 <li><a href="#help">how to help</a></li>
Daniel Veillard10a2c651999-12-12 13:03:50 +0000[diff] [blame]25 <li><a href="#Downloads">Downloads</a></li>
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000[diff] [blame]26 <li><a href="#News">News</a></li>
27 <li><a href="#XML">XML</a></li>
28 <li><a href="#tree">The tree output</a></li>
29 <li><a href="#interface">The SAX interface</a></li>
30 <li><a href="#library">The XML library interfaces</a>
31 <ul>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000[diff] [blame]32 <li><a href="#Invoking">Invoking the parser: the pull way</a></li>
33 <li><a href="#Invoking">Invoking the parser: the push way</a></li>
34 <li><a href="#Invoking2">Invoking the parser: the SAX interface</a></li>
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000[diff] [blame]35 <li><a href="#Building">Building a tree from scratch</a></li>
36 <li><a href="#Traversing">Traversing the tree</a></li>
37 <li><a href="#Modifying">Modifying the tree</a></li>
38 <li><a href="#Saving">Saving the tree</a></li>
39 <li><a href="#Compressio">Compression</a></li>
40 </ul>
41 </li>
42 <li><a href="#Entities">Entities or no entities</a></li>
43 <li><a href="#Namespaces">Namespaces</a></li>
44 <li><a href="#Validation">Validation</a></li>
45 <li><a href="#Principles">DOM principles</a></li>
46 <li><a href="#real">A real example</a></li>
Daniel Veillard96984452000-08-31 13:50:12 +0000[diff] [blame]47 <li><a href="#Contributi">Contributions</a></li>
48</ul>
49
50<p>Separate documents:</p>
51<ul>
52 <li><a href="upgrade.html">upgrade instructions for migrating to
53 libxml2</a></li>
54 <li><a href="encoding.html">libxml Internationalization support</a></li>
55 <li><a href="xmlio.html">libxml Input/Output interfaces</a></li>
Daniel Veillard189446d2000-10-13 10:23:06 +0000[diff] [blame]56 <li><a href="xmlmem.html">libxml Memory interfaces</a></li>
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000[diff] [blame]57</ul>
58
59<h2><a name="Introducti">Introduction</a></h2>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]60
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +0000[diff] [blame]61<p>This document describes libxml, the <a
Daniel Veillardec78c0f2000-08-25 10:25:23 +0000[diff] [blame]62href="http://www.w3.org/XML/">XML</a> C library developped for the <a
63href="http://www.gnome.org/">Gnome</a> project. <a
64href="http://www.w3.org/XML/">XML is a standard</a> for building tag-based
65structured documents/data.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]66
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000[diff] [blame]67<p>Here are some key points about libxml:</p>
68<ul>
Daniel Veillard189446d2000-10-13 10:23:06 +0000[diff] [blame]69 <li>Libxml exports Push and Pull type parser interfaces for both XML and
70 HTML.</li>
71 <li>Libxml can do Dtd validation at parse time, using a parsed document
72 instance, or with an arbitrary Dtd.</li>
73 <li>Libxml now includes a nearly complete <a
74 href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xpath">XPath</a> and <a
Daniel Veillard0c069222000-10-21 09:25:52 +0000[diff] [blame]75 href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xptr">XPointer</a> implementations.</li>
Daniel Veillardec78c0f2000-08-25 10:25:23 +0000[diff] [blame]76 <li>It is written in plain C, making as few assumptions as possible, and
Daniel Veillard189446d2000-10-13 10:23:06 +0000[diff] [blame]77 sticking closely to ANSI C/POSIX for easy embedding. Works on
Daniel Veillardab8500d2000-10-15 21:06:19 +0000[diff] [blame]78 Linux/Unix/Windows, ported to a number of other platforms.</li>
Daniel Veillard189446d2000-10-13 10:23:06 +0000[diff] [blame]79 <li>Basic support for HTTP and FTP client allowing to fetch remote
80 resources</li>
81 <li>The design of modular, most of the extensions can be compiled out.</li>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000[diff] [blame]82 <li>The internal document repesentation is as close as possible to the <a
83 href="http://www.w3.org/DOM/">DOM</a> interfaces.</li>
84 <li>Libxml also has a <a href="http://www.megginson.com/SAX/index.html">SAX
Daniel Veillard402e8c82000-02-29 22:57:47 +0000[diff] [blame]85 like interface</a>; the interface is designed to be compatible with <a
86 href="http://www.jclark.com/xml/expat.html">Expat</a>.</li>
Daniel Veillardec303412000-03-24 13:41:54 +0000[diff] [blame]87 <li>This library is released both under the <a
88 href="http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Legal/copyright-software-19980720.html">W3C
Daniel Veillard189446d2000-10-13 10:23:06 +0000[diff] [blame]89 IPR</a> and the <a href="http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/lesser.html">GNU
90 LGPL</a>. Use either at your convenience, basically this should make
91 everybody happy, if not, drop me a mail.</li>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000[diff] [blame]92</ul>
Daniel Veillardccb09631998-10-27 06:21:04 +0000[diff] [blame]93
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000[diff] [blame]94<h2><a name="Documentat">Documentation</a></h2>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]95
Daniel Veillard402e8c82000-02-29 22:57:47 +0000[diff] [blame]96<p>There are some on-line resources about using libxml:</p>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000[diff] [blame]97<ol>
Daniel Veillard365e13b2000-07-02 07:56:37 +0000[diff] [blame]98 <li>Check the <a href="FAQ.html">FAQ</a></li>
Daniel Veillardc19fccc2000-07-03 11:52:01 +0000[diff] [blame]99 <li>Check the <a href="http://xmlsoft.org/html/libxml-lib.html">extensive
Daniel Veillard8c6d6af2000-08-25 17:14:13 +0000[diff] [blame]100 documentation</a> automatically extracted from code comments (using <a
101 href="http://cvs.gnome.org/bonsai/rview.cgi?cvsroot=/cvs/gnome&amp;dir=gtk-doc">gtk
102 doc</a>).</li>
Daniel Veillard8d869642000-07-14 12:12:59 +0000[diff] [blame]103 <li>Look at the documentation about <a href="encoding.html">libxml
104 internationalization support</a></li>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000[diff] [blame]105 <li>This page provides a global overview and <a href="#real">some
Daniel Veillard402e8c82000-02-29 22:57:47 +0000[diff] [blame]106 examples</a> on how to use libxml.</li>
107 <li><a href="mailto:james@daa.com.au">James Henstridge</a> wrote <a
108 href="http://www.daa.com.au/~james/gnome/xml-sax/xml-sax.html">some nice
109 documentation</a> explaining how to use the libxml SAX interface.</li>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000[diff] [blame]110 <li>George Lebl wrote <a
111 href="http://www-4.ibm.com/software/developer/library/gnome3/">an article
Daniel Veillard402e8c82000-02-29 22:57:47 +0000[diff] [blame]112 for IBM developerWorks</a> about using libxml.</li>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000[diff] [blame]113 <li>It is also a good idea to check to <a href="mailto:raph@levien.com">Raph
114 Levien</a> <a href="http://levien.com/gnome/">web site</a> since he is
115 building the <a href="http://levien.com/gnome/gdome.html">DOM interface
Daniel Veillard402e8c82000-02-29 22:57:47 +0000[diff] [blame]116 gdome</a> on top of libxml result tree and an implementation of <a
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000[diff] [blame]117 href="http://www.w3.org/Graphics/SVG/">SVG</a> called <a
118 href="http://www.levien.com/svg/">gill</a>. Check his <a
119 href="http://www.levien.com/gnome/domination.html">DOMination
120 paper</a>.</li>
Daniel Veillardec303412000-03-24 13:41:54 +0000[diff] [blame]121 <li>Check <a href="http://cvs.gnome.org/lxr/source/gnome-xml/TODO">the TODO
122 file</a></li>
123 <li>Read the <a href="upgrade.html">1.x to 2.x upgrade path</a>. If you are
124 starting a new project using libxml you should really use the 2.x
125 version.</li>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000[diff] [blame]126 <li>And don't forget to look at the <a href="/messages/">mailing-list
Daniel Veillardc310d562000-06-23 18:32:15 +0000[diff] [blame]127 archive</a>.</li>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000[diff] [blame]128</ol>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]129
Daniel Veillardd5f97f82000-09-17 16:38:14 +0000[diff] [blame]130<h2><a name="Reporting">Reporting bugs and getting help</a></h2>
Daniel Veillard4c3a2031999-11-19 17:46:26 +0000[diff] [blame]131
Daniel Veillard402e8c82000-02-29 22:57:47 +0000[diff] [blame]132<p>Well, bugs or missing features are always possible, and I will make a point
Daniel Veillardd5f97f82000-09-17 16:38:14 +0000[diff] [blame]133of fixing them in a timely fashion. The best way to report a bug is to use the
134<a href="http://bugs.gnome.org/db/pa/lgnome-xml.html">Gnome bug tracking
Daniel Veillard189446d2000-10-13 10:23:06 +0000[diff] [blame]135database</a> (make sure to use the "gnome-xml" module name, not libxml or
136libxml2). I look at reports there regularly and it's good to have a reminder
137when a bug is still open. Check the <a
Daniel Veillard4c3a2031999-11-19 17:46:26 +0000[diff] [blame]138href="http://bugs.gnome.org/Reporting.html">instructions on reporting bugs</a>
Daniel Veillard402e8c82000-02-29 22:57:47 +0000[diff] [blame]139and be sure to specify that the bug is for the package gnome-xml.</p>
Daniel Veillard4c3a2031999-11-19 17:46:26 +0000[diff] [blame]140
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000[diff] [blame]141<p>There is also a mailing-list <a
Daniel Veillardf121ab72000-08-29 23:40:42 +0000[diff] [blame]142href="mailto:xml@rpmfind.net">xml@rpmfind.net</a> for libxml, with an <a
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000[diff] [blame]143href="http://xmlsoft.org/messages">on-line archive</a>. To subscribe to this
Daniel Veillard402e8c82000-02-29 22:57:47 +0000[diff] [blame]144majordomo based list, send a mail message to <a
Daniel Veillardf121ab72000-08-29 23:40:42 +0000[diff] [blame]145href="mailto:majordomo@rpmfind.net">majordomo@rpmfind.net</a> with "subscribe
146xml" in the <strong>content</strong> of the message.</p>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000[diff] [blame]147
Daniel Veillard402e8c82000-02-29 22:57:47 +0000[diff] [blame]148<p>Alternatively, you can just send the bug to the <a
Daniel Veillardf121ab72000-08-29 23:40:42 +0000[diff] [blame]149href="mailto:xml@rpmfind.net">xml@rpmfind.net</a> list, if it's really libxml
150related I will approve it..</p>
Daniel Veillard4c3a2031999-11-19 17:46:26 +0000[diff] [blame]151
Daniel Veillardec303412000-03-24 13:41:54 +0000[diff] [blame]152<p>Of course, bugs reports with a suggested patch for fixing them will
153probably be processed faster.</p>
154
155<p>If you're looking for help, a quick look at <a
156href="http://xmlsoft.org/messages/#407">the list archive</a> may actually
157provide the answer, I usually send source samples when answering libxml usage
Daniel Veillard6f0adb52000-07-03 11:41:26 +0000[diff] [blame]158questions. The <a href="http://xmlsoft.org/html/book1.html">auto-generated
Daniel Veillardec303412000-03-24 13:41:54 +0000[diff] [blame]159documentantion</a> is not as polished as I would like (i need to learn more
160about Docbook), but it's a good starting point.</p>
161
Daniel Veillardd5f97f82000-09-17 16:38:14 +0000[diff] [blame]162<h2><a name="help">How to help</a></h2>
163
164<p>You can help the project in various ways, the best thing to do first is to
165subscribe to the mailing-list as explained before, check the <a
166href="http://xmlsoft.org/messages/">archives </a>and the <a
167href="http://bugs.gnome.org/db/pa/lgnome-xml.html">Gnome bug
168database:</a>:</p>
169<ol>
170 <li>provide patches when you find problems</li>
Daniel Veillard189446d2000-10-13 10:23:06 +0000[diff] [blame]171 <li>provide the diffs when you port libxml to a new platform. They may not
Daniel Veillardab8500d2000-10-15 21:06:19 +0000[diff] [blame]172 be integrated in all cases but help pinpointing portability problems
173 and</li>
Daniel Veillardd5f97f82000-09-17 16:38:14 +0000[diff] [blame]174 <li>provice documentation fixes (either as patches to the code comments or
175 as HTML diffs).</li>
176 <li>provide new documentations pieces (translations, examples, etc ...)</li>
177 <li>Check the TODO file and try to close one of the items</li>
178 <li>take one of the points raised in the archive or the bug database and
179 provide a fix. <a href="mailto:Daniel.Veillard@w3.org">Get in touch with
180 me </a>before to avoid synchronization problems and check that the
181 suggested fix will fit in nicely :-)</li>
182</ol>
183
Daniel Veillard10a2c651999-12-12 13:03:50 +0000[diff] [blame]184<h2><a name="Downloads">Downloads</a></h2>
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000[diff] [blame]185
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]186<p>The latest versions of libxml can be found on <a
Daniel Veillard6c8b1172000-03-01 00:40:41 +0000[diff] [blame]187href="ftp://rpmfind.net/pub/libxml/">rpmfind.net</a> or on the <a
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000[diff] [blame]188href="ftp://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/MIRRORS.html">Gnome FTP server</a> either
Daniel Veillard10a2c651999-12-12 13:03:50 +0000[diff] [blame]189as a <a href="ftp://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/stable/sources/libxml/">source
Daniel Veillard306be992000-07-03 12:38:45 +0000[diff] [blame]190archive</a> or <a
191href="ftp://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/contrib/redhat/SRPMS/">RPM packages</a>.
192(NOTE that you need both the <a
Daniel Veillardc19fccc2000-07-03 11:52:01 +0000[diff] [blame]193href="http://rpmfind.net/linux/RPM/libxml2.html">libxml(2)</a> and <a
194href="http://rpmfind.net/linux/RPM/libxml2-devel.html">libxml(2)-devel</a>
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]195packages installed to compile applications using libxml.)</p>
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000[diff] [blame]196
Daniel Veillard6c8b1172000-03-01 00:40:41 +0000[diff] [blame]197<p><a name="Snapshot">Snapshot:</a></p>
198<ul>
199 <li>Code from the W3C cvs base libxml <a
200 href="ftp://rpmfind.net/pub/libxml/cvs-snapshot.tar.gz">cvs-snapshot.tar.gz</a></li>
201 <li>Docs, content of the web site, the list archive included <a
202 href="ftp://rpmfind.net/pub/libxml/libxml-docs.tar.gz">libxml-docs.tar.gz</a></li>
203</ul>
204
205<p><a name="Contribs">Contribs:</a></p>
206
207<p>I do accept external contributions, especially if compiling on another
208platform, get in touch with me to upload the package. I will keep them in the
209<a href="ftp://rpmfind.net/pub/libxml/contribs/">contrib directory</a></p>
210
Daniel Veillardc310d562000-06-23 18:32:15 +0000[diff] [blame]211<p>Libxml is also available from 2 CVS bases:</p>
Daniel Veillard10a2c651999-12-12 13:03:50 +0000[diff] [blame]212<ul>
213 <li><p>The <a href="http://dev.w3.org/cvsweb/XML/">W3C CVS base</a>,
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000[diff] [blame]214 available read-only using the CVS pserver authentification (I tend to use
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +0000[diff] [blame]215 this base for my own development, so it's updated more regularly, but the
216 content may not be as stable):</p>
Daniel Veillard10a2c651999-12-12 13:03:50 +0000[diff] [blame]217 <pre>CVSROOT=:pserver:anonymous@dev.w3.org:/sources/public
Daniel Veillard365e13b2000-07-02 07:56:37 +0000[diff] [blame]218 password: anonymous
219 module: XML</pre>
Daniel Veillard10a2c651999-12-12 13:03:50 +0000[diff] [blame]220 </li>
221 <li><p>The <a
222 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]223 CVS base</a>. Check the <a
224 href="http://developer.gnome.org/tools/cvs.html">Gnome CVS Tools</a> page;
225 the CVS module is <b>gnome-xml</b>.</p>
Daniel Veillard10a2c651999-12-12 13:03:50 +0000[diff] [blame]226 </li>
227</ul>
228
229<h2><a name="News">News</a></h2>
230
Daniel Veillard944b5ff1999-12-15 19:08:24 +0000[diff] [blame]231<h3>CVS only : check the <a
232href="http://cvs.gnome.org/lxr/source/gnome-xml/ChangeLog">Changelog</a> file
Daniel Veillard189446d2000-10-13 10:23:06 +0000[diff] [blame]233for a really accurate description</h3>
Daniel Veillardab8500d2000-10-15 21:06:19 +0000[diff] [blame]234
235<p>Item floating around but not actively worked on, get in touch with me if
236you want to test those</p>
237<ul>
238 <li>working on HTML and XML links recognition layers</li>
239 <li>parsing/import of Docbook SGML docs</li>
240</ul>
241
Daniel Veillard29a11cc2000-10-25 13:32:39 +0000[diff] [blame^]242<h3>2.2.6: Oct 25 2000:</h3>
243<ul>
244 <li>Added an hash table module, migrated a number of internal structure to
245 those</li>
246 <li>Fixed a posteriori validation problems</li>
247 <li>HTTP module cleanups</li>
248 <li>HTML parser improvements (tag errors, script/style handling, attribute
249 normalization)</li>
250 <li>coalescing of adjacent text nodes</li>
251 <li>couple of XPath bug fixes, exported the internal API</li>
252</ul>
253
Daniel Veillardab8500d2000-10-15 21:06:19 +0000[diff] [blame]254<h3>2.2.5: Oct 15 2000:</h3>
Daniel Veillard4c3a2031999-11-19 17:46:26 +0000[diff] [blame]255<ul>
Daniel Veillard189446d2000-10-13 10:23:06 +0000[diff] [blame]256 <li>XPointer implementation and testsuite</li>
257 <li>Lot of XPath fixes, added variable and functions registration, more
258 tests</li>
259 <li>Portability fixes, lots of enhancements toward an easy Windows build and
260 release</li>
261 <li>Late validation fixes</li>
262 <li>Integrated a lot of contributed patches</li>
263 <li>added memory management docs</li>
Daniel Veillardab8500d2000-10-15 21:06:19 +0000[diff] [blame]264 <li>a performance problem when using large buffer seems fixed</li>
Daniel Veillard189446d2000-10-13 10:23:06 +0000[diff] [blame]265</ul>
266
267<h3>2.2.4: Oct 1 2000:</h3>
268<ul>
269 <li>main XPath problem fixed</li>
270 <li>Integrated portability patches for Windows</li>
271 <li>Serious bug fixes on the URI and HTML code</li>
Daniel Veillard361d8452000-04-03 19:48:13 +0000[diff] [blame]272</ul>
273
Daniel Veillardd5f97f82000-09-17 16:38:14 +0000[diff] [blame]274<h3>2.2.3: Sep 17 2000</h3>
275<ul>
276 <li>bug fixes</li>
277 <li>cleanup of entity handling code</li>
278 <li>overall review of all loops in the parsers, all sprintf usage has been
279 checked too</li>
280 <li>Far better handling of larges Dtd. Validating against Docbook XML Dtd
281 works smoothly now.</li>
282</ul>
283
284<h3>1.8.10: Sep 6 2000</h3>
285<ul>
286 <li>bug fix release for some Gnome projects</li>
287</ul>
288
289<h3>2.2.2: August 12 2000</h3>
Daniel Veillard786d7c82000-08-12 23:38:57 +0000[diff] [blame]290<ul>
291 <li>mostly bug fixes</li>
Daniel Veillardec78c0f2000-08-25 10:25:23 +0000[diff] [blame]292 <li>started adding routines to access xml parser context options</li>
Daniel Veillard786d7c82000-08-12 23:38:57 +0000[diff] [blame]293</ul>
294
Daniel Veillardd5f97f82000-09-17 16:38:14 +0000[diff] [blame]295<h3>2.2.1: July 21 2000</h3>
Daniel Veillarda2679fa2000-07-22 02:38:15 +0000[diff] [blame]296<ul>
297 <li>a purely bug fixes release</li>
298 <li>fixed an encoding support problem when parsing from a memory block</li>
299 <li>fixed a DOCTYPE parsing problem</li>
300 <li>removed a bug in the function allowing to override the memory allocation
301 routines</li>
302</ul>
303
Daniel Veillardd5f97f82000-09-17 16:38:14 +0000[diff] [blame]304<h3>2.2.0: July 14 2000</h3>
Daniel Veillard94e90602000-07-17 14:38:19 +0000[diff] [blame]305<ul>
306 <li>applied a lot of portability fixes</li>
307 <li>better encoding support/cleanup and saving (content is now always
308 encoded in UTF-8)</li>
309 <li>the HTML parser now correctly handles encodings</li>
310 <li>added xmlHasProp()</li>
311 <li>fixed a serious problem with &amp;#38;</li>
312 <li>propagated the fix to FTP client</li>
313 <li>cleanup, bugfixes, etc ...</li>
314 <li>Added a page about <a href="encoding.html">libxml Internationalization
315 support</a></li>
316</ul>
317
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]318<h3>1.8.9: July 9 2000</h3>
319<ul>
320 <li>fixed the spec the RPMs should be better</li>
321 <li>fixed a serious bug in the FTP implementation, released 1.8.9 to solve
322 rpmfind users problem</li>
323</ul>
324
Daniel Veillard6388e172000-07-03 16:07:19 +0000[diff] [blame]325<h3>2.1.1: July 1 2000</h3>
326<ul>
327 <li>fixes a couple of bugs in the 2.1.0 packaging</li>
328 <li>improvements on the HTML parser</li>
329</ul>
330
Daniel Veillard3f6f7f62000-06-30 17:58:25 +0000[diff] [blame]331<h3>2.1.0 and 1.8.8: June 29 2000</h3>
332<ul>
333 <li>1.8.8 is mostly a comodity package for upgrading to libxml2 accoding to
334 <a href="upgrade.html">new instructions</a>. It fixes a nasty problem
335 about &amp;#38; charref parsing</li>
336 <li>2.1.0 also ease the upgrade from libxml v1 to the recent version. it
337 also contains numerous fixes and enhancements:
338 <ul>
339 <li>added xmlStopParser() to stop parsing</li>
340 <li>improved a lot parsing speed when there is large CDATA blocs</li>
341 <li>includes XPath patches provided by Picdar Technology</li>
342 <li>tried to fix as much as possible DtD validation and namespace
343 related problems</li>
344 <li>output to a given encoding has been added/tested</li>
345 <li>lot of various fixes</li>
346 </ul>
347 </li>
348</ul>
349
Daniel Veillarde0aed302000-04-16 08:52:20 +0000[diff] [blame]350<h3>2.0.0: Apr 12 2000</h3>
Daniel Veillard361d8452000-04-03 19:48:13 +0000[diff] [blame]351<ul>
352 <li>First public release of libxml2. If you are using libxml, it's a good
Daniel Veillarde0aed302000-04-16 08:52:20 +0000[diff] [blame]353 idea to check the 1.x to 2.x upgrade instructions. NOTE: while initally
354 scheduled for Apr 3 the relase occured only on Apr 12 due to massive
355 workload.</li>
Daniel Veillard361d8452000-04-03 19:48:13 +0000[diff] [blame]356 <li>The include are now located under $prefix/include/libxml (instead of
Daniel Veillarde0aed302000-04-16 08:52:20 +0000[diff] [blame]357 $prefix/include/gnome-xml), they also are referenced by
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]358 <pre>#include &lt;libxml/xxx.h&gt;</pre>
Daniel Veillarde0aed302000-04-16 08:52:20 +0000[diff] [blame]359 <p>instead of</p>
Daniel Veillard361d8452000-04-03 19:48:13 +0000[diff] [blame]360 <pre>#include "xxx.h"</pre>
361 </li>
Daniel Veillard8f621982000-03-20 13:07:15 +0000[diff] [blame]362 <li>a new URI module for parsing URIs and following strictly RFC 2396</li>
363 <li>the memory allocation routines used by libxml can now be overloaded
364 dynamically by using xmlMemSetup()</li>
Daniel Veillard361d8452000-04-03 19:48:13 +0000[diff] [blame]365 <li>The previously CVS only tool tester has been renamed
366 <strong>xmllint</strong> and is now installed as part of the libxml2
367 package</li>
Daniel Veillarde0aed302000-04-16 08:52:20 +0000[diff] [blame]368 <li>The I/O interface has been revamped. There is now ways to plug in
369 specific I/O modules, either at the URI scheme detection level using
370 xmlRegisterInputCallbacks() or by passing I/O functions when creating a
371 parser context using xmlCreateIOParserCtxt()</li>
372 <li>there is a C preprocessor macro LIBXML_VERSION providing the version
373 number of the libxml module in use</li>
374 <li>a number of optional features of libxml can now be excluded at configure
375 time (FTP/HTTP/HTML/XPath/Debug)</li>
Daniel Veillardedfb29b2000-03-14 19:59:05 +0000[diff] [blame]376</ul>
377
378<h3>2.0.0beta: Mar 14 2000</h3>
379<ul>
380 <li>This is a first Beta release of libxml version 2</li>
381 <li>It's available only from<a href="ftp://rpmfind.net/pub/libxml/">
382 rpmfind.net FTP</a>, it's packaged as libxml2-2.0.0beta and available as
383 tar and RPMs</li>
384 <li>This version is now the head in the Gnome CVS base, the old one is
385 available under the tag LIB_XML_1_X</li>
386 <li>This includes a very large set of changes. Froma programmatic point of
387 view applications should not have to be modified too much, check the <a
388 href="upgrade.html">upgrade page</a></li>
389 <li>Some interfaces may changes (especially a bit about encoding).</li>
390 <li>the updates includes:
Daniel Veillard6c8b1172000-03-01 00:40:41 +0000[diff] [blame]391 <ul>
Daniel Veillardedfb29b2000-03-14 19:59:05 +0000[diff] [blame]392 <li>fix I18N support. ISO-Latin-x/UTF-8/UTF-16 (nearly) seems correctly
393 handled now</li>
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +0000[diff] [blame]394 <li>Better handling of entities, especially well formedness checking and
395 proper PEref extensions in external subsets</li>
Daniel Veillard6c8b1172000-03-01 00:40:41 +0000[diff] [blame]396 <li>DTD conditional sections</li>
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +0000[diff] [blame]397 <li>Validation now correcly handle entities content</li>
Daniel Veillard6c8b1172000-03-01 00:40:41 +0000[diff] [blame]398 <li><a href="http://rpmfind.net/tools/gdome/messages/0039.html">change
399 structures to accomodate DOM</a></li>
Daniel Veillard6c8b1172000-03-01 00:40:41 +0000[diff] [blame]400 </ul>
401 </li>
Daniel Veillardedfb29b2000-03-14 19:59:05 +0000[diff] [blame]402 <li>Serious progress were made toward compliance, <a
403 href="conf/result.html">here are the result of the test</a> against the
404 OASIS testsuite (except the japanese tests since I don't support that
405 encoding yet). This URL is rebuilt every couple of hours using the CVS
406 head version.</li>
Daniel Veillarde41f2b72000-01-30 20:00:07 +0000[diff] [blame]407</ul>
408
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +0000[diff] [blame]409<h3>1.8.7: Mar 6 2000</h3>
410<ul>
411 <li>This is a bug fix release:</li>
412 <li>It is possible to disable the ignorable blanks heuristic used by
413 libxml-1.x, a new function xmlKeepBlanksDefault(0) will allow this. Note
414 that for adherence to XML spec, this behaviour will be disabled by default
415 in 2.x . The same function will allow to keep compatibility for old
416 code.</li>
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]417 <li>Blanks in &lt;a&gt; &lt;/a&gt; constructs are not ignored anymore,
418 avoiding heuristic is really the Right Way :-\</li>
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +0000[diff] [blame]419 <li>The unchecked use of snprintf which was breaking libxml-1.8.6
420 compilation on some platforms has been fixed</li>
421 <li>nanoftp.c nanohttp.c: Fixed '#' and '?' stripping when processing
422 URIs</li>
423</ul>
424
Daniel Veillarde41f2b72000-01-30 20:00:07 +0000[diff] [blame]425<h3>1.8.6: Jan 31 2000</h3>
426<ul>
427 <li>added a nanoFTP transport module, debugged until the new version of <a
428 href="http://rpmfind.net/linux/rpm2html/rpmfind.html">rpmfind</a> can use
429 it without troubles</li>
Daniel Veillardda07c342000-01-25 18:31:22 +0000[diff] [blame]430</ul>
431
432<h3>1.8.5: Jan 21 2000</h3>
433<ul>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000[diff] [blame]434 <li>adding APIs to parse a well balanced chunk of XML (production <a
435 href="http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml#NT-content">[43] content</a> of the XML
436 spec)</li>
Daniel Veillard461a66c2000-01-18 18:01:01 +0000[diff] [blame]437 <li>fixed a hideous bug in xmlGetProp pointed by Rune.Djurhuus@fast.no</li>
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]438 <li>Jody Goldberg &lt;jgoldberg@home.com&gt; provided another patch trying
439 to solve the zlib checks problems</li>
Daniel Veillard461a66c2000-01-18 18:01:01 +0000[diff] [blame]440 <li>The current state in gnome CVS base is expected to ship as 1.8.5 with
441 gnumeric soon</li>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000[diff] [blame]442</ul>
443
444<h3>1.8.4: Jan 13 2000</h3>
445<ul>
446 <li>bug fixes, reintroduced xmlNewGlobalNs(), fixed xmlNewNs()</li>
447 <li>all exit() call should have been removed from libxml</li>
448 <li>fixed a problem with INCLUDE_WINSOCK on WIN32 platform</li>
449 <li>added newDocFragment()</li>
Daniel Veillardf84f71f2000-01-05 19:54:23 +0000[diff] [blame]450</ul>
451
452<h3>1.8.3: Jan 5 2000</h3>
453<ul>
454 <li>a Push interface for the XML and HTML parsers</li>
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +0000[diff] [blame]455 <li>a shell-like interface to the document tree (try tester --shell :-)</li>
Daniel Veillarddbfd6411999-12-28 16:35:14 +0000[diff] [blame]456 <li>lots of bug fixes and improvement added over XMas hollidays</li>
Daniel Veillard437b87b2000-01-03 17:30:46 +0000[diff] [blame]457 <li>fixed the DTD parsing code to work with the xhtml DTD</li>
Daniel Veillardf84f71f2000-01-05 19:54:23 +0000[diff] [blame]458 <li>added xmlRemoveProp(), xmlRemoveID() and xmlRemoveRef()</li>
459 <li>Fixed bugs in xmlNewNs()</li>
Daniel Veillard437b87b2000-01-03 17:30:46 +0000[diff] [blame]460 <li>External entity loading code has been revamped, now it uses
Daniel Veillardf84f71f2000-01-05 19:54:23 +0000[diff] [blame]461 xmlLoadExternalEntity(), some fix on entities processing were added</li>
Daniel Veillard437b87b2000-01-03 17:30:46 +0000[diff] [blame]462 <li>cleaned up WIN32 includes of socket stuff</li>
Daniel Veillard5cb5ab81999-12-21 15:35:29 +0000[diff] [blame]463</ul>
464
465<h3>1.8.2: Dec 21 1999</h3>
466<ul>
Daniel Veillardb24054a1999-12-18 15:32:46 +0000[diff] [blame]467 <li>I got another problem with includes and C++, I hope this issue is fixed
468 for good this time</li>
Daniel Veillard5cb5ab81999-12-21 15:35:29 +0000[diff] [blame]469 <li>Added a few tree modification functions: xmlReplaceNode,
470 xmlAddPrevSibling, xmlAddNextSibling, xmlNodeSetName and
471 xmlDocSetRootElement</li>
472 <li>Tried to improve the HTML output with help from <a
473 href="mailto:clahey@umich.edu">Chris Lahey</a></li>
Daniel Veillarde4e51311999-12-18 15:32:46 +0000[diff] [blame]474</ul>
Daniel Veillardb24054a1999-12-18 15:32:46 +0000[diff] [blame]475
Daniel Veillarde4e51311999-12-18 15:32:46 +0000[diff] [blame]476<h3>1.8.1: Dec 18 1999</h3>
477<ul>
478 <li>various patches to avoid troubles when using libxml with C++ compilers
479 the "namespace" keyword and C escaping in include files</li>
480 <li>a problem in one of the core macros IS_CHAR was corrected</li>
481 <li>fixed a bug introduced in 1.8.0 breaking default namespace processing,
482 and more specifically the Dia application</li>
Daniel Veillard944b5ff1999-12-15 19:08:24 +0000[diff] [blame]483 <li>fixed a posteriori validation (validation after parsing, or by using a
484 Dtd not specified in the original document)</li>
Daniel Veillardb24054a1999-12-18 15:32:46 +0000[diff] [blame]485 <li>fixed a bug in</li>
Daniel Veillard10a2c651999-12-12 13:03:50 +0000[diff] [blame]486</ul>
487
488<h3>1.8.0: Dec 12 1999</h3>
489<ul>
490 <li>cleanup, especially memory wise</li>
491 <li>the parser should be more reliable, especially the HTML one, it should
492 not crash, whatever the input !</li>
493 <li>Integrated various patches, especially a speedup improvement for large
494 dataset from <a href="mailto:cnygard@bellatlantic.net">Carl Nygard</a>,
495 configure with --with-buffers to enable them.</li>
496 <li>attribute normalization, oops should have been added long ago !</li>
497 <li>attributes defaulted from Dtds should be available, xmlSetProp() now
498 does entities escapting by default.</li>
Daniel Veillard4c3a2031999-11-19 17:46:26 +0000[diff] [blame]499</ul>
Daniel Veillard35008381999-10-25 13:15:52 +0000[diff] [blame]500
501<h3>1.7.4: Oct 25 1999</h3>
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000[diff] [blame]502<ul>
Daniel Veillard35008381999-10-25 13:15:52 +0000[diff] [blame]503 <li>Lots of HTML improvement</li>
504 <li>Fixed some errors when saving both XML and HTML</li>
505 <li>More examples, the regression tests should now look clean</li>
506 <li>Fixed a bug with contiguous charref</li>
507</ul>
508
509<h3>1.7.3: Sep 29 1999</h3>
510<ul>
511 <li>portability problems fixed</li>
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000[diff] [blame]512 <li>snprintf was used unconditionnally, leading to link problems on system
Daniel Veillard35008381999-10-25 13:15:52 +0000[diff] [blame]513 were it's not available, fixed</li>
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000[diff] [blame]514</ul>
515
516<h3>1.7.1: Sep 24 1999</h3>
517<ul>
518 <li>The basic type for strings manipulated by libxml has been renamed in
519 1.7.1 from <strong>CHAR</strong> to <strong>xmlChar</strong>. The reason
520 is that CHAR was conflicting with a predefined type on Windows. However on
521 non WIN32 environment, compatibility is provided by the way of a
522 <strong>#define </strong>.</li>
523 <li>Changed another error : the use of a structure field called errno, and
524 leading to troubles on platforms where it's a macro</li>
525</ul>
526
527<h3>1.7.0: sep 23 1999</h3>
528<ul>
529 <li>Added the ability to fetch remote DTD or parsed entities, see the <a
Daniel Veillardc19fccc2000-07-03 11:52:01 +0000[diff] [blame]530 href="html/gnome-xml-nanohttp.html">nanohttp</a> module.</li>
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000[diff] [blame]531 <li>Added an errno to report errors by another mean than a simple printf
532 like callback</li>
533 <li>Finished ID/IDREF support and checking when validation</li>
534 <li>Serious memory leaks fixed (there is now a <a
Daniel Veillardc19fccc2000-07-03 11:52:01 +0000[diff] [blame]535 href="html/gnome-xml-xmlmemory.html">memory wrapper</a> module)</li>
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000[diff] [blame]536 <li>Improvement of <a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xpath">XPath</a>
537 implementation</li>
538 <li>Added an HTML parser front-end</li>
539</ul>
540
541<h2><a name="XML">XML</a></h2>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]542
Daniel Veillard402e8c82000-02-29 22:57:47 +0000[diff] [blame]543<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]544markup-based structured documents. Here is <a name="example">an example XML
545document</a>:</p>
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]546<pre>&lt;?xml version="1.0"?&gt;
547&lt;EXAMPLE prop1="gnome is great" prop2="&amp;amp; linux too"&gt;
548 &lt;head&gt;
549 &lt;title&gt;Welcome to Gnome&lt;/title&gt;
550 &lt;/head&gt;
551 &lt;chapter&gt;
552 &lt;title&gt;The Linux adventure&lt;/title&gt;
553 &lt;p&gt;bla bla bla ...&lt;/p&gt;
554 &lt;image href="linus.gif"/&gt;
555 &lt;p&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;
556 &lt;/chapter&gt;
557&lt;/EXAMPLE&gt;</pre>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]558
Daniel Veillard402e8c82000-02-29 22:57:47 +0000[diff] [blame]559<p>The first line specifies that it's an XML document and gives useful
560information about its encoding. Then the document is a text format whose
561structure is specified by tags between brackets. <strong>Each tag opened has
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +0000[diff] [blame]562to be closed</strong>. XML is pedantic about this. However, if a tag is empty
563(no content), a single tag can serve as both the opening and closing tag if it
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]564ends with <code>/&gt;</code> rather than with <code>&gt;</code>. Note that,
565for example, the image tag has no content (just an attribute) and is closed by
566ending the tag with <code>/&gt;</code>.</p>
Daniel Veillardccb09631998-10-27 06:21:04 +0000[diff] [blame]567
Daniel Veillard402e8c82000-02-29 22:57:47 +0000[diff] [blame]568<p>XML can be applied sucessfully to a wide range of uses, from long term
569structured document maintenance (where it follows the steps of SGML) to simple
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +0000[diff] [blame]570data encoding mechanisms like configuration file formatting (glade),
571spreadsheets (gnumeric), or even shorter lived documents such as WebDAV where
572it is used to encode remote calls between a client and a server.</p>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]573
Daniel Veillard4540be42000-08-19 16:40:28 +0000[diff] [blame]574<h2>An overview of libxml architecture</h2>
575
576<p>Libxml is made of multiple components, some of them optionals, and most of
577the block interfaces are public. The main components are:</p>
578<ul>
579 <li>an Input/Output layer</li>
580 <li>FTP and HTTP client layers (optionnal)</li>
581 <li>an Internationalization layer managing the encodings support</li>
582 <li>an URI module</li>
583 <li>the XML parser and its basic SAX interface</li>
584 <li>an HTML parser using the same SAX interface (optionnal)</li>
585 <li>a SAX tree module to build an in-memory DOM representation</li>
586 <li>a tree module to manipulate the DOM representation</li>
587 <li>a validation module using the DOM representation (optionnal)</li>
588 <li>an XPath module for global lookup in a DOM representation
589 (optionnal)</li>
590 <li>a debug module (optionnal)</li>
591</ul>
592
593<p>Graphically this gives the following:</p>
594
595<p><img src="libxml.gif" alt="a graphical view of the various"></p>
596
597<p></p>
598
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000[diff] [blame]599<h2><a name="tree">The tree output</a></h2>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]600
601<p>The parser returns a tree built during the document analysis. The value
Daniel Veillard402e8c82000-02-29 22:57:47 +0000[diff] [blame]602returned is an <strong>xmlDocPtr</strong> (i.e., a pointer to an
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +0000[diff] [blame]603<strong>xmlDoc</strong> structure). This structure contains information such
Daniel Veillard306be992000-07-03 12:38:45 +0000[diff] [blame]604as the file name, the document type, and a <strong>children</strong> pointer
605which is the root of the document (or more exactly the first child under the
606root which is the document). The tree is made of <strong>xmlNode</strong>s,
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]607chained in double-linked lists of siblings and with children&lt;-&gt;parent
Daniel Veillard306be992000-07-03 12:38:45 +0000[diff] [blame]608relationship. An xmlNode can also carry properties (a chain of xmlAttr
609structures). An attribute may have a value which is a list of TEXT or
610ENTITY_REF nodes.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]611
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]612<p>Here is an example (erroneous with respect to the XML spec since there
613should be only one ELEMENT under the root):</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]614
615<p><img src="structure.gif" alt=" structure.gif "></p>
616
617<p>In the source package there is a small program (not installed by default)
Daniel Veillard361d8452000-04-03 19:48:13 +0000[diff] [blame]618called <strong>xmllint</strong> which parses XML files given as argument and
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +0000[diff] [blame]619prints them back as parsed. This is useful for detecting errors both in XML
620code and in the XML parser itself. It has an option <strong>--debug</strong>
621which prints the actual in-memory structure of the document, here is the
622result with the <a href="#example">example</a> given before:</p>
Daniel Veillard10c6a8f1998-10-28 01:00:12 +0000[diff] [blame]623<pre>DOCUMENT
624version=1.0
625standalone=true
626 ELEMENT EXAMPLE
627 ATTRIBUTE prop1
628 TEXT
629 content=gnome is great
630 ATTRIBUTE prop2
631 ENTITY_REF
632 TEXT
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000[diff] [blame]633 content= linux too
Daniel Veillard402e8c82000-02-29 22:57:47 +0000[diff] [blame]634 ELEMENT head
Daniel Veillard10c6a8f1998-10-28 01:00:12 +0000[diff] [blame]635 ELEMENT title
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +0000[diff] [blame]636 TEXT
637 content=Welcome to Gnome
Daniel Veillard10c6a8f1998-10-28 01:00:12 +0000[diff] [blame]638 ELEMENT chapter
639 ELEMENT title
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +0000[diff] [blame]640 TEXT
641 content=The Linux adventure
Daniel Veillard10c6a8f1998-10-28 01:00:12 +0000[diff] [blame]642 ELEMENT p
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +0000[diff] [blame]643 TEXT
644 content=bla bla bla ...
Daniel Veillard10c6a8f1998-10-28 01:00:12 +0000[diff] [blame]645 ELEMENT image
646 ATTRIBUTE href
647 TEXT
648 content=linus.gif
649 ELEMENT p
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +0000[diff] [blame]650 TEXT
651 content=...</pre>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]652
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]653<p>This should be useful for learning the internal representation model.</p>
Daniel Veillardccb09631998-10-27 06:21:04 +0000[diff] [blame]654
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000[diff] [blame]655<h2><a name="interface">The SAX interface</a></h2>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]656
Daniel Veillard402e8c82000-02-29 22:57:47 +0000[diff] [blame]657<p>Sometimes the DOM tree output is just too large to fit reasonably into
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]658memory. In that case (and if you don't expect to save back the XML document
659loaded using libxml), it's better to use the SAX interface of libxml. SAX is a
Daniel Veillard402e8c82000-02-29 22:57:47 +0000[diff] [blame]660<strong>callback-based interface</strong> to the parser. Before parsing, the
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +0000[diff] [blame]661application layer registers a customized set of callbacks which are called by
662the library as it progresses through the XML input.</p>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]663
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]664<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]665libxml, see the <a
666href="http://www.daa.com.au/~james/gnome/xml-sax/xml-sax.html">nice
667documentation</a>.written by <a href="mailto:james@daa.com.au">James
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]668Henstridge</a>.</p>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]669
670<p>You can debug the SAX behaviour by using the <strong>testSAX</strong>
671program located in the gnome-xml module (it's usually not shipped in the
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]672binary packages of libxml, but you can find it in the tar source
Daniel Veillard402e8c82000-02-29 22:57:47 +0000[diff] [blame]673distribution). Here is the sequence of callbacks that would be reported by
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]674testSAX when parsing the example XML document shown earlier:</p>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]675<pre>SAX.setDocumentLocator()
676SAX.startDocument()
677SAX.getEntity(amp)
678SAX.startElement(EXAMPLE, prop1='gnome is great', prop2='&amp;amp; linux too')
679SAX.characters( , 3)
680SAX.startElement(head)
681SAX.characters( , 4)
682SAX.startElement(title)
683SAX.characters(Welcome to Gnome, 16)
684SAX.endElement(title)
685SAX.characters( , 3)
686SAX.endElement(head)
687SAX.characters( , 3)
688SAX.startElement(chapter)
689SAX.characters( , 4)
690SAX.startElement(title)
691SAX.characters(The Linux adventure, 19)
692SAX.endElement(title)
693SAX.characters( , 4)
694SAX.startElement(p)
695SAX.characters(bla bla bla ..., 15)
696SAX.endElement(p)
697SAX.characters( , 4)
698SAX.startElement(image, href='linus.gif')
699SAX.endElement(image)
700SAX.characters( , 4)
701SAX.startElement(p)
702SAX.characters(..., 3)
703SAX.endElement(p)
704SAX.characters( , 3)
705SAX.endElement(chapter)
706SAX.characters( , 1)
707SAX.endElement(EXAMPLE)
708SAX.endDocument()</pre>
709
Daniel Veillard402e8c82000-02-29 22:57:47 +0000[diff] [blame]710<p>Most of the other functionalities of libxml are based on the DOM
711tree-building facility, so nearly everything up to the end of this document
712presupposes the use of the standard DOM tree build. Note that the DOM tree
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]713itself is built by a set of registered default callbacks, without internal
714specific interface.</p>
715
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000[diff] [blame]716<h2><a name="library">The XML library interfaces</a></h2>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]717
718<p>This section is directly intended to help programmers getting bootstrapped
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]719using the XML library from the C language. It is not intended to be extensive.
720I hope the automatically generated documents will provide the completeness
721required, but as a separate set of documents. The interfaces of the XML
722library are by principle low level, there is nearly zero abstraction. Those
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]723interested in a higher level API should <a href="#DOM">look at DOM</a>.</p>
Daniel Veillardccb09631998-10-27 06:21:04 +0000[diff] [blame]724
Daniel Veillardc19fccc2000-07-03 11:52:01 +0000[diff] [blame]725<p>The <a href="html/gnome-xml-parser.html">parser interfaces for XML</a> are
726separated from the <a href="html/gnome-xml-htmlparser.html">HTML parser
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]727interfaces</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]728
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]729<h3><a name="Invoking">Invoking the parser : the pull method</a></h3>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]730
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]731<p>Usually, the first thing to do is to read an XML input. The parser accepts
732documents either from in-memory strings or from files. The functions are
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]733defined in "parser.h":</p>
Daniel Veillard10c6a8f1998-10-28 01:00:12 +0000[diff] [blame]734<dl>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]735 <dt><code>xmlDocPtr xmlParseMemory(char *buffer, int size);</code></dt>
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]736 <dd><p>Parse a null-terminated string containing the document.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]737 </dd>
Daniel Veillard10c6a8f1998-10-28 01:00:12 +0000[diff] [blame]738</dl>
739<dl>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]740 <dt><code>xmlDocPtr xmlParseFile(const char *filename);</code></dt>
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +0000[diff] [blame]741 <dd><p>Parse an XML document contained in a (possibly compressed)
742 file.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]743 </dd>
Daniel Veillard10c6a8f1998-10-28 01:00:12 +0000[diff] [blame]744</dl>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]745
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]746<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]747failure).</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]748
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]749<h3 id="Invoking1">Invoking the parser: the push method</h3>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000[diff] [blame]750
751<p>In order for the application to keep the control when the document is been
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]752fetched (which is common for GUI based programs) libxml provides a push
753interface, too, as of version 1.8.3. Here are the interface functions:</p>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000[diff] [blame]754<pre>xmlParserCtxtPtr xmlCreatePushParserCtxt(xmlSAXHandlerPtr sax,
755 void *user_data,
756 const char *chunk,
757 int size,
758 const char *filename);
759int xmlParseChunk (xmlParserCtxtPtr ctxt,
760 const char *chunk,
761 int size,
762 int terminate);</pre>
763
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]764<p>and here is a simple example showing how to use the interface:</p>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000[diff] [blame]765<pre> FILE *f;
766
767 f = fopen(filename, "r");
768 if (f != NULL) {
769 int res, size = 1024;
770 char chars[1024];
771 xmlParserCtxtPtr ctxt;
772
773 res = fread(chars, 1, 4, f);
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]774 if (res &gt; 0) {
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000[diff] [blame]775 ctxt = xmlCreatePushParserCtxt(NULL, NULL,
776 chars, res, filename);
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]777 while ((res = fread(chars, 1, size, f)) &gt; 0) {
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000[diff] [blame]778 xmlParseChunk(ctxt, chars, res, 0);
779 }
780 xmlParseChunk(ctxt, chars, 0, 1);
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]781 doc = ctxt-&gt;myDoc;
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000[diff] [blame]782 xmlFreeParserCtxt(ctxt);
783 }
784 }</pre>
785
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]786<p>Also note that the HTML parser embedded into libxml also has a push
787interface; the functions are just prefixed by "html" rather than "xml"</p>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000[diff] [blame]788
789<h3 id="Invoking2">Invoking the parser: the SAX interface</h3>
790
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]791<p>A couple of comments can be made, first this mean that the parser is
Daniel Veillard10c6a8f1998-10-28 01:00:12 +0000[diff] [blame]792memory-hungry, first to load the document in memory, second to build the tree.
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000[diff] [blame]793Reading a document without building the tree is possible using the SAX
794interfaces (see SAX.h and <a
795href="http://www.daa.com.au/~james/gnome/xml-sax/xml-sax.html">James
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]796Henstridge's documentation</a>). Note also that the push interface can be
797limited to SAX. Just use the two first arguments of
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000[diff] [blame]798<code>xmlCreatePushParserCtxt()</code>.</p>
Daniel Veillardccb09631998-10-27 06:21:04 +0000[diff] [blame]799
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000[diff] [blame]800<h3><a name="Building">Building a tree from scratch</a></h3>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]801
802<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]803there is a set of functions dedicated to building new elements. (These are
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]804also described in &lt;libxml/tree.h&gt;.) For example, here is a piece of code
Daniel Veillard361d8452000-04-03 19:48:13 +0000[diff] [blame]805that produces the XML document used in the previous examples:</p>
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]806<pre> #include &lt;libxml/tree.h&gt;
Daniel Veillard361d8452000-04-03 19:48:13 +0000[diff] [blame]807 xmlDocPtr doc;
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +0000[diff] [blame]808 xmlNodePtr tree, subtree;
809
810 doc = xmlNewDoc("1.0");
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]811 doc-&gt;children = xmlNewDocNode(doc, NULL, "EXAMPLE", NULL);
812 xmlSetProp(doc-&gt;children, "prop1", "gnome is great");
813 xmlSetProp(doc-&gt;children, "prop2", "&amp; linux too");
814 tree = xmlNewChild(doc-&gt;children, NULL, "head", NULL);
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +0000[diff] [blame]815 subtree = xmlNewChild(tree, NULL, "title", "Welcome to Gnome");
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]816 tree = xmlNewChild(doc-&gt;children, NULL, "chapter", NULL);
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +0000[diff] [blame]817 subtree = xmlNewChild(tree, NULL, "title", "The Linux adventure");
818 subtree = xmlNewChild(tree, NULL, "p", "bla bla bla ...");
819 subtree = xmlNewChild(tree, NULL, "image", NULL);
820 xmlSetProp(subtree, "href", "linus.gif");</pre>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]821
822<p>Not really rocket science ...</p>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +0000[diff] [blame]823
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000[diff] [blame]824<h3><a name="Traversing">Traversing the tree</a></h3>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]825
Daniel Veillard306be992000-07-03 12:38:45 +0000[diff] [blame]826<p>Basically by <a href="html/gnome-xml-tree.html">including "tree.h"</a> your
827code has access to the internal structure of all the elements of the tree. The
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +0000[diff] [blame]828names should be somewhat simple like <strong>parent</strong>,
Daniel Veillard306be992000-07-03 12:38:45 +0000[diff] [blame]829<strong>children</strong>, <strong>next</strong>, <strong>prev</strong>,
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]830<strong>properties</strong>, etc... For example, still with the previous
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000[diff] [blame]831example:</p>
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]832<pre><code>doc-&gt;children-&gt;children-&gt;children</code></pre>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]833
834<p>points to the title element,</p>
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]835<pre>doc-&gt;children-&gt;children-&gt;next-&gt;child-&gt;child</pre>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]836
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +0000[diff] [blame]837<p>points to the text node containing the chapter title "The Linux
838adventure".</p>
Daniel Veillard10c6a8f1998-10-28 01:00:12 +0000[diff] [blame]839
Daniel Veillardb24054a1999-12-18 15:32:46 +0000[diff] [blame]840<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]841present before the document root, so <code>doc-&gt;children</code> may point
842to an element which is not the document Root Element, a function
Daniel Veillard5cb5ab81999-12-21 15:35:29 +0000[diff] [blame]843<code>xmlDocGetRootElement()</code> was added for this purpose.</p>
Daniel Veillardb24054a1999-12-18 15:32:46 +0000[diff] [blame]844
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000[diff] [blame]845<h3><a name="Modifying">Modifying the tree</a></h3>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]846
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]847<p>Functions are provided for reading and writing the document content. Here
Daniel Veillardc19fccc2000-07-03 11:52:01 +0000[diff] [blame]848is an excerpt from the <a href="html/gnome-xml-tree.html">tree API</a>:</p>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +0000[diff] [blame]849<dl>
Daniel Veillarddd6b3671999-09-23 22:19:22 +0000[diff] [blame]850 <dt><code>xmlAttrPtr xmlSetProp(xmlNodePtr node, const xmlChar *name, const
851 xmlChar *value);</code></dt>
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]852 <dd><p>This sets (or changes) an attribute carried by an ELEMENT node. The
853 value can be NULL.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]854 </dd>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +0000[diff] [blame]855</dl>
856<dl>
Daniel Veillarddd6b3671999-09-23 22:19:22 +0000[diff] [blame]857 <dt><code>const xmlChar *xmlGetProp(xmlNodePtr node, const xmlChar
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]858 *name);</code></dt>
Daniel Veillardc92c3042000-09-29 02:42:04 +0000[diff] [blame]859 <dd><p>This function returns a pointer to new copy of the property
860 content. Note that the user must deallocate the result.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]861 </dd>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +0000[diff] [blame]862</dl>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]863
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]864<p>Two functions are provided for reading and writing the text associated with
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +0000[diff] [blame]865elements:</p>
866<dl>
Daniel Veillarddd6b3671999-09-23 22:19:22 +0000[diff] [blame]867 <dt><code>xmlNodePtr xmlStringGetNodeList(xmlDocPtr doc, const xmlChar
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]868 *value);</code></dt>
869 <dd><p>This function takes an "external" string and convert it to one text
870 node or possibly to a list of entity and text nodes. All non-predefined
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +0000[diff] [blame]871 entity references like &amp;Gnome; will be stored internally as entity
872 nodes, hence the result of the function may not be a single node.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]873 </dd>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +0000[diff] [blame]874</dl>
875<dl>
Daniel Veillarddd6b3671999-09-23 22:19:22 +0000[diff] [blame]876 <dt><code>xmlChar *xmlNodeListGetString(xmlDocPtr doc, xmlNodePtr list, int
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]877 inLine);</code></dt>
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +0000[diff] [blame]878 <dd><p>This function is the inverse of
879 <code>xmlStringGetNodeList()</code>. It generates a new string
880 containing the content of the text and entity nodes. Note the extra
881 argument inLine. If this argument is set to 1, the function will expand
882 entity references. For example, instead of returning the &amp;Gnome;
883 XML encoding in the string, it will substitute it with its value (say,
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]884 "GNU Network Object Model Environment"). Set this argument if you want
885 to use the string for non-XML usage like User Interface.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]886 </dd>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +0000[diff] [blame]887</dl>
Daniel Veillard10c6a8f1998-10-28 01:00:12 +0000[diff] [blame]888
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000[diff] [blame]889<h3><a name="Saving">Saving a tree</a></h3>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]890
891<p>Basically 3 options are possible:</p>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +0000[diff] [blame]892<dl>
Daniel Veillarddd6b3671999-09-23 22:19:22 +0000[diff] [blame]893 <dt><code>void xmlDocDumpMemory(xmlDocPtr cur, xmlChar**mem, int
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]894 *size);</code></dt>
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]895 <dd><p>Returns a buffer into which the document has been saved.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]896 </dd>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +0000[diff] [blame]897</dl>
898<dl>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]899 <dt><code>extern void xmlDocDump(FILE *f, xmlDocPtr doc);</code></dt>
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]900 <dd><p>Dumps a document to an open file descriptor.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]901 </dd>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +0000[diff] [blame]902</dl>
903<dl>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]904 <dt><code>int xmlSaveFile(const char *filename, xmlDocPtr cur);</code></dt>
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +0000[diff] [blame]905 <dd><p>Saves the document to a file. In this case, the compression
906 interface is triggered if it has been turned on.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]907 </dd>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +0000[diff] [blame]908</dl>
Daniel Veillard10c6a8f1998-10-28 01:00:12 +0000[diff] [blame]909
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000[diff] [blame]910<h3><a name="Compressio">Compression</a></h3>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]911
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]912<p>The library transparently handles compression when doing file-based
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +0000[diff] [blame]913accesses. The level of compression on saves can be turned on either globally
914or individually for one file:</p>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +0000[diff] [blame]915<dl>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]916 <dt><code>int xmlGetDocCompressMode (xmlDocPtr doc);</code></dt>
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]917 <dd><p>Gets the document compression ratio (0-9).</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]918 </dd>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +0000[diff] [blame]919</dl>
920<dl>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]921 <dt><code>void xmlSetDocCompressMode (xmlDocPtr doc, int mode);</code></dt>
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]922 <dd><p>Sets the document compression ratio.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]923 </dd>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +0000[diff] [blame]924</dl>
925<dl>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]926 <dt><code>int xmlGetCompressMode(void);</code></dt>
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]927 <dd><p>Gets the default compression ratio.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]928 </dd>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +0000[diff] [blame]929</dl>
930<dl>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]931 <dt><code>void xmlSetCompressMode(int mode);</code></dt>
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]932 <dd><p>Sets the default compression ratio.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]933 </dd>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +0000[diff] [blame]934</dl>
935
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000[diff] [blame]936<h2><a name="Entities">Entities or no entities</a></h2>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]937
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]938<p>Entities in principle are similar to simple C macros. An entity defines an
939abbreviation for a given string that you can reuse many times throughout the
940content of your document. Entities are especially useful when a given string
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +0000[diff] [blame]941may occur frequently within a document, or to confine the change needed to a
942document to a restricted area in the internal subset of the document (at the
943beginning). Example:</p>
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]944<pre>1 &lt;?xml version="1.0"?&gt;
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]9452 &lt;!DOCTYPE EXAMPLE SYSTEM "example.dtd" [
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]9463 &lt;!ENTITY xml "Extensible Markup Language"&gt;
9474 ]&gt;
9485 &lt;EXAMPLE&gt;
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]9496 &amp;xml;
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]9507 &lt;/EXAMPLE&gt;</pre>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]951
952<p>Line 3 declares the xml entity. Line 6 uses the xml entity, by prefixing
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000[diff] [blame]953it's name with '&amp;' and following it by ';' without any spaces added. There
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]954are 5 predefined entities in libxml allowing you to escape charaters with
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]955predefined meaning in some parts of the xml document content:
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]956<strong>&amp;lt;</strong> for the character '&lt;', <strong>&amp;gt;</strong>
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]957for the character '&gt;', <strong>&amp;apos;</strong> for the character ''',
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]958<strong>&amp;quot;</strong> for the character '"', and
959<strong>&amp;amp;</strong> for the character '&amp;'.</p>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]960
961<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]962substitute an entity's content so that you can see the replacement text in
963your application. Or you may prefer to keep entity references as such in the
964content to be able to save the document back without losing this usually
965precious information (if the user went through the pain of explicitly defining
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]966entities, he may have a a rather negative attitude if you blindly susbtitute
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]967them as saving time). The <a
Daniel Veillardc19fccc2000-07-03 11:52:01 +0000[diff] [blame]968href="html/gnome-xml-parser.html#XMLSUBSTITUTEENTITIESDEFAULT">xmlSubstituteEntitiesDefault()</a>
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]969function allows you to check and change the behaviour, which is to not
970substitute entities by default.</p>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]971
972<p>Here is the DOM tree built by libxml for the previous document in the
973default case:</p>
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]974<pre>/gnome/src/gnome-xml -&gt; ./xmllint --debug test/ent1
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]975DOCUMENT
976version=1.0
977 ELEMENT EXAMPLE
978 TEXT
979 content=
980 ENTITY_REF
981 INTERNAL_GENERAL_ENTITY xml
982 content=Extensible Markup Language
983 TEXT
984 content=</pre>
985
986<p>And here is the result when substituting entities:</p>
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]987<pre>/gnome/src/gnome-xml -&gt; ./tester --debug --noent test/ent1
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]988DOCUMENT
989version=1.0
990 ELEMENT EXAMPLE
991 TEXT
992 content= Extensible Markup Language</pre>
993
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]994<p>So, entities or no entities? Basically, it depends on your use case. I
995suggest that you keep the non-substituting default behaviour and avoid using
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]996entities in your XML document or data if you are not willing to handle the
997entity references elements in the DOM tree.</p>
998
999<p>Note that at save time libxml enforce the conversion of the predefined
1000entities where necessary to prevent well-formedness problems, and will also
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]1001transparently replace those with chars (i.e., it will not generate entity
1002reference elements in the DOM tree or call the reference() SAX callback when
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]1003finding them in the input).</p>
1004
Daniel Veillard7b9c4b72000-08-25 16:26:50 +0000[diff] [blame]1005<p><span style="background-color: #FF0000">WARNING</span>: handling entities
1006on top of libxml SAX interface is difficult !!! If you plan to use
1007non-predefined entities in your documents, then the learning cuvre to handle
1008then using the SAX API may be long. If you plan to use complex document, I
1009strongly suggest you consider using the DOM interface instead and let libxml
Daniel Veillard8c6d6af2000-08-25 17:14:13 +0000[diff] [blame]1010deal with the complexity rather than trying to do it yourself.</p>
Daniel Veillard7b9c4b72000-08-25 16:26:50 +0000[diff] [blame]1011
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000[diff] [blame]1012<h2><a name="Namespaces">Namespaces</a></h2>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]1013
Daniel Veillardec303412000-03-24 13:41:54 +0000[diff] [blame]1014<p>The libxml library implements <a
1015href="http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml-names/">XML namespaces</a> support by
1016recognizing namespace contructs in the input, and does namespace lookup
1017automatically when building the DOM tree. A namespace declaration is
1018associated with an in-memory structure and all elements or attributes within
1019that namespace point to it. Hence testing the namespace is a simple and fast
1020equality operation at the user level.</p>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]1021
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +0000[diff] [blame]1022<p>I suggest that people using libxml use a namespace, and declare it in the
1023root element of their document as the default namespace. Then they don't need
1024to use the prefix in the content but we will have a basis for future semantic
1025refinement and merging of data from different sources. This doesn't augment
1026significantly the size of the XML output, but significantly increase its value
Daniel Veillardec303412000-03-24 13:41:54 +0000[diff] [blame]1027in the long-term. Example:</p>
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]1028<pre>&lt;mydoc xmlns="http://mydoc.example.org/schemas/"&gt;
1029 &lt;elem1&gt;...&lt;/elem1&gt;
1030 &lt;elem2&gt;...&lt;/elem2&gt;
1031&lt;/mydoc&gt;</pre>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]1032
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]1033<p>Concerning the namespace value, this has to be an URL, but the URL doesn't
Daniel Veillardec303412000-03-24 13:41:54 +0000[diff] [blame]1034have to point to any existing resource on the Web. It will bind all the
1035element and atributes with that URL. I suggest to use an URL within a domain
1036you control, and that the URL should contain some kind of version information
1037if possible. For example, <code>"http://www.gnome.org/gnumeric/1.0/"</code> is
Daniel Veillard361d8452000-04-03 19:48:13 +0000[diff] [blame]1038a good namespace scheme.</p>
Daniel Veillardec303412000-03-24 13:41:54 +0000[diff] [blame]1039
1040<p>Then when you load a file, make sure that a namespace carrying the
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]1041version-independent prefix is installed on the root element of your document,
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]1042and if the version information don't match something you know, warn the user
1043and 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]1044namespace checking on the prefix value. &lt;foo:text&gt; may be exactly the
1045same as &lt;bar:text&gt; in another document. What really matter is the URI
1046associated with the element or the attribute, not the prefix string (which is
1047just a shortcut for the full URI). In libxml element and attributes have a
Daniel Veillardec303412000-03-24 13:41:54 +0000[diff] [blame]1048<code>ns</code> field pointing to an xmlNs structure detailing the namespace
1049prefix and it's URI.</p>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]1050
1051<p>@@Interfaces@@</p>
1052
1053<p>@@Examples@@</p>
1054
1055<p>Usually people object using namespace in the case of validation, I object
1056this and will make sure that using namespaces won't break validity checking,
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +0000[diff] [blame]1057so even is you plan to use or currently are using validation I strongly
1058suggest adding namespaces to your document. A default namespace scheme
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]1059<code>xmlns="http://...."</code> should not break validity even on less
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]1060flexible parsers. Now using namespace to mix and differentiate content coming
1061from multiple DTDs will certainly break current validation schemes. I will try
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]1062to provide ways to do this, but this may not be portable or standardized.</p>
1063
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000[diff] [blame]1064<h2><a name="Validation">Validation, or are you afraid of DTDs ?</a></h2>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]1065
1066<p>Well what is validation and what is a DTD ?</p>
1067
1068<p>Validation is the process of checking a document against a set of
1069construction rules, a <strong>DTD</strong> (Document Type Definition) is such
1070a set of rules.</p>
1071
1072<p>The validation process and building DTDs are the two most difficult parts
1073of XML life cycle. Briefly a DTD defines all the possibles element to be
1074found within your document, what is the formal shape of your document tree (by
1075defining the allowed content of an element, either text, a regular expression
Daniel Veillard306be992000-07-03 12:38:45 +0000[diff] [blame]1076for the allowed list of children, or mixed content i.e. both text and
1077children). The DTD also defines the allowed attributes for all elements and
1078the types of the attributes. For more detailed informations, I suggest to read
1079the related parts of the XML specification, the examples found under
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]1080gnome-xml/test/valid/dtd and the large amount of books available on XML. The
1081dia example in gnome-xml/test/valid should be both simple and complete enough
1082to allow you to build your own.</p>
1083
1084<p>A word of warning, building a good DTD which will fit your needs of your
1085application in the long-term is far from trivial, however the extra level of
1086quality it can insure is well worth the price for some sets of applications or
1087if you already have already a DTD defined for your application field.</p>
1088
1089<p>The validation is not completely finished but in a (very IMHO) usable
1090state. Until a real validation interface is defined the way to do it is to
1091define and set the <strong>xmlDoValidityCheckingDefaultValue</strong> external
1092variable to 1, this will of course be changed at some point:</p>
1093
1094<p>extern int xmlDoValidityCheckingDefaultValue;</p>
1095
1096<p>...</p>
1097
1098<p>xmlDoValidityCheckingDefaultValue = 1;</p>
1099
1100<p></p>
1101
1102<p>To handle external entities, use the function
1103<strong>xmlSetExternalEntityLoader</strong>(xmlExternalEntityLoader f); to
1104link in you HTTP/FTP/Entities database library to the standard libxml
1105core.</p>
1106
1107<p>@@interfaces@@</p>
1108
Daniel Veillard35008381999-10-25 13:15:52 +0000[diff] [blame]1109<h2><a name="DOM"></a><a name="Principles">DOM Principles</a></h2>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1110
1111<p><a href="http://www.w3.org/DOM/">DOM</a> stands for the <em>Document Object
Daniel Veillardccb09631998-10-27 06:21:04 +0000[diff] [blame]1112Model</em> this is an API for accessing XML or HTML structured documents.
1113Native support for DOM in Gnome is on the way (module gnome-dom), and it will
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +0000[diff] [blame]1114be based on gnome-xml. This will be a far cleaner interface to manipulate XML
Daniel Veillardc08a2c61999-09-08 21:35:25 +0000[diff] [blame]1115files within Gnome since it won't expose the internal structure. DOM defines a
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +0000[diff] [blame]1116set of IDL (or Java) interfaces allowing to traverse and manipulate a
1117document. The DOM library will allow accessing and modifying "live" documents
1118presents on other programs like this:</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1119
1120<p><img src="DOM.gif" alt=" DOM.gif "></p>
1121
1122<p>This should help greatly doing things like modifying a gnumeric spreadsheet
Daniel Veillardccb09631998-10-27 06:21:04 +0000[diff] [blame]1123embedded in a GWP document for example.</p>
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +0000[diff] [blame]1124
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]1125<p>The current DOM implementation on top of libxml is the <a
1126href="http://cvs.gnome.org/lxr/source/gdome/">gdome Gnome module</a>, this is
1127a full DOM interface, thanks to <a href="mailto:raph@levien.com">Raph
1128Levien</a>.</p>
1129
1130<p>The gnome-dom module in the Gnome CVS base is obsolete</p>
1131
Daniel Veillard35008381999-10-25 13:15:52 +0000[diff] [blame]1132<h2><a name="Example"></a><a name="real">A real example</a></h2>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1133
1134<p>Here is a real size example, where the actual content of the application
1135data 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]1136a proposal to keep a database of jobs related to Gnome, with an XML based
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1137storage structure. Here is an <a href="gjobs.xml">XML encoded jobs
1138base</a>:</p>
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]1139<pre>&lt;?xml version="1.0"?&gt;
1140&lt;gjob:Helping xmlns:gjob="http://www.gnome.org/some-location"&gt;
1141 &lt;gjob:Jobs&gt;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +0000[diff] [blame]1142
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]1143 &lt;gjob:Job&gt;
1144 &lt;gjob:Project ID="3"/&gt;
1145 &lt;gjob:Application&gt;GBackup&lt;/gjob:Application&gt;
1146 &lt;gjob:Category&gt;Development&lt;/gjob:Category&gt;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +0000[diff] [blame]1147
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]1148 &lt;gjob:Update&gt;
1149 &lt;gjob:Status&gt;Open&lt;/gjob:Status&gt;
1150 &lt;gjob:Modified&gt;Mon, 07 Jun 1999 20:27:45 -0400 MET DST&lt;/gjob:Modified&gt;
1151 &lt;gjob:Salary&gt;USD 0.00&lt;/gjob:Salary&gt;
1152 &lt;/gjob:Update&gt;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +0000[diff] [blame]1153
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]1154 &lt;gjob:Developers&gt;
1155 &lt;gjob:Developer&gt;
1156 &lt;/gjob:Developer&gt;
1157 &lt;/gjob:Developers&gt;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +0000[diff] [blame]1158
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]1159 &lt;gjob:Contact&gt;
1160 &lt;gjob:Person&gt;Nathan Clemons&lt;/gjob:Person&gt;
1161 &lt;gjob:Email&gt;nathan@windsofstorm.net&lt;/gjob:Email&gt;
1162 &lt;gjob:Company&gt;
1163 &lt;/gjob:Company&gt;
1164 &lt;gjob:Organisation&gt;
1165 &lt;/gjob:Organisation&gt;
1166 &lt;gjob:Webpage&gt;
1167 &lt;/gjob:Webpage&gt;
1168 &lt;gjob:Snailmail&gt;
1169 &lt;/gjob:Snailmail&gt;
1170 &lt;gjob:Phone&gt;
1171 &lt;/gjob:Phone&gt;
1172 &lt;/gjob:Contact&gt;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +0000[diff] [blame]1173
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]1174 &lt;gjob:Requirements&gt;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +0000[diff] [blame]1175 The program should be released as free software, under the GPL.
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]1176 &lt;/gjob:Requirements&gt;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +0000[diff] [blame]1177
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]1178 &lt;gjob:Skills&gt;
1179 &lt;/gjob:Skills&gt;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +0000[diff] [blame]1180
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]1181 &lt;gjob:Details&gt;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +0000[diff] [blame]1182 A GNOME based system that will allow a superuser to configure
1183 compressed and uncompressed files and/or file systems to be backed
1184 up with a supported media in the system. This should be able to
1185 perform via find commands generating a list of files that are passed
1186 to tar, dd, cpio, cp, gzip, etc., to be directed to the tape machine
1187 or via operations performed on the filesystem itself. Email
1188 notification and GUI status display very important.
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]1189 &lt;/gjob:Details&gt;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +0000[diff] [blame]1190
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]1191 &lt;/gjob:Job&gt;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +0000[diff] [blame]1192
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]1193 &lt;/gjob:Jobs&gt;
1194&lt;/gjob:Helping&gt;</pre>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1195
1196<p>While loading the XML file into an internal DOM tree is a matter of calling
1197only a couple of functions, browsing the tree to gather the informations and
1198generate the internals structures is harder, and more error prone.</p>
1199
1200<p>The suggested principle is to be tolerant with respect to the input
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +0000[diff] [blame]1201structure. For example, the ordering of the attributes is not significant,
1202Cthe XML specification is clear about it. It's also usually a good idea to not
Daniel Veillard306be992000-07-03 12:38:45 +0000[diff] [blame]1203be dependent of the orders of the children of a given node, unless it really
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +0000[diff] [blame]1204makes things harder. Here is some code to parse the informations for a
1205person:</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1206<pre>/*
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +0000[diff] [blame]1207 * A person record
1208 */
1209typedef struct person {
1210 char *name;
1211 char *email;
1212 char *company;
1213 char *organisation;
1214 char *smail;
1215 char *webPage;
1216 char *phone;
1217} person, *personPtr;
1218
1219/*
1220 * And the code needed to parse it
1221 */
1222personPtr parsePerson(xmlDocPtr doc, xmlNsPtr ns, xmlNodePtr cur) {
1223 personPtr ret = NULL;
1224
1225DEBUG("parsePerson\n");
1226 /*
1227 * allocate the struct
1228 */
1229 ret = (personPtr) malloc(sizeof(person));
1230 if (ret == NULL) {
1231 fprintf(stderr,"out of memory\n");
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1232 return(NULL);
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +0000[diff] [blame]1233 }
1234 memset(ret, 0, sizeof(person));
1235
1236 /* We don't care what the top level element name is */
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]1237 cur = cur-&gt;xmlChildrenNode;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +0000[diff] [blame]1238 while (cur != NULL) {
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]1239 if ((!strcmp(cur-&gt;name, "Person")) &amp;&amp; (cur-&gt;ns == ns))
1240 ret-&gt;name = xmlNodeListGetString(doc, cur-&gt;xmlChildrenNode, 1);
1241 if ((!strcmp(cur-&gt;name, "Email")) &amp;&amp; (cur-&gt;ns == ns))
1242 ret-&gt;email = xmlNodeListGetString(doc, cur-&gt;xmlChildrenNode, 1);
1243 cur = cur-&gt;next;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +0000[diff] [blame]1244 }
1245
1246 return(ret);
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1247}</pre>
1248
1249<p>Here is a couple of things to notice:</p>
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +0000[diff] [blame]1250<ul>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1251 <li>Usually a recursive parsing style is the more convenient one, XML data
1252 being by nature subject to repetitive constructs and usualy exibit highly
1253 stuctured patterns.</li>
1254 <li>The two arguments of type <em>xmlDocPtr</em> and <em>xmlNsPtr</em>, i.e.
1255 the pointer to the global XML document and the namespace reserved to the
1256 application. Document wide information are needed for example to decode
1257 entities and it's a good coding practice to define a namespace for your
1258 application set of data and test that the element and attributes you're
1259 analyzing actually pertains to your application space. This is done by a
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]1260 simple equality test (cur-&gt;ns == ns).</li>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1261 <li>To retrieve text and attributes value, it is suggested to use the
1262 function <em>xmlNodeListGetString</em> to gather all the text and entity
1263 reference nodes generated by the DOM output and produce an single text
1264 string.</li>
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +0000[diff] [blame]1265</ul>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1266
1267<p>Here is another piece of code used to parse another level of the
1268structure:</p>
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]1269<pre>#include &lt;libxml/tree.h&gt;
Daniel Veillard361d8452000-04-03 19:48:13 +0000[diff] [blame]1270/*
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +0000[diff] [blame]1271 * a Description for a Job
1272 */
1273typedef struct job {
1274 char *projectID;
1275 char *application;
1276 char *category;
1277 personPtr contact;
1278 int nbDevelopers;
1279 personPtr developers[100]; /* using dynamic alloc is left as an exercise */
1280} job, *jobPtr;
1281
1282/*
1283 * And the code needed to parse it
1284 */
1285jobPtr parseJob(xmlDocPtr doc, xmlNsPtr ns, xmlNodePtr cur) {
1286 jobPtr ret = NULL;
1287
1288DEBUG("parseJob\n");
1289 /*
1290 * allocate the struct
1291 */
1292 ret = (jobPtr) malloc(sizeof(job));
1293 if (ret == NULL) {
1294 fprintf(stderr,"out of memory\n");
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1295 return(NULL);
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +0000[diff] [blame]1296 }
1297 memset(ret, 0, sizeof(job));
1298
1299 /* We don't care what the top level element name is */
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]1300 cur = cur-&gt;xmlChildrenNode;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +0000[diff] [blame]1301 while (cur != NULL) {
1302
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]1303 if ((!strcmp(cur-&gt;name, "Project")) &amp;&amp; (cur-&gt;ns == ns)) {
1304 ret-&gt;projectID = xmlGetProp(cur, "ID");
1305 if (ret-&gt;projectID == NULL) {
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1306 fprintf(stderr, "Project has no ID\n");
1307 }
1308 }
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]1309 if ((!strcmp(cur-&gt;name, "Application")) &amp;&amp; (cur-&gt;ns == ns))
1310 ret-&gt;application = xmlNodeListGetString(doc, cur-&gt;xmlChildrenNode, 1);
1311 if ((!strcmp(cur-&gt;name, "Category")) &amp;&amp; (cur-&gt;ns == ns))
1312 ret-&gt;category = xmlNodeListGetString(doc, cur-&gt;xmlChildrenNode, 1);
1313 if ((!strcmp(cur-&gt;name, "Contact")) &amp;&amp; (cur-&gt;ns == ns))
1314 ret-&gt;contact = parsePerson(doc, ns, cur);
1315 cur = cur-&gt;next;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +0000[diff] [blame]1316 }
1317
1318 return(ret);
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1319}</pre>
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +0000[diff] [blame]1320
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1321<p>One can notice that once used to it, writing this kind of code is quite
1322simple, but boring. Ultimately, it could be possble to write stubbers taking
1323either C data structure definitions, a set of XML examples or an XML DTD and
1324produce the code needed to import and export the content between C data and
1325XML storage. This is left as an exercise to the reader :-)</p>
1326
Daniel Veillard6f0adb52000-07-03 11:41:26 +0000[diff] [blame]1327<p>Feel free to use <a href="example/gjobread.c">the code for the full C
1328parsing example</a> as a template, it is also available with Makefile in the
1329Gnome CVS base under gnome-xml/example</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1330
Daniel Veillardc310d562000-06-23 18:32:15 +0000[diff] [blame]1331<h2><a name="Contributi">Contributions</a></h2>
1332<ul>
1333 <li><a href="mailto:ari@btigate.com">Ari Johnson</a> provides a C++ wrapper
1334 for libxml:
1335 <p>Website: <a
1336 href="http://lusis.org/~ari/xml++/">http://lusis.org/~ari/xml++/</a></p>
1337 <p>Download: <a
1338 href="http://lusis.org/~ari/xml++/libxml++.tar.gz">http://lusis.org/~ari/xml++/libxml++.tar.gz</a></p>
1339 </li>
1340 <li><a href="mailto:doolin@cs.utk.edu">David Doolin</a> provides a
1341 precompiled Windows version
1342 <p><a
1343 href="http://www.ce.berkeley.edu/~doolin/code/libxmlwin32/">http://www.ce.berkeley.edu/~doolin/code/libxmlwin32/</a></p>
1344 </li>
Daniel Veillard3f6f7f62000-06-30 17:58:25 +0000[diff] [blame]1345 <li><a href="mailto:fnatter@gmx.net">Felix Natter</a> provided <a
1346 href="libxml-doc.el">an emacs module</a> to lookup libxml functions
1347 documentation</li>
Daniel Veillardc310d562000-06-23 18:32:15 +0000[diff] [blame]1348 <li><a href="mailto:sherwin@nlm.nih.gov">Ziying Sherwin</a> provided <a
1349 href="http://xmlsoft.org/messages/0488.html">man pages</a> (not yet
1350 integrated in the distribution)</li>
1351</ul>
1352
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]1353<p></p>
1354
1355<p><a href="mailto:Daniel.Veillard@w3.org">Daniel Veillard</a></p>
1356
Daniel Veillard29a11cc2000-10-25 13:32:39 +0000[diff] [blame^]1357<p>$Id: xml.html,v 1.56 2000/10/21 09:25:52 veillard Exp $</p>
Daniel Veillardccb09631998-10-27 06:21:04 +0000[diff] [blame]1358</body>
1359</html>