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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 Veillardec78c0f2000-08-25 10:25:23 +0000[diff] [blame]5 <title>The XML C library for Gnome</title>
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame^]6 <meta name="GENERATOR" content="amaya V5.0">
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"
Daniel Veillardb370a742001-06-09 16:58:47 +0000[diff] [blame]13alt="W3C Logo"></a><a href="http://www.redhat.com"><img src="redhat.gif"
14alt="Red Hat Logo"></a></p>
Daniel Veillardec303412000-03-24 13:41:54 +0000[diff] [blame]15
Daniel Veillardec78c0f2000-08-25 10:25:23 +0000[diff] [blame]16<h1 align="center">The XML C library for Gnome</h1>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]17
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]18<h2 style="text-align: center">libxml, a.k.a. gnome-xml</h2>
19
20<p></p>
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000[diff] [blame]21<ul>
22 <li><a href="#Introducti">Introduction</a></li>
23 <li><a href="#Documentat">Documentation</a></li>
Daniel Veillardd5f97f82000-09-17 16:38:14 +0000[diff] [blame]24 <li><a href="#Reporting">Reporting bugs and getting help</a></li>
25 <li><a href="#help">how to help</a></li>
Daniel Veillard10a2c651999-12-12 13:03:50 +0000[diff] [blame]26 <li><a href="#Downloads">Downloads</a></li>
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000[diff] [blame]27 <li><a href="#News">News</a></li>
28 <li><a href="#XML">XML</a></li>
Daniel Veillard82687162001-01-22 15:32:01 +0000[diff] [blame]29 <li><a href="#XSLT">XSLT</a></li>
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000[diff] [blame]30 <li><a href="#tree">The tree output</a></li>
31 <li><a href="#interface">The SAX interface</a></li>
32 <li><a href="#library">The XML library interfaces</a>
33 <ul>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000[diff] [blame]34 <li><a href="#Invoking">Invoking the parser: the pull way</a></li>
35 <li><a href="#Invoking">Invoking the parser: the push way</a></li>
36 <li><a href="#Invoking2">Invoking the parser: the SAX interface</a></li>
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000[diff] [blame]37 <li><a href="#Building">Building a tree from scratch</a></li>
38 <li><a href="#Traversing">Traversing the tree</a></li>
39 <li><a href="#Modifying">Modifying the tree</a></li>
40 <li><a href="#Saving">Saving the tree</a></li>
41 <li><a href="#Compressio">Compression</a></li>
42 </ul>
43 </li>
44 <li><a href="#Entities">Entities or no entities</a></li>
45 <li><a href="#Namespaces">Namespaces</a></li>
46 <li><a href="#Validation">Validation</a></li>
47 <li><a href="#Principles">DOM principles</a></li>
48 <li><a href="#real">A real example</a></li>
Daniel Veillard96984452000-08-31 13:50:12 +0000[diff] [blame]49 <li><a href="#Contributi">Contributions</a></li>
50</ul>
51
52<p>Separate documents:</p>
53<ul>
54 <li><a href="upgrade.html">upgrade instructions for migrating to
55 libxml2</a></li>
56 <li><a href="encoding.html">libxml Internationalization support</a></li>
57 <li><a href="xmlio.html">libxml Input/Output interfaces</a></li>
Daniel Veillard189446d2000-10-13 10:23:06 +0000[diff] [blame]58 <li><a href="xmlmem.html">libxml Memory interfaces</a></li>
Daniel Veillard300f7d62000-11-24 13:04:04 +0000[diff] [blame]59 <li><a href="xmldtd.html">a short introduction about DTDs and
60 libxml</a></li>
Daniel Veillard6e6a6cc2001-02-15 15:55:44 +0000[diff] [blame]61 <li><a href="http://xmlsoft.org/XSLT/">the libxslt page</a></li>
Daniel Veillard7b06bcb2001-06-22 16:03:51 +0000[diff] [blame]62 <li><a href="http://www.cs.unibo.it/~casarini/gdome2/">the gdome2 page: a
63 standard DOM interface for libxml2</a></li>
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000[diff] [blame]64</ul>
65
66<h2><a name="Introducti">Introduction</a></h2>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]67
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +0000[diff] [blame]68<p>This document describes libxml, the <a
Daniel Veillardec78c0f2000-08-25 10:25:23 +0000[diff] [blame]69href="http://www.w3.org/XML/">XML</a> C library developped for the <a
70href="http://www.gnome.org/">Gnome</a> project. <a
71href="http://www.w3.org/XML/">XML is a standard</a> for building tag-based
72structured documents/data.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]73
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000[diff] [blame]74<p>Here are some key points about libxml:</p>
75<ul>
Daniel Veillard189446d2000-10-13 10:23:06 +0000[diff] [blame]76 <li>Libxml exports Push and Pull type parser interfaces for both XML and
77 HTML.</li>
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000[diff] [blame]78 <li>Libxml can do DTD validation at parse time, using a parsed document
79 instance, or with an arbitrary DTD.</li>
80 <li>Libxml now includes nearly complete <a
Daniel Veillard8c2ecaf2001-07-10 17:53:07 +0000[diff] [blame]81 href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xpath">XPath</a>, <a
82 href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xptr">XPointer</a> and <a
83 href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xinclude">XInclude</a> implementations.</li>
Daniel Veillardec78c0f2000-08-25 10:25:23 +0000[diff] [blame]84 <li>It is written in plain C, making as few assumptions as possible, and
Daniel Veillard189446d2000-10-13 10:23:06 +0000[diff] [blame]85 sticking closely to ANSI C/POSIX for easy embedding. Works on
Daniel Veillardab8500d2000-10-15 21:06:19 +0000[diff] [blame]86 Linux/Unix/Windows, ported to a number of other platforms.</li>
Daniel Veillardec70e912001-02-26 20:10:45 +0000[diff] [blame]87 <li>Basic support for HTTP and FTP client allowing aplications to fetch
88 remote resources</li>
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000[diff] [blame]89 <li>The design is modular, most of the extensions can be compiled out.</li>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000[diff] [blame]90 <li>The internal document repesentation is as close as possible to the <a
91 href="http://www.w3.org/DOM/">DOM</a> interfaces.</li>
92 <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]93 like interface</a>; the interface is designed to be compatible with <a
94 href="http://www.jclark.com/xml/expat.html">Expat</a>.</li>
Daniel Veillardec303412000-03-24 13:41:54 +0000[diff] [blame]95 <li>This library is released both under the <a
96 href="http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Legal/copyright-software-19980720.html">W3C
Daniel Veillard189446d2000-10-13 10:23:06 +0000[diff] [blame]97 IPR</a> and the <a href="http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/lesser.html">GNU
98 LGPL</a>. Use either at your convenience, basically this should make
99 everybody happy, if not, drop me a mail.</li>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000[diff] [blame]100</ul>
Daniel Veillardccb09631998-10-27 06:21:04 +0000[diff] [blame]101
Daniel Veillarde0c1d722001-03-21 10:28:36 +0000[diff] [blame]102<p>Warning: unless you are forced to because your application links with a
103Gnome library requiring it, <strong><span
104style="background-color: #FF0000">Do Not Use libxml1</span></strong>, use
105libxml2</p>
106
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000[diff] [blame]107<h2><a name="Documentat">Documentation</a></h2>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]108
Daniel Veillard402e8c82000-02-29 22:57:47 +0000[diff] [blame]109<p>There are some on-line resources about using libxml:</p>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000[diff] [blame]110<ol>
Daniel Veillard365e13b2000-07-02 07:56:37 +0000[diff] [blame]111 <li>Check the <a href="FAQ.html">FAQ</a></li>
Daniel Veillardc19fccc2000-07-03 11:52:01 +0000[diff] [blame]112 <li>Check the <a href="http://xmlsoft.org/html/libxml-lib.html">extensive
Daniel Veillard8c6d6af2000-08-25 17:14:13 +0000[diff] [blame]113 documentation</a> automatically extracted from code comments (using <a
114 href="http://cvs.gnome.org/bonsai/rview.cgi?cvsroot=/cvs/gnome&amp;dir=gtk-doc">gtk
115 doc</a>).</li>
Daniel Veillard8d869642000-07-14 12:12:59 +0000[diff] [blame]116 <li>Look at the documentation about <a href="encoding.html">libxml
117 internationalization support</a></li>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000[diff] [blame]118 <li>This page provides a global overview and <a href="#real">some
Daniel Veillard402e8c82000-02-29 22:57:47 +0000[diff] [blame]119 examples</a> on how to use libxml.</li>
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame^]120 <li><a href="mailto:james@daa.com.au">James Henstridge</a>
121 wrote <a
Daniel Veillard402e8c82000-02-29 22:57:47 +0000[diff] [blame]122 href="http://www.daa.com.au/~james/gnome/xml-sax/xml-sax.html">some nice
123 documentation</a> explaining how to use the libxml SAX interface.</li>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000[diff] [blame]124 <li>George Lebl wrote <a
125 href="http://www-4.ibm.com/software/developer/library/gnome3/">an article
Daniel Veillard402e8c82000-02-29 22:57:47 +0000[diff] [blame]126 for IBM developerWorks</a> about using libxml.</li>
Daniel Veillardec303412000-03-24 13:41:54 +0000[diff] [blame]127 <li>Check <a href="http://cvs.gnome.org/lxr/source/gnome-xml/TODO">the TODO
128 file</a></li>
129 <li>Read the <a href="upgrade.html">1.x to 2.x upgrade path</a>. If you are
130 starting a new project using libxml you should really use the 2.x
131 version.</li>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000[diff] [blame]132 <li>And don't forget to look at the <a href="/messages/">mailing-list
Daniel Veillardc310d562000-06-23 18:32:15 +0000[diff] [blame]133 archive</a>.</li>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000[diff] [blame]134</ol>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]135
Daniel Veillardd5f97f82000-09-17 16:38:14 +0000[diff] [blame]136<h2><a name="Reporting">Reporting bugs and getting help</a></h2>
Daniel Veillard4c3a2031999-11-19 17:46:26 +0000[diff] [blame]137
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame^]138<p>Well, bugs or missing features are always possible, and I will make a
139point of fixing them in a timely fashion. The best way to report a bug is to
140use the <a href="http://bugzilla.gnome.org/buglist.cgi?product=libxml">Gnome
141bug tracking database</a> (make sure to use the "libxml" module name). I look
142at reports there regularly and it's good to have a reminder when a bug is
143still open. Check the <a
144href="http://bugzilla.gnome.org/bugwritinghelp.html">instructions on
145reporting bugs</a> and be sure to specify that the bug is for the package
146libxml.</p>
Daniel Veillard4c3a2031999-11-19 17:46:26 +0000[diff] [blame]147
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000[diff] [blame]148<p>There is also a mailing-list <a
Daniel Veillard3197f162001-04-04 00:40:08 +0000[diff] [blame]149href="mailto:xml@gnome.org">xml@gnome.org</a> for libxml, with an <a
150href="http://mail.gnome.org/archives/xml/">on-line archive</a> (<a
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame^]151href="http://xmlsoft.org/messages">old</a>). To subscribe to this list,
152please visit the <a
153href="http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/xml">associated Web</a> page and
154follow the instructions. <strong>Do not send code, I won't debug it</strong>
155(but patches are really appreciated!).</p>
Daniel Veillard234547b2001-07-05 09:46:10 +0000[diff] [blame]156
157<p>Check the following too before posting:</p>
158<ul>
159 <li>make sure you are <a href="ftp://xmlsoft.org/">using a recent
160 version</a>, and that the problem still shows up in those</li>
161 <li>check the <a href="http://mail.gnome.org/archives/xml/">list
162 archives</a> to see if the problem was reported already, in this case
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame^]163 there is probably a fix available, similary check the <a href="http://bugzilla.gnome.org/buglist.cgi?product=libxml&amp;product=libxslt&amp;bug_status=UNCONFIRMED&amp;bug_status=NEW&amp;bug_status=ASSIGNED&amp;bug_status=NEEDINFO&amp;bug_status=REOPENED&amp;bug_status=RESOLVED&amp;bug_status=VERIFIED&amp;email1=&amp;emailtype1=substring&amp;emailassigned_to1=1&amp;emailreporter1=1&amp;emailcc1=1&amp;emaillongdesc1=1&amp;email2=&amp;emailtype2=substring&amp;emailassigned_to2=1&amp;emailreporter2=1&amp;emailcc2=1&amp;emaillongdesc2=1&amp;changedin=&amp;chfieldfrom=&amp;chfieldto=Now&amp;chfieldvalue=&amp;short_desc=&amp;short_desc_type=substring&amp;long_desc=&amp;long_desc_type=substring&amp;bug_file_loc=&amp;bug_file_loc_type=substring&amp;status_whiteboard=&amp;status_whiteboard_type=substring&amp;keywords=&amp;keywords_type=anywords&amp;op_sys_details=&amp;op_sys_details_type=substring&amp;version_details=&amp;version_details_type=substring&amp;cmdtype=doit&amp;newqueryname=&amp;order=Reuse+same+sort+as+last+time&amp;form_name=query">registered
164 open bugs</a></li>
Daniel Veillard234547b2001-07-05 09:46:10 +0000[diff] [blame]165 <li>make sure you can reproduce the bug with xmllint or one of the test
166 programs found in source in the distribution</li>
167 <li>Please send the command showing the error as well as the input (as an
168 attachement)</li>
169</ul>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000[diff] [blame]170
Daniel Veillard402e8c82000-02-29 22:57:47 +0000[diff] [blame]171<p>Alternatively, you can just send the bug to the <a
Daniel Veillard33a67802001-03-07 09:44:02 +0000[diff] [blame]172href="mailto:xml@gnome.org">xml@gnome.org</a> list; if it's really libxml
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame^]173related I will approve it.. Please do not send me mail directly especially
174for portability problem, it makes things really harder to track and in some
175cases I'm not the best person to answer a given question, ask the list
176instead.</p>
Daniel Veillard4c3a2031999-11-19 17:46:26 +0000[diff] [blame]177
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000[diff] [blame]178<p>Of course, bugs reported with a suggested patch for fixing them will
Daniel Veillardec303412000-03-24 13:41:54 +0000[diff] [blame]179probably be processed faster.</p>
180
181<p>If you're looking for help, a quick look at <a
182href="http://xmlsoft.org/messages/#407">the list archive</a> may actually
183provide the answer, I usually send source samples when answering libxml usage
Daniel Veillard6f0adb52000-07-03 11:41:26 +0000[diff] [blame]184questions. The <a href="http://xmlsoft.org/html/book1.html">auto-generated
Daniel Veillardec303412000-03-24 13:41:54 +0000[diff] [blame]185documentantion</a> is not as polished as I would like (i need to learn more
186about Docbook), but it's a good starting point.</p>
187
Daniel Veillardd5f97f82000-09-17 16:38:14 +0000[diff] [blame]188<h2><a name="help">How to help</a></h2>
189
190<p>You can help the project in various ways, the best thing to do first is to
191subscribe to the mailing-list as explained before, check the <a
192href="http://xmlsoft.org/messages/">archives </a>and the <a
193href="http://bugs.gnome.org/db/pa/lgnome-xml.html">Gnome bug
194database:</a>:</p>
195<ol>
196 <li>provide patches when you find problems</li>
Daniel Veillard189446d2000-10-13 10:23:06 +0000[diff] [blame]197 <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]198 be integrated in all cases but help pinpointing portability problems
199 and</li>
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000[diff] [blame]200 <li>provide documentation fixes (either as patches to the code comments or
Daniel Veillardd5f97f82000-09-17 16:38:14 +0000[diff] [blame]201 as HTML diffs).</li>
202 <li>provide new documentations pieces (translations, examples, etc ...)</li>
203 <li>Check the TODO file and try to close one of the items</li>
204 <li>take one of the points raised in the archive or the bug database and
Daniel Veillard33a67802001-03-07 09:44:02 +0000[diff] [blame]205 provide a fix. <a href="mailto:Daniel.Veillard@imag.fr">Get in touch with
Daniel Veillardd5f97f82000-09-17 16:38:14 +0000[diff] [blame]206 me </a>before to avoid synchronization problems and check that the
207 suggested fix will fit in nicely :-)</li>
208</ol>
209
Daniel Veillard10a2c651999-12-12 13:03:50 +0000[diff] [blame]210<h2><a name="Downloads">Downloads</a></h2>
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000[diff] [blame]211
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]212<p>The latest versions of libxml can be found on <a
Daniel Veillard20c8cf22001-06-26 22:47:36 +0000[diff] [blame]213href="ftp://xmlsoft.org/">xmlsoft.org</a> (<a
214href="ftp://speakeasy.rpmfind.net/pub/libxml/">Seattle</a>, <a
215href="ftp://fr.rpmfind.net/pub/libxml/">France</a>) or on the <a
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000[diff] [blame]216href="ftp://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/MIRRORS.html">Gnome FTP server</a> either
Daniel Veillard10a2c651999-12-12 13:03:50 +0000[diff] [blame]217as a <a href="ftp://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/stable/sources/libxml/">source
Daniel Veillard306be992000-07-03 12:38:45 +0000[diff] [blame]218archive</a> or <a
Daniel Veillarda41123c2001-04-22 19:31:20 +0000[diff] [blame]219href="ftp://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/stable/redhat/i386/libxml/">RPM
220packages</a>. (NOTE that you need both the <a
Daniel Veillardc19fccc2000-07-03 11:52:01 +0000[diff] [blame]221href="http://rpmfind.net/linux/RPM/libxml2.html">libxml(2)</a> and <a
222href="http://rpmfind.net/linux/RPM/libxml2-devel.html">libxml(2)-devel</a>
Daniel Veillard95189532001-07-26 18:30:26 +0000[diff] [blame]223packages installed to compile applications using libxml.) <a
224href="mailto:izlatkovic@daenet.de">Igor Zlatkovic</a> is now the maintainer
225of the Windows port, <a
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame^]226href="http://www.fh-frankfurt.de/~igor/projects/libxml/index.html">he
227provides binaries</a></p>
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000[diff] [blame]228
Daniel Veillard6c8b1172000-03-01 00:40:41 +0000[diff] [blame]229<p><a name="Snapshot">Snapshot:</a></p>
230<ul>
231 <li>Code from the W3C cvs base libxml <a
Daniel Veillard33a67802001-03-07 09:44:02 +0000[diff] [blame]232 href="ftp://xmlsoft.org/cvs-snapshot.tar.gz">cvs-snapshot.tar.gz</a></li>
Daniel Veillard6c8b1172000-03-01 00:40:41 +0000[diff] [blame]233 <li>Docs, content of the web site, the list archive included <a
Daniel Veillard33a67802001-03-07 09:44:02 +0000[diff] [blame]234 href="ftp://xmlsoft.org/libxml-docs.tar.gz">libxml-docs.tar.gz</a></li>
Daniel Veillard6c8b1172000-03-01 00:40:41 +0000[diff] [blame]235</ul>
236
237<p><a name="Contribs">Contribs:</a></p>
238
239<p>I do accept external contributions, especially if compiling on another
240platform, get in touch with me to upload the package. I will keep them in the
Daniel Veillard33a67802001-03-07 09:44:02 +0000[diff] [blame]241<a href="ftp://xmlsoft.org/contribs/">contrib directory</a></p>
Daniel Veillard6c8b1172000-03-01 00:40:41 +0000[diff] [blame]242
Daniel Veillard82687162001-01-22 15:32:01 +0000[diff] [blame]243<p>Libxml is also available from CVS:</p>
Daniel Veillard10a2c651999-12-12 13:03:50 +0000[diff] [blame]244<ul>
Daniel Veillard10a2c651999-12-12 13:03:50 +0000[diff] [blame]245 <li><p>The <a
246 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]247 CVS base</a>. Check the <a
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame^]248 href="http://developer.gnome.org/tools/cvs.html">Gnome CVS Tools</a>
249 page; the CVS module is <b>gnome-xml</b>.</p>
Daniel Veillard10a2c651999-12-12 13:03:50 +0000[diff] [blame]250 </li>
Daniel Veillard82687162001-01-22 15:32:01 +0000[diff] [blame]251 <li>The <strong>libxslt</strong> module is also present there</li>
Daniel Veillard10a2c651999-12-12 13:03:50 +0000[diff] [blame]252</ul>
253
254<h2><a name="News">News</a></h2>
255
Daniel Veillard944b5ff1999-12-15 19:08:24 +0000[diff] [blame]256<h3>CVS only : check the <a
257href="http://cvs.gnome.org/lxr/source/gnome-xml/ChangeLog">Changelog</a> file
Daniel Veillard189446d2000-10-13 10:23:06 +0000[diff] [blame]258for a really accurate description</h3>
Daniel Veillardab8500d2000-10-15 21:06:19 +0000[diff] [blame]259
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000[diff] [blame]260<p>Items floating around but not actively worked on, get in touch with me if
Daniel Veillardab8500d2000-10-15 21:06:19 +0000[diff] [blame]261you want to test those</p>
262<ul>
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame^]263 <li>Implementing <a href="http://xmlsoft.org/XSLT">XSLT</a>, this is done
264 as a separate C library on top of libxml called libxslt</li>
Daniel Veillard28929b22000-11-13 18:22:49 +0000[diff] [blame]265 <li>Finishing up <a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xptr">XPointer</a> and <a
266 href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xinclude">XInclude</a></li>
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame^]267 <li>(seeems working but delayed from release) parsing/import of Docbook
268 SGML docs</li>
269</ul>
270
271<h3>2.4.2: Aug 15 2001</h3>
272<ul>
273 <li>adds xmlLineNumbersDefault() to control line number generation</li>
274 <li>lot of bug fixes</li>
275 <li>the Microsoft MSC projects files shuld now be up to date</li>
276 <li>inheritance of namespaces from DTD defaulted attributes</li>
277 <li>fixes a serious potential security bug</li>
278 <li>added a --format option to xmllint</li>
279</ul>
280
281<h3>2.4.1: July 24 2001</h3>
282<ul>
283 <li>possibility to keep line numbers in the tree</li>
284 <li>some computation NaN fixes</li>
285 <li>extension of the XPath API</li>
286 <li>cleanup for alpha and ia64 targets</li>
287 <li>patch to allow saving through HTTP PUT or POST</li>
Daniel Veillard09ab7e12001-07-10 15:49:44 +0000[diff] [blame]288</ul>
289
290<h3>2.4.0: July 10 2001</h3>
291<ul>
292 <li>Fixed a few bugs in XPath, validation, and tree handling.</li>
293 <li>Fixed XML Base implementation, added a coupel of examples to the
294 regression tests</li>
295 <li>A bit of cleanup</li>
Daniel Veillardab8500d2000-10-15 21:06:19 +0000[diff] [blame]296</ul>
297
Daniel Veillard5b43fde2001-07-05 23:31:40 +0000[diff] [blame]298<h3>2.3.14: July 5 2001</h3>
299<ul>
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame^]300 <li>fixed some entities problems and reduce mem requirement when
301 substituing them</li>
Daniel Veillard5b43fde2001-07-05 23:31:40 +0000[diff] [blame]302 <li>lots of improvements in the XPath queries interpreter can be
303 substancially faster</li>
304 <li>Makefiles and configure cleanups</li>
305 <li>Fixes to XPath variable eval, and compare on empty node set</li>
306 <li>HTML tag closing bug fixed</li>
307 <li>Fixed an URI reference computating problem when validating</li>
308</ul>
309
Daniel Veillard2adbb512001-06-28 16:20:36 +0000[diff] [blame]310<h3>2.3.13: June 28 2001</h3>
311<ul>
312 <li>2.3.12 configure.in was broken as well as the push mode XML parser</li>
313 <li>a few more fixes for compilation on Windows MSC by Yon Derek</li>
314</ul>
315
316<h3>1.8.14: June 28 2001</h3>
317<ul>
318 <li>Zbigniew Chyla gave a patch to use the old XML parser in push mode</li>
319 <li>Small Makefile fix</li>
320</ul>
321
Daniel Veillard11648102001-06-26 16:08:24 +0000[diff] [blame]322<h3>2.3.12: June 26 2001</h3>
323<ul>
324 <li>lots of cleanup</li>
325 <li>a couple of validation fix</li>
326 <li>fixed line number counting</li>
327 <li>fixed serious problems in the XInclude processing</li>
328 <li>added support for UTF8 BOM at beginning of entities</li>
329 <li>fixed a strange gcc optimizer bugs in xpath handling of float, gcc-3.0
330 miscompile uri.c (William), Thomas Leitner provided a fix for the
331 optimizer on Tru64</li>
332 <li>incorporated Yon Derek and Igor Zlatkovic fixes and improvements for
333 compilation on Windows MSC</li>
334 <li>update of libxml-doc.el (Felix Natter)</li>
335 <li>fixed 2 bugs in URI normalization code</li>
336</ul>
337
Daniel Veillarde3c81b52001-06-17 14:50:34 +0000[diff] [blame]338<h3>2.3.11: June 17 2001</h3>
339<ul>
340 <li>updates to trio, Makefiles and configure should fix some portability
341 problems (alpha)</li>
342 <li>fixed some HTML serialization problems (pre, script, and block/inline
343 handling), added encoding aware APIs, cleanup of this code</li>
344 <li>added xmlHasNsProp()</li>
345 <li>implemented a specific PI for encoding support in the DocBook SGML
346 parser</li>
347 <li>some XPath fixes (-Infinity, / as a function parameter and namespaces
348 node selection)</li>
349 <li>fixed a performance problem and an error in the validation code</li>
350 <li>fixed XInclude routine to implement the recursive behaviour</li>
351 <li>fixed xmlFreeNode problem when libxml is included statically twice</li>
352 <li>added --version to xmllint for bug reports</li>
353</ul>
354
Daniel Veillard2e4f1882001-06-01 10:11:57 +0000[diff] [blame]355<h3>2.3.10: June 1 2001</h3>
356<ul>
357 <li>fixed the SGML catalog support</li>
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame^]358 <li>a number of reported bugs got fixed, in XPath, iconv detection,
359 XInclude processing</li>
Daniel Veillard2e4f1882001-06-01 10:11:57 +0000[diff] [blame]360 <li>XPath string function should now handle unicode correctly</li>
361</ul>
362
Daniel Veillard4623acd2001-05-19 15:13:15 +0000[diff] [blame]363<h3>2.3.9: May 19 2001</h3>
364
365<p>Lots of bugfixes, and added a basic SGML catalog support:</p>
366<ul>
367 <li>HTML push bugfix #54891 and another patch from Jonas Borgström</li>
368 <li>some serious speed optimisation again</li>
369 <li>some documentation cleanups</li>
370 <li>trying to get better linking on solaris (-R)</li>
371 <li>XPath API cleanup from Thomas Broyer</li>
372 <li>Validation bug fixed #54631, added a patch from Gary Pennington, fixed
373 xmlValidGetValidElements()</li>
374 <li>Added an INSTALL file</li>
375 <li>Attribute removal added to API: #54433</li>
376 <li>added a basic support for SGML catalogs</li>
377 <li>fixed xmlKeepBlanksDefault(0) API</li>
378 <li>bugfix in xmlNodeGetLang()</li>
379 <li>fixed a small configure portability problem</li>
380 <li>fixed an inversion of SYSTEM and PUBLIC identifier in HTML document</li>
381</ul>
382
Daniel Veillarda265af72001-05-14 11:13:58 +0000[diff] [blame]383<h3>1.8.13: May 14 2001</h3>
384<ul>
385 <li>bugfixes release of the old libxml1 branch used by Gnome</li>
386</ul>
387
Daniel Veillard3bbbe6f2001-05-03 11:15:37 +0000[diff] [blame]388<h3>2.3.8: May 3 2001</h3>
389<ul>
390 <li>Integrated an SGML DocBook parser for the Gnome project</li>
391 <li>Fixed a few things in the HTML parser</li>
392 <li>Fixed some XPath bugs raised by XSLT use, tried to fix the floating
393 point portability issue</li>
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame^]394 <li>Speed improvement (8M/s for SAX, 3M/s for DOM, 1.5M/s for
395 DOM+validation using the XML REC as input and a 700MHz celeron).</li>
Daniel Veillard3bbbe6f2001-05-03 11:15:37 +0000[diff] [blame]396 <li>incorporated more Windows cleanup</li>
397 <li>added xmlSaveFormatFile()</li>
398 <li>fixed problems in copying nodes with entities references (gdome)</li>
399 <li>removed some troubles surrounding the new validation module</li>
400</ul>
401
Daniel Veillarda41123c2001-04-22 19:31:20 +0000[diff] [blame]402<h3>2.3.7: April 22 2001</h3>
403<ul>
404 <li>lots of small bug fixes, corrected XPointer</li>
405 <li>Non determinist content model validation support</li>
406 <li>added xmlDocCopyNode for gdome2</li>
407 <li>revamped the way the HTML parser handles end of tags</li>
408 <li>XPath: corrctions of namespacessupport and number formatting</li>
409 <li>Windows: Igor Zlatkovic patches for MSC compilation</li>
410 <li>HTML ouput fixes from P C Chow and William M. Brack</li>
411 <li>Improved validation speed sensible for DocBook</li>
412 <li>fixed a big bug with ID declared in external parsed entities</li>
413 <li>portability fixes, update of Trio from Bjorn Reese</li>
414</ul>
415
Daniel Veillardafc73112001-04-11 11:51:41 +0000[diff] [blame]416<h3>2.3.6: April 8 2001</h3>
417<ul>
418 <li>Code cleanup using extreme gcc compiler warning options, found and
419 cleared half a dozen potential problem</li>
420 <li>the Eazel team found an XML parser bug</li>
421 <li>cleaned up the user of some of the string formatting function. used the
422 trio library code to provide the one needed when the platform is missing
423 them</li>
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame^]424 <li>xpath: removed a memory leak and fixed the predicate evaluation
425 problem, extended the testsuite and cleaned up the result. XPointer seems
426 broken ...</li>
Daniel Veillardafc73112001-04-11 11:51:41 +0000[diff] [blame]427</ul>
428
Daniel Veillard56a4cb82001-03-24 17:00:36 +0000[diff] [blame]429<h3>2.3.5: Mar 23 2001</h3>
430<ul>
431 <li>Biggest change is separate parsing and evaluation of XPath expressions,
432 there is some new APIs for this too</li>
433 <li>included a number of bug fixes(XML push parser, 51876, notations,
434 52299)</li>
435 <li>Fixed some portability issues</li>
436</ul>
437
Daniel Veillarde356c282001-03-10 12:32:04 +0000[diff] [blame]438<h3>2.3.4: Mar 10 2001</h3>
439<ul>
440 <li>Fixed bugs #51860 and #51861</li>
441 <li>Added a global variable xmlDefaultBufferSize to allow default buffer
442 size to be application tunable.</li>
443 <li>Some cleanup in the validation code, still a bug left and this part
444 should probably be rewritten to support ambiguous content model :-\</li>
445 <li>Fix a couple of serious bugs introduced or raised by changes in 2.3.3
446 parser</li>
447 <li>Fixed another bug in xmlNodeGetContent()</li>
448 <li>Bjorn fixed XPath node collection and Number formatting</li>
449 <li>Fixed a loop reported in the HTML parsing</li>
450 <li>blank space are reported even if the Dtd content model proves that they
451 are formatting spaces, this is for XmL conformance</li>
452</ul>
453
Daniel Veillardb402c072001-03-01 17:28:58 +0000[diff] [blame]454<h3>2.3.3: Mar 1 2001</h3>
455<ul>
456 <li>small change in XPath for XSLT</li>
457 <li>documentation cleanups</li>
458 <li>fix in validation by Gary Pennington</li>
459 <li>serious parsing performances improvements</li>
460</ul>
461
Daniel Veillardec70e912001-02-26 20:10:45 +0000[diff] [blame]462<h3>2.3.2: Feb 24 2001</h3>
Daniel Veillard71681102001-02-24 17:48:53 +0000[diff] [blame]463<ul>
464 <li>chasing XPath bugs, found a bunch, completed some TODO</li>
465 <li>fixed a Dtd parsing bug</li>
466 <li>fixed a bug in xmlNodeGetContent</li>
467 <li>ID/IDREF support partly rewritten by Gary Pennington</li>
468</ul>
469
Daniel Veillardec70e912001-02-26 20:10:45 +0000[diff] [blame]470<h3>2.3.1: Feb 15 2001</h3>
Daniel Veillard6e6a6cc2001-02-15 15:55:44 +0000[diff] [blame]471<ul>
472 <li>some XPath and HTML bug fixes for XSLT</li>
473 <li>small extension of the hash table interfaces for DOM gdome2
474 implementation</li>
475 <li>A few bug fixes</li>
476</ul>
477
Daniel Veillardec70e912001-02-26 20:10:45 +0000[diff] [blame]478<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]479<ul>
480 <li>Lots of XPath bug fixes</li>
481 <li>Add a mode with Dtd lookup but without validation error reporting for
482 XSLT</li>
483 <li>Add support for text node without escaping (XSLT)</li>
484 <li>bug fixes for xmlCheckFilename</li>
485 <li>validation code bug fixes from Gary Pennington</li>
486 <li>Patch from Paul D. Smith correcting URI path normalization</li>
487 <li>Patch to allow simultaneous install of libxml-devel and
488 libxml2-devel</li>
489 <li>the example Makefile is now fixed</li>
490 <li>added HTML to the RPM packages</li>
491 <li>tree copying bugfixes</li>
492 <li>updates to Windows makefiles</li>
493 <li>optimisation patch from Bjorn Reese</li>
494</ul>
495
Daniel Veillardec70e912001-02-26 20:10:45 +0000[diff] [blame]496<h3>2.2.11: Jan 4 2001</h3>
Daniel Veillard503b8932001-01-05 06:36:31 +0000[diff] [blame]497<ul>
498 <li>bunch of bug fixes (memory I/O, xpath, ftp/http, ...)</li>
499 <li>added htmlHandleOmittedElem()</li>
500 <li>Applied Bjorn Reese's IPV6 first patch</li>
501 <li>Applied Paul D. Smith patches for validation of XInclude results</li>
Daniel Veillard82687162001-01-22 15:32:01 +0000[diff] [blame]502 <li>added XPointer xmlns() new scheme support</li>
Daniel Veillard503b8932001-01-05 06:36:31 +0000[diff] [blame]503</ul>
504
Daniel Veillard2ddd23d2000-11-25 10:42:19 +0000[diff] [blame]505<h3>2.2.10: Nov 25 2000</h3>
Daniel Veillard9d343c42000-11-25 10:12:43 +0000[diff] [blame]506<ul>
507 <li>Fix the Windows problems of 2.2.8</li>
508 <li>integrate OpenVMS patches</li>
509 <li>better handling of some nasty HTML input</li>
510 <li>Improved the XPointer implementation</li>
511 <li>integrate a number of provided patches</li>
512</ul>
513
Daniel Veillard2ddd23d2000-11-25 10:42:19 +0000[diff] [blame]514<h3>2.2.9: Nov 25 2000</h3>
515<ul>
516 <li>erroneous release :-(</li>
517</ul>
518
Daniel Veillard28929b22000-11-13 18:22:49 +0000[diff] [blame]519<h3>2.2.8: Nov 13 2000</h3>
520<ul>
521 <li>First version of <a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xinclude">XInclude</a>
522 support</li>
523 <li>Patch in conditional section handling</li>
524 <li>updated MS compiler project</li>
525 <li>fixed some XPath problems</li>
526 <li>added an URI escaping function</li>
527 <li>some other bug fixes</li>
528</ul>
529
530<h3>2.2.7: Oct 31 2000</h3>
531<ul>
532 <li>added message redirection</li>
533 <li>XPath improvements (thanks TOM !)</li>
534 <li>xmlIOParseDTD() added</li>
535 <li>various small fixes in the HTML, URI, HTTP and XPointer support</li>
536 <li>some cleanup of the Makefile, autoconf and the distribution content</li>
537</ul>
538
Daniel Veillard29a11cc2000-10-25 13:32:39 +0000[diff] [blame]539<h3>2.2.6: Oct 25 2000:</h3>
540<ul>
541 <li>Added an hash table module, migrated a number of internal structure to
542 those</li>
543 <li>Fixed a posteriori validation problems</li>
544 <li>HTTP module cleanups</li>
545 <li>HTML parser improvements (tag errors, script/style handling, attribute
546 normalization)</li>
547 <li>coalescing of adjacent text nodes</li>
548 <li>couple of XPath bug fixes, exported the internal API</li>
549</ul>
550
Daniel Veillardab8500d2000-10-15 21:06:19 +0000[diff] [blame]551<h3>2.2.5: Oct 15 2000:</h3>
Daniel Veillard4c3a2031999-11-19 17:46:26 +0000[diff] [blame]552<ul>
Daniel Veillard189446d2000-10-13 10:23:06 +0000[diff] [blame]553 <li>XPointer implementation and testsuite</li>
554 <li>Lot of XPath fixes, added variable and functions registration, more
555 tests</li>
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame^]556 <li>Portability fixes, lots of enhancements toward an easy Windows build
557 and release</li>
Daniel Veillard189446d2000-10-13 10:23:06 +0000[diff] [blame]558 <li>Late validation fixes</li>
559 <li>Integrated a lot of contributed patches</li>
560 <li>added memory management docs</li>
Daniel Veillardab8500d2000-10-15 21:06:19 +0000[diff] [blame]561 <li>a performance problem when using large buffer seems fixed</li>
Daniel Veillard189446d2000-10-13 10:23:06 +0000[diff] [blame]562</ul>
563
564<h3>2.2.4: Oct 1 2000:</h3>
565<ul>
566 <li>main XPath problem fixed</li>
567 <li>Integrated portability patches for Windows</li>
568 <li>Serious bug fixes on the URI and HTML code</li>
Daniel Veillard361d8452000-04-03 19:48:13 +0000[diff] [blame]569</ul>
570
Daniel Veillardd5f97f82000-09-17 16:38:14 +0000[diff] [blame]571<h3>2.2.3: Sep 17 2000</h3>
572<ul>
573 <li>bug fixes</li>
574 <li>cleanup of entity handling code</li>
575 <li>overall review of all loops in the parsers, all sprintf usage has been
576 checked too</li>
577 <li>Far better handling of larges Dtd. Validating against Docbook XML Dtd
578 works smoothly now.</li>
579</ul>
580
581<h3>1.8.10: Sep 6 2000</h3>
582<ul>
583 <li>bug fix release for some Gnome projects</li>
584</ul>
585
586<h3>2.2.2: August 12 2000</h3>
Daniel Veillard786d7c82000-08-12 23:38:57 +0000[diff] [blame]587<ul>
588 <li>mostly bug fixes</li>
Daniel Veillardec78c0f2000-08-25 10:25:23 +0000[diff] [blame]589 <li>started adding routines to access xml parser context options</li>
Daniel Veillard786d7c82000-08-12 23:38:57 +0000[diff] [blame]590</ul>
591
Daniel Veillardd5f97f82000-09-17 16:38:14 +0000[diff] [blame]592<h3>2.2.1: July 21 2000</h3>
Daniel Veillarda2679fa2000-07-22 02:38:15 +0000[diff] [blame]593<ul>
594 <li>a purely bug fixes release</li>
595 <li>fixed an encoding support problem when parsing from a memory block</li>
596 <li>fixed a DOCTYPE parsing problem</li>
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame^]597 <li>removed a bug in the function allowing to override the memory
598 allocation routines</li>
Daniel Veillarda2679fa2000-07-22 02:38:15 +0000[diff] [blame]599</ul>
600
Daniel Veillardd5f97f82000-09-17 16:38:14 +0000[diff] [blame]601<h3>2.2.0: July 14 2000</h3>
Daniel Veillard94e90602000-07-17 14:38:19 +0000[diff] [blame]602<ul>
603 <li>applied a lot of portability fixes</li>
604 <li>better encoding support/cleanup and saving (content is now always
605 encoded in UTF-8)</li>
606 <li>the HTML parser now correctly handles encodings</li>
607 <li>added xmlHasProp()</li>
608 <li>fixed a serious problem with &amp;#38;</li>
609 <li>propagated the fix to FTP client</li>
610 <li>cleanup, bugfixes, etc ...</li>
611 <li>Added a page about <a href="encoding.html">libxml Internationalization
612 support</a></li>
613</ul>
614
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]615<h3>1.8.9: July 9 2000</h3>
616<ul>
617 <li>fixed the spec the RPMs should be better</li>
618 <li>fixed a serious bug in the FTP implementation, released 1.8.9 to solve
619 rpmfind users problem</li>
620</ul>
621
Daniel Veillard6388e172000-07-03 16:07:19 +0000[diff] [blame]622<h3>2.1.1: July 1 2000</h3>
623<ul>
624 <li>fixes a couple of bugs in the 2.1.0 packaging</li>
625 <li>improvements on the HTML parser</li>
626</ul>
627
Daniel Veillard3f6f7f62000-06-30 17:58:25 +0000[diff] [blame]628<h3>2.1.0 and 1.8.8: June 29 2000</h3>
629<ul>
630 <li>1.8.8 is mostly a comodity package for upgrading to libxml2 accoding to
631 <a href="upgrade.html">new instructions</a>. It fixes a nasty problem
632 about &amp;#38; charref parsing</li>
633 <li>2.1.0 also ease the upgrade from libxml v1 to the recent version. it
634 also contains numerous fixes and enhancements:
635 <ul>
636 <li>added xmlStopParser() to stop parsing</li>
637 <li>improved a lot parsing speed when there is large CDATA blocs</li>
638 <li>includes XPath patches provided by Picdar Technology</li>
639 <li>tried to fix as much as possible DtD validation and namespace
640 related problems</li>
641 <li>output to a given encoding has been added/tested</li>
642 <li>lot of various fixes</li>
643 </ul>
644 </li>
645</ul>
646
Daniel Veillarde0aed302000-04-16 08:52:20 +0000[diff] [blame]647<h3>2.0.0: Apr 12 2000</h3>
Daniel Veillard361d8452000-04-03 19:48:13 +0000[diff] [blame]648<ul>
649 <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]650 idea to check the 1.x to 2.x upgrade instructions. NOTE: while initally
651 scheduled for Apr 3 the relase occured only on Apr 12 due to massive
652 workload.</li>
Daniel Veillard361d8452000-04-03 19:48:13 +0000[diff] [blame]653 <li>The include are now located under $prefix/include/libxml (instead of
Daniel Veillarde0aed302000-04-16 08:52:20 +0000[diff] [blame]654 $prefix/include/gnome-xml), they also are referenced by
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]655 <pre>#include &lt;libxml/xxx.h&gt;</pre>
Daniel Veillarde0aed302000-04-16 08:52:20 +0000[diff] [blame]656 <p>instead of</p>
Daniel Veillard361d8452000-04-03 19:48:13 +0000[diff] [blame]657 <pre>#include "xxx.h"</pre>
658 </li>
Daniel Veillard8f621982000-03-20 13:07:15 +0000[diff] [blame]659 <li>a new URI module for parsing URIs and following strictly RFC 2396</li>
660 <li>the memory allocation routines used by libxml can now be overloaded
661 dynamically by using xmlMemSetup()</li>
Daniel Veillard361d8452000-04-03 19:48:13 +0000[diff] [blame]662 <li>The previously CVS only tool tester has been renamed
663 <strong>xmllint</strong> and is now installed as part of the libxml2
664 package</li>
Daniel Veillarde0aed302000-04-16 08:52:20 +0000[diff] [blame]665 <li>The I/O interface has been revamped. There is now ways to plug in
666 specific I/O modules, either at the URI scheme detection level using
667 xmlRegisterInputCallbacks() or by passing I/O functions when creating a
668 parser context using xmlCreateIOParserCtxt()</li>
669 <li>there is a C preprocessor macro LIBXML_VERSION providing the version
670 number of the libxml module in use</li>
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame^]671 <li>a number of optional features of libxml can now be excluded at
672 configure time (FTP/HTTP/HTML/XPath/Debug)</li>
Daniel Veillardedfb29b2000-03-14 19:59:05 +0000[diff] [blame]673</ul>
674
675<h3>2.0.0beta: Mar 14 2000</h3>
676<ul>
677 <li>This is a first Beta release of libxml version 2</li>
Daniel Veillarde356c282001-03-10 12:32:04 +0000[diff] [blame]678 <li>It's available only from<a href="ftp://xmlsoft.org/">xmlsoft.org
679 FTP</a>, it's packaged as libxml2-2.0.0beta and available as tar and
680 RPMs</li>
Daniel Veillardedfb29b2000-03-14 19:59:05 +0000[diff] [blame]681 <li>This version is now the head in the Gnome CVS base, the old one is
682 available under the tag LIB_XML_1_X</li>
683 <li>This includes a very large set of changes. Froma programmatic point of
684 view applications should not have to be modified too much, check the <a
685 href="upgrade.html">upgrade page</a></li>
686 <li>Some interfaces may changes (especially a bit about encoding).</li>
687 <li>the updates includes:
Daniel Veillard6c8b1172000-03-01 00:40:41 +0000[diff] [blame]688 <ul>
Daniel Veillardedfb29b2000-03-14 19:59:05 +0000[diff] [blame]689 <li>fix I18N support. ISO-Latin-x/UTF-8/UTF-16 (nearly) seems correctly
690 handled now</li>
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame^]691 <li>Better handling of entities, especially well formedness checking
692 and proper PEref extensions in external subsets</li>
Daniel Veillard6c8b1172000-03-01 00:40:41 +0000[diff] [blame]693 <li>DTD conditional sections</li>
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +0000[diff] [blame]694 <li>Validation now correcly handle entities content</li>
Daniel Veillard6c8b1172000-03-01 00:40:41 +0000[diff] [blame]695 <li><a href="http://rpmfind.net/tools/gdome/messages/0039.html">change
696 structures to accomodate DOM</a></li>
Daniel Veillard6c8b1172000-03-01 00:40:41 +0000[diff] [blame]697 </ul>
698 </li>
Daniel Veillardedfb29b2000-03-14 19:59:05 +0000[diff] [blame]699 <li>Serious progress were made toward compliance, <a
700 href="conf/result.html">here are the result of the test</a> against the
701 OASIS testsuite (except the japanese tests since I don't support that
702 encoding yet). This URL is rebuilt every couple of hours using the CVS
703 head version.</li>
Daniel Veillarde41f2b72000-01-30 20:00:07 +0000[diff] [blame]704</ul>
705
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +0000[diff] [blame]706<h3>1.8.7: Mar 6 2000</h3>
707<ul>
708 <li>This is a bug fix release:</li>
709 <li>It is possible to disable the ignorable blanks heuristic used by
710 libxml-1.x, a new function xmlKeepBlanksDefault(0) will allow this. Note
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame^]711 that for adherence to XML spec, this behaviour will be disabled by
712 default in 2.x . The same function will allow to keep compatibility for
713 old code.</li>
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]714 <li>Blanks in &lt;a&gt; &lt;/a&gt; constructs are not ignored anymore,
715 avoiding heuristic is really the Right Way :-\</li>
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +0000[diff] [blame]716 <li>The unchecked use of snprintf which was breaking libxml-1.8.6
717 compilation on some platforms has been fixed</li>
718 <li>nanoftp.c nanohttp.c: Fixed '#' and '?' stripping when processing
719 URIs</li>
720</ul>
721
Daniel Veillarde41f2b72000-01-30 20:00:07 +0000[diff] [blame]722<h3>1.8.6: Jan 31 2000</h3>
723<ul>
724 <li>added a nanoFTP transport module, debugged until the new version of <a
725 href="http://rpmfind.net/linux/rpm2html/rpmfind.html">rpmfind</a> can use
726 it without troubles</li>
Daniel Veillardda07c342000-01-25 18:31:22 +0000[diff] [blame]727</ul>
728
729<h3>1.8.5: Jan 21 2000</h3>
730<ul>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000[diff] [blame]731 <li>adding APIs to parse a well balanced chunk of XML (production <a
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame^]732 href="http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml#NT-content">[43] content</a> of the
733 XML spec)</li>
Daniel Veillard461a66c2000-01-18 18:01:01 +0000[diff] [blame]734 <li>fixed a hideous bug in xmlGetProp pointed by Rune.Djurhuus@fast.no</li>
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]735 <li>Jody Goldberg &lt;jgoldberg@home.com&gt; provided another patch trying
736 to solve the zlib checks problems</li>
Daniel Veillard461a66c2000-01-18 18:01:01 +0000[diff] [blame]737 <li>The current state in gnome CVS base is expected to ship as 1.8.5 with
738 gnumeric soon</li>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000[diff] [blame]739</ul>
740
741<h3>1.8.4: Jan 13 2000</h3>
742<ul>
743 <li>bug fixes, reintroduced xmlNewGlobalNs(), fixed xmlNewNs()</li>
744 <li>all exit() call should have been removed from libxml</li>
745 <li>fixed a problem with INCLUDE_WINSOCK on WIN32 platform</li>
746 <li>added newDocFragment()</li>
Daniel Veillardf84f71f2000-01-05 19:54:23 +0000[diff] [blame]747</ul>
748
749<h3>1.8.3: Jan 5 2000</h3>
750<ul>
751 <li>a Push interface for the XML and HTML parsers</li>
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +0000[diff] [blame]752 <li>a shell-like interface to the document tree (try tester --shell :-)</li>
Daniel Veillarddbfd6411999-12-28 16:35:14 +0000[diff] [blame]753 <li>lots of bug fixes and improvement added over XMas hollidays</li>
Daniel Veillard437b87b2000-01-03 17:30:46 +0000[diff] [blame]754 <li>fixed the DTD parsing code to work with the xhtml DTD</li>
Daniel Veillardf84f71f2000-01-05 19:54:23 +0000[diff] [blame]755 <li>added xmlRemoveProp(), xmlRemoveID() and xmlRemoveRef()</li>
756 <li>Fixed bugs in xmlNewNs()</li>
Daniel Veillard437b87b2000-01-03 17:30:46 +0000[diff] [blame]757 <li>External entity loading code has been revamped, now it uses
Daniel Veillardf84f71f2000-01-05 19:54:23 +0000[diff] [blame]758 xmlLoadExternalEntity(), some fix on entities processing were added</li>
Daniel Veillard437b87b2000-01-03 17:30:46 +0000[diff] [blame]759 <li>cleaned up WIN32 includes of socket stuff</li>
Daniel Veillard5cb5ab81999-12-21 15:35:29 +0000[diff] [blame]760</ul>
761
762<h3>1.8.2: Dec 21 1999</h3>
763<ul>
Daniel Veillardb24054a1999-12-18 15:32:46 +0000[diff] [blame]764 <li>I got another problem with includes and C++, I hope this issue is fixed
765 for good this time</li>
Daniel Veillard5cb5ab81999-12-21 15:35:29 +0000[diff] [blame]766 <li>Added a few tree modification functions: xmlReplaceNode,
767 xmlAddPrevSibling, xmlAddNextSibling, xmlNodeSetName and
768 xmlDocSetRootElement</li>
769 <li>Tried to improve the HTML output with help from <a
770 href="mailto:clahey@umich.edu">Chris Lahey</a></li>
Daniel Veillarde4e51311999-12-18 15:32:46 +0000[diff] [blame]771</ul>
Daniel Veillardb24054a1999-12-18 15:32:46 +0000[diff] [blame]772
Daniel Veillarde4e51311999-12-18 15:32:46 +0000[diff] [blame]773<h3>1.8.1: Dec 18 1999</h3>
774<ul>
775 <li>various patches to avoid troubles when using libxml with C++ compilers
776 the "namespace" keyword and C escaping in include files</li>
777 <li>a problem in one of the core macros IS_CHAR was corrected</li>
778 <li>fixed a bug introduced in 1.8.0 breaking default namespace processing,
779 and more specifically the Dia application</li>
Daniel Veillard944b5ff1999-12-15 19:08:24 +0000[diff] [blame]780 <li>fixed a posteriori validation (validation after parsing, or by using a
781 Dtd not specified in the original document)</li>
Daniel Veillardb24054a1999-12-18 15:32:46 +0000[diff] [blame]782 <li>fixed a bug in</li>
Daniel Veillard10a2c651999-12-12 13:03:50 +0000[diff] [blame]783</ul>
784
785<h3>1.8.0: Dec 12 1999</h3>
786<ul>
787 <li>cleanup, especially memory wise</li>
788 <li>the parser should be more reliable, especially the HTML one, it should
789 not crash, whatever the input !</li>
790 <li>Integrated various patches, especially a speedup improvement for large
791 dataset from <a href="mailto:cnygard@bellatlantic.net">Carl Nygard</a>,
792 configure with --with-buffers to enable them.</li>
793 <li>attribute normalization, oops should have been added long ago !</li>
794 <li>attributes defaulted from Dtds should be available, xmlSetProp() now
795 does entities escapting by default.</li>
Daniel Veillard4c3a2031999-11-19 17:46:26 +0000[diff] [blame]796</ul>
Daniel Veillard35008381999-10-25 13:15:52 +0000[diff] [blame]797
798<h3>1.7.4: Oct 25 1999</h3>
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000[diff] [blame]799<ul>
Daniel Veillard35008381999-10-25 13:15:52 +0000[diff] [blame]800 <li>Lots of HTML improvement</li>
801 <li>Fixed some errors when saving both XML and HTML</li>
802 <li>More examples, the regression tests should now look clean</li>
803 <li>Fixed a bug with contiguous charref</li>
804</ul>
805
806<h3>1.7.3: Sep 29 1999</h3>
807<ul>
808 <li>portability problems fixed</li>
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000[diff] [blame]809 <li>snprintf was used unconditionnally, leading to link problems on system
Daniel Veillard35008381999-10-25 13:15:52 +0000[diff] [blame]810 were it's not available, fixed</li>
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000[diff] [blame]811</ul>
812
813<h3>1.7.1: Sep 24 1999</h3>
814<ul>
815 <li>The basic type for strings manipulated by libxml has been renamed in
816 1.7.1 from <strong>CHAR</strong> to <strong>xmlChar</strong>. The reason
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame^]817 is that CHAR was conflicting with a predefined type on Windows. However
818 on non WIN32 environment, compatibility is provided by the way of a
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000[diff] [blame]819 <strong>#define </strong>.</li>
820 <li>Changed another error : the use of a structure field called errno, and
821 leading to troubles on platforms where it's a macro</li>
822</ul>
823
824<h3>1.7.0: sep 23 1999</h3>
825<ul>
826 <li>Added the ability to fetch remote DTD or parsed entities, see the <a
Daniel Veillard9cb5ff42001-01-29 08:22:21 +0000[diff] [blame]827 href="html/libxml-nanohttp.html">nanohttp</a> module.</li>
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000[diff] [blame]828 <li>Added an errno to report errors by another mean than a simple printf
829 like callback</li>
830 <li>Finished ID/IDREF support and checking when validation</li>
831 <li>Serious memory leaks fixed (there is now a <a
Daniel Veillard9cb5ff42001-01-29 08:22:21 +0000[diff] [blame]832 href="html/libxml-xmlmemory.html">memory wrapper</a> module)</li>
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000[diff] [blame]833 <li>Improvement of <a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xpath">XPath</a>
834 implementation</li>
835 <li>Added an HTML parser front-end</li>
836</ul>
837
838<h2><a name="XML">XML</a></h2>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]839
Daniel Veillard402e8c82000-02-29 22:57:47 +0000[diff] [blame]840<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]841markup-based structured documents. Here is <a name="example">an example XML
842document</a>:</p>
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]843<pre>&lt;?xml version="1.0"?&gt;
844&lt;EXAMPLE prop1="gnome is great" prop2="&amp;amp; linux too"&gt;
845 &lt;head&gt;
846 &lt;title&gt;Welcome to Gnome&lt;/title&gt;
847 &lt;/head&gt;
848 &lt;chapter&gt;
849 &lt;title&gt;The Linux adventure&lt;/title&gt;
850 &lt;p&gt;bla bla bla ...&lt;/p&gt;
851 &lt;image href="linus.gif"/&gt;
852 &lt;p&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;
853 &lt;/chapter&gt;
854&lt;/EXAMPLE&gt;</pre>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]855
Daniel Veillard402e8c82000-02-29 22:57:47 +0000[diff] [blame]856<p>The first line specifies that it's an XML document and gives useful
857information about its encoding. Then the document is a text format whose
858structure is specified by tags between brackets. <strong>Each tag opened has
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +0000[diff] [blame]859to be closed</strong>. XML is pedantic about this. However, if a tag is empty
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame^]860(no content), a single tag can serve as both the opening and closing tag if
861it ends with <code>/&gt;</code> rather than with <code>&gt;</code>. Note
862that, for example, the image tag has no content (just an attribute) and is
863closed by ending the tag with <code>/&gt;</code>.</p>
Daniel Veillardccb09631998-10-27 06:21:04 +0000[diff] [blame]864
Daniel Veillard402e8c82000-02-29 22:57:47 +0000[diff] [blame]865<p>XML can be applied sucessfully to a wide range of uses, from long term
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame^]866structured document maintenance (where it follows the steps of SGML) to
867simple data encoding mechanisms like configuration file formatting (glade),
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +0000[diff] [blame]868spreadsheets (gnumeric), or even shorter lived documents such as WebDAV where
869it is used to encode remote calls between a client and a server.</p>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]870
Daniel Veillard82687162001-01-22 15:32:01 +0000[diff] [blame]871<h2><a name="XSLT">XSLT</a></h2>
872
Daniel Veillard6e6a6cc2001-02-15 15:55:44 +0000[diff] [blame]873<p>Check <a href="http://xmlsoft.org/XSLT">the separate libxslt page</a></p>
874
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame^]875<p><a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xslt">XSL Transformations</a>, is a
876language for transforming XML documents into other XML documents (or
877HTML/textual output).</p>
Daniel Veillard82687162001-01-22 15:32:01 +0000[diff] [blame]878
879<p>A separate library called libxslt is being built on top of libxml2. This
880module "libxslt" can be found in the Gnome CVS base too.</p>
881
Daniel Veillard383b1472001-01-23 11:39:52 +0000[diff] [blame]882<p>You can check the <a
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame^]883href="http://cvs.gnome.org/lxr/source/libxslt/FEATURES">features</a>
884supported and the progresses on the <a
Daniel Veillard82687162001-01-22 15:32:01 +0000[diff] [blame]885href="http://cvs.gnome.org/lxr/source/libxslt/ChangeLog">Changelog</a></p>
886
Daniel Veillard4540be42000-08-19 16:40:28 +0000[diff] [blame]887<h2>An overview of libxml architecture</h2>
888
Daniel Veillardec70e912001-02-26 20:10:45 +0000[diff] [blame]889<p>Libxml is made of multiple components; some of them are optional, and most
890of the block interfaces are public. The main components are:</p>
Daniel Veillard4540be42000-08-19 16:40:28 +0000[diff] [blame]891<ul>
892 <li>an Input/Output layer</li>
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000[diff] [blame]893 <li>FTP and HTTP client layers (optional)</li>
Daniel Veillard4540be42000-08-19 16:40:28 +0000[diff] [blame]894 <li>an Internationalization layer managing the encodings support</li>
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000[diff] [blame]895 <li>a URI module</li>
Daniel Veillard4540be42000-08-19 16:40:28 +0000[diff] [blame]896 <li>the XML parser and its basic SAX interface</li>
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000[diff] [blame]897 <li>an HTML parser using the same SAX interface (optional)</li>
Daniel Veillard4540be42000-08-19 16:40:28 +0000[diff] [blame]898 <li>a SAX tree module to build an in-memory DOM representation</li>
899 <li>a tree module to manipulate the DOM representation</li>
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000[diff] [blame]900 <li>a validation module using the DOM representation (optional)</li>
Daniel Veillard4540be42000-08-19 16:40:28 +0000[diff] [blame]901 <li>an XPath module for global lookup in a DOM representation
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000[diff] [blame]902 (optional)</li>
903 <li>a debug module (optional)</li>
Daniel Veillard4540be42000-08-19 16:40:28 +0000[diff] [blame]904</ul>
905
906<p>Graphically this gives the following:</p>
907
908<p><img src="libxml.gif" alt="a graphical view of the various"></p>
909
910<p></p>
911
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000[diff] [blame]912<h2><a name="tree">The tree output</a></h2>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]913
914<p>The parser returns a tree built during the document analysis. The value
Daniel Veillard402e8c82000-02-29 22:57:47 +0000[diff] [blame]915returned is an <strong>xmlDocPtr</strong> (i.e., a pointer to an
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +0000[diff] [blame]916<strong>xmlDoc</strong> structure). This structure contains information such
Daniel Veillard306be992000-07-03 12:38:45 +0000[diff] [blame]917as the file name, the document type, and a <strong>children</strong> pointer
918which is the root of the document (or more exactly the first child under the
919root which is the document). The tree is made of <strong>xmlNode</strong>s,
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000[diff] [blame]920chained in double-linked lists of siblings and with a children&lt;-&gt;parent
Daniel Veillard306be992000-07-03 12:38:45 +0000[diff] [blame]921relationship. An xmlNode can also carry properties (a chain of xmlAttr
922structures). An attribute may have a value which is a list of TEXT or
923ENTITY_REF nodes.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]924
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]925<p>Here is an example (erroneous with respect to the XML spec since there
926should be only one ELEMENT under the root):</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]927
928<p><img src="structure.gif" alt=" structure.gif "></p>
929
930<p>In the source package there is a small program (not installed by default)
Daniel Veillard361d8452000-04-03 19:48:13 +0000[diff] [blame]931called <strong>xmllint</strong> which parses XML files given as argument and
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +0000[diff] [blame]932prints them back as parsed. This is useful for detecting errors both in XML
933code and in the XML parser itself. It has an option <strong>--debug</strong>
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000[diff] [blame]934which prints the actual in-memory structure of the document; here is the
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +0000[diff] [blame]935result with the <a href="#example">example</a> given before:</p>
Daniel Veillard10c6a8f1998-10-28 01:00:12 +0000[diff] [blame]936<pre>DOCUMENT
937version=1.0
938standalone=true
939 ELEMENT EXAMPLE
940 ATTRIBUTE prop1
941 TEXT
942 content=gnome is great
943 ATTRIBUTE prop2
944 ENTITY_REF
945 TEXT
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000[diff] [blame]946 content= linux too
Daniel Veillard402e8c82000-02-29 22:57:47 +0000[diff] [blame]947 ELEMENT head
Daniel Veillard10c6a8f1998-10-28 01:00:12 +0000[diff] [blame]948 ELEMENT title
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +0000[diff] [blame]949 TEXT
950 content=Welcome to Gnome
Daniel Veillard10c6a8f1998-10-28 01:00:12 +0000[diff] [blame]951 ELEMENT chapter
952 ELEMENT title
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +0000[diff] [blame]953 TEXT
954 content=The Linux adventure
Daniel Veillard10c6a8f1998-10-28 01:00:12 +0000[diff] [blame]955 ELEMENT p
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +0000[diff] [blame]956 TEXT
957 content=bla bla bla ...
Daniel Veillard10c6a8f1998-10-28 01:00:12 +0000[diff] [blame]958 ELEMENT image
959 ATTRIBUTE href
960 TEXT
961 content=linus.gif
962 ELEMENT p
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +0000[diff] [blame]963 TEXT
964 content=...</pre>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]965
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]966<p>This should be useful for learning the internal representation model.</p>
Daniel Veillardccb09631998-10-27 06:21:04 +0000[diff] [blame]967
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000[diff] [blame]968<h2><a name="interface">The SAX interface</a></h2>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]969
Daniel Veillard402e8c82000-02-29 22:57:47 +0000[diff] [blame]970<p>Sometimes the DOM tree output is just too large to fit reasonably into
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]971memory. 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^]972loaded using libxml), it's better to use the SAX interface of libxml. SAX is
973a <strong>callback-based interface</strong> to the parser. Before parsing,
974the application layer registers a customized set of callbacks which are
975called by the library as it progresses through the XML input.</p>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]976
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]977<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]978libxml, see the <a
979href="http://www.daa.com.au/~james/gnome/xml-sax/xml-sax.html">nice
980documentation</a>.written by <a href="mailto:james@daa.com.au">James
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]981Henstridge</a>.</p>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]982
983<p>You can debug the SAX behaviour by using the <strong>testSAX</strong>
984program located in the gnome-xml module (it's usually not shipped in the
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]985binary packages of libxml, but you can find it in the tar source
Daniel Veillard402e8c82000-02-29 22:57:47 +0000[diff] [blame]986distribution). Here is the sequence of callbacks that would be reported by
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]987testSAX when parsing the example XML document shown earlier:</p>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]988<pre>SAX.setDocumentLocator()
989SAX.startDocument()
990SAX.getEntity(amp)
991SAX.startElement(EXAMPLE, prop1='gnome is great', prop2='&amp;amp; linux too')
992SAX.characters( , 3)
993SAX.startElement(head)
994SAX.characters( , 4)
995SAX.startElement(title)
996SAX.characters(Welcome to Gnome, 16)
997SAX.endElement(title)
998SAX.characters( , 3)
999SAX.endElement(head)
1000SAX.characters( , 3)
1001SAX.startElement(chapter)
1002SAX.characters( , 4)
1003SAX.startElement(title)
1004SAX.characters(The Linux adventure, 19)
1005SAX.endElement(title)
1006SAX.characters( , 4)
1007SAX.startElement(p)
1008SAX.characters(bla bla bla ..., 15)
1009SAX.endElement(p)
1010SAX.characters( , 4)
1011SAX.startElement(image, href='linus.gif')
1012SAX.endElement(image)
1013SAX.characters( , 4)
1014SAX.startElement(p)
1015SAX.characters(..., 3)
1016SAX.endElement(p)
1017SAX.characters( , 3)
1018SAX.endElement(chapter)
1019SAX.characters( , 1)
1020SAX.endElement(EXAMPLE)
1021SAX.endDocument()</pre>
1022
Daniel Veillardec70e912001-02-26 20:10:45 +0000[diff] [blame]1023<p>Most of the other interfaces of libxml are based on the DOM tree-building
1024facility, so nearly everything up to the end of this document presupposes the
1025use of the standard DOM tree build. Note that the DOM tree itself is built by
1026a set of registered default callbacks, without internal specific
1027interface.</p>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]1028
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000[diff] [blame]1029<h2><a name="library">The XML library interfaces</a></h2>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1030
1031<p>This section is directly intended to help programmers getting bootstrapped
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame^]1032using the XML library from the C language. It is not intended to be
1033extensive. I hope the automatically generated documents will provide the
1034completeness required, but as a separate set of documents. The interfaces of
1035the XML library are by principle low level, there is nearly zero abstraction.
1036Those interested in a higher level API should <a href="#DOM">look at
1037DOM</a>.</p>
Daniel Veillardccb09631998-10-27 06:21:04 +0000[diff] [blame]1038
Daniel Veillard9cb5ff42001-01-29 08:22:21 +0000[diff] [blame]1039<p>The <a href="html/libxml-parser.html">parser interfaces for XML</a> are
1040separated from the <a href="html/libxml-htmlparser.html">HTML parser
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]1041interfaces</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]1042
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]1043<h3><a name="Invoking">Invoking the parser : the pull method</a></h3>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1044
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]1045<p>Usually, the first thing to do is to read an XML input. The parser accepts
1046documents either from in-memory strings or from files. The functions are
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1047defined in "parser.h":</p>
Daniel Veillard10c6a8f1998-10-28 01:00:12 +0000[diff] [blame]1048<dl>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1049 <dt><code>xmlDocPtr xmlParseMemory(char *buffer, int size);</code></dt>
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]1050 <dd><p>Parse a null-terminated string containing the document.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1051 </dd>
Daniel Veillard10c6a8f1998-10-28 01:00:12 +0000[diff] [blame]1052</dl>
1053<dl>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1054 <dt><code>xmlDocPtr xmlParseFile(const char *filename);</code></dt>
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +0000[diff] [blame]1055 <dd><p>Parse an XML document contained in a (possibly compressed)
1056 file.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1057 </dd>
Daniel Veillard10c6a8f1998-10-28 01:00:12 +0000[diff] [blame]1058</dl>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1059
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]1060<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]1061failure).</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1062
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]1063<h3 id="Invoking1">Invoking the parser: the push method</h3>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000[diff] [blame]1064
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame^]1065<p>In order for the application to keep the control when the document is
1066being fetched (which is common for GUI based programs) libxml provides a push
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]1067interface, too, as of version 1.8.3. Here are the interface functions:</p>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000[diff] [blame]1068<pre>xmlParserCtxtPtr xmlCreatePushParserCtxt(xmlSAXHandlerPtr sax,
1069 void *user_data,
1070 const char *chunk,
1071 int size,
1072 const char *filename);
1073int xmlParseChunk (xmlParserCtxtPtr ctxt,
1074 const char *chunk,
1075 int size,
1076 int terminate);</pre>
1077
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]1078<p>and here is a simple example showing how to use the interface:</p>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000[diff] [blame]1079<pre> FILE *f;
1080
1081 f = fopen(filename, "r");
1082 if (f != NULL) {
1083 int res, size = 1024;
1084 char chars[1024];
1085 xmlParserCtxtPtr ctxt;
1086
1087 res = fread(chars, 1, 4, f);
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]1088 if (res &gt; 0) {
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000[diff] [blame]1089 ctxt = xmlCreatePushParserCtxt(NULL, NULL,
1090 chars, res, filename);
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]1091 while ((res = fread(chars, 1, size, f)) &gt; 0) {
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000[diff] [blame]1092 xmlParseChunk(ctxt, chars, res, 0);
1093 }
1094 xmlParseChunk(ctxt, chars, 0, 1);
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]1095 doc = ctxt-&gt;myDoc;
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000[diff] [blame]1096 xmlFreeParserCtxt(ctxt);
1097 }
1098 }</pre>
1099
Daniel Veillardec70e912001-02-26 20:10:45 +0000[diff] [blame]1100<p>The HTML parser embedded into libxml also has a push interface; the
1101functions are just prefixed by "html" rather than "xml".</p>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000[diff] [blame]1102
1103<h3 id="Invoking2">Invoking the parser: the SAX interface</h3>
1104
Daniel Veillardec70e912001-02-26 20:10:45 +0000[diff] [blame]1105<p>The tree-building interface makes the parser memory-hungry, first loading
1106the document in memory and then building the tree itself. Reading a document
1107without building the tree is possible using the SAX interfaces (see SAX.h and
1108<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]1109Henstridge's documentation</a>). Note also that the push interface can be
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000[diff] [blame]1110limited to SAX: just use the two first arguments of
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000[diff] [blame]1111<code>xmlCreatePushParserCtxt()</code>.</p>
Daniel Veillardccb09631998-10-27 06:21:04 +0000[diff] [blame]1112
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000[diff] [blame]1113<h3><a name="Building">Building a tree from scratch</a></h3>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1114
1115<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]1116there is a set of functions dedicated to building new elements. (These are
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame^]1117also described in &lt;libxml/tree.h&gt;.) For example, here is a piece of
1118code that produces the XML document used in the previous examples:</p>
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]1119<pre> #include &lt;libxml/tree.h&gt;
Daniel Veillard361d8452000-04-03 19:48:13 +0000[diff] [blame]1120 xmlDocPtr doc;
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +0000[diff] [blame]1121 xmlNodePtr tree, subtree;
1122
1123 doc = xmlNewDoc("1.0");
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]1124 doc-&gt;children = xmlNewDocNode(doc, NULL, "EXAMPLE", NULL);
1125 xmlSetProp(doc-&gt;children, "prop1", "gnome is great");
1126 xmlSetProp(doc-&gt;children, "prop2", "&amp; linux too");
1127 tree = xmlNewChild(doc-&gt;children, NULL, "head", NULL);
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +0000[diff] [blame]1128 subtree = xmlNewChild(tree, NULL, "title", "Welcome to Gnome");
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]1129 tree = xmlNewChild(doc-&gt;children, NULL, "chapter", NULL);
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +0000[diff] [blame]1130 subtree = xmlNewChild(tree, NULL, "title", "The Linux adventure");
1131 subtree = xmlNewChild(tree, NULL, "p", "bla bla bla ...");
1132 subtree = xmlNewChild(tree, NULL, "image", NULL);
1133 xmlSetProp(subtree, "href", "linus.gif");</pre>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1134
1135<p>Not really rocket science ...</p>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +0000[diff] [blame]1136
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000[diff] [blame]1137<h3><a name="Traversing">Traversing the tree</a></h3>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1138
Daniel Veillard9cb5ff42001-01-29 08:22:21 +0000[diff] [blame]1139<p>Basically by <a href="html/libxml-tree.html">including "tree.h"</a> your
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame^]1140code has access to the internal structure of all the elements of the tree.
1141The names should be somewhat simple like <strong>parent</strong>,
Daniel Veillard306be992000-07-03 12:38:45 +0000[diff] [blame]1142<strong>children</strong>, <strong>next</strong>, <strong>prev</strong>,
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]1143<strong>properties</strong>, etc... For example, still with the previous
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000[diff] [blame]1144example:</p>
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]1145<pre><code>doc-&gt;children-&gt;children-&gt;children</code></pre>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1146
1147<p>points to the title element,</p>
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000[diff] [blame]1148<pre>doc-&gt;children-&gt;children-&gt;next-&gt;children-&gt;children</pre>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1149
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +0000[diff] [blame]1150<p>points to the text node containing the chapter title "The Linux
1151adventure".</p>
Daniel Veillard10c6a8f1998-10-28 01:00:12 +0000[diff] [blame]1152
Daniel Veillardb24054a1999-12-18 15:32:46 +0000[diff] [blame]1153<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]1154present before the document root, so <code>doc-&gt;children</code> may point
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000[diff] [blame]1155to an element which is not the document Root Element; a function
Daniel Veillard5cb5ab81999-12-21 15:35:29 +0000[diff] [blame]1156<code>xmlDocGetRootElement()</code> was added for this purpose.</p>
Daniel Veillardb24054a1999-12-18 15:32:46 +0000[diff] [blame]1157
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000[diff] [blame]1158<h3><a name="Modifying">Modifying the tree</a></h3>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1159
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]1160<p>Functions are provided for reading and writing the document content. Here
Daniel Veillard9cb5ff42001-01-29 08:22:21 +0000[diff] [blame]1161is an excerpt from the <a href="html/libxml-tree.html">tree API</a>:</p>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +0000[diff] [blame]1162<dl>
Daniel Veillarddd6b3671999-09-23 22:19:22 +0000[diff] [blame]1163 <dt><code>xmlAttrPtr xmlSetProp(xmlNodePtr node, const xmlChar *name, const
1164 xmlChar *value);</code></dt>
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame^]1165 <dd><p>This sets (or changes) an attribute carried by an ELEMENT node.
1166 The value can be NULL.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1167 </dd>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +0000[diff] [blame]1168</dl>
1169<dl>
Daniel Veillarddd6b3671999-09-23 22:19:22 +0000[diff] [blame]1170 <dt><code>const xmlChar *xmlGetProp(xmlNodePtr node, const xmlChar
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1171 *name);</code></dt>
Daniel Veillardc92c3042000-09-29 02:42:04 +0000[diff] [blame]1172 <dd><p>This function returns a pointer to new copy of the property
1173 content. Note that the user must deallocate the result.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1174 </dd>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +0000[diff] [blame]1175</dl>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1176
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame^]1177<p>Two functions are provided for reading and writing the text associated
1178with elements:</p>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +0000[diff] [blame]1179<dl>
Daniel Veillarddd6b3671999-09-23 22:19:22 +0000[diff] [blame]1180 <dt><code>xmlNodePtr xmlStringGetNodeList(xmlDocPtr doc, const xmlChar
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1181 *value);</code></dt>
Daniel Veillardec70e912001-02-26 20:10:45 +0000[diff] [blame]1182 <dd><p>This function takes an "external" string and converts it to one
1183 text node or possibly to a list of entity and text nodes. All
1184 non-predefined entity references like &amp;Gnome; will be stored
1185 internally as entity nodes, hence the result of the function may not be
1186 a single node.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1187 </dd>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +0000[diff] [blame]1188</dl>
1189<dl>
Daniel Veillarddd6b3671999-09-23 22:19:22 +0000[diff] [blame]1190 <dt><code>xmlChar *xmlNodeListGetString(xmlDocPtr doc, xmlNodePtr list, int
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1191 inLine);</code></dt>
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +0000[diff] [blame]1192 <dd><p>This function is the inverse of
1193 <code>xmlStringGetNodeList()</code>. It generates a new string
1194 containing the content of the text and entity nodes. Note the extra
1195 argument inLine. If this argument is set to 1, the function will expand
1196 entity references. For example, instead of returning the &amp;Gnome;
1197 XML encoding in the string, it will substitute it with its value (say,
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000[diff] [blame]1198 "GNU Network Object Model Environment").</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1199 </dd>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +0000[diff] [blame]1200</dl>
Daniel Veillard10c6a8f1998-10-28 01:00:12 +0000[diff] [blame]1201
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000[diff] [blame]1202<h3><a name="Saving">Saving a tree</a></h3>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1203
1204<p>Basically 3 options are possible:</p>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +0000[diff] [blame]1205<dl>
Daniel Veillarddd6b3671999-09-23 22:19:22 +0000[diff] [blame]1206 <dt><code>void xmlDocDumpMemory(xmlDocPtr cur, xmlChar**mem, int
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1207 *size);</code></dt>
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]1208 <dd><p>Returns a buffer into which the document has been saved.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1209 </dd>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +0000[diff] [blame]1210</dl>
1211<dl>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1212 <dt><code>extern void xmlDocDump(FILE *f, xmlDocPtr doc);</code></dt>
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]1213 <dd><p>Dumps a document to an open file descriptor.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1214 </dd>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +0000[diff] [blame]1215</dl>
1216<dl>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1217 <dt><code>int xmlSaveFile(const char *filename, xmlDocPtr cur);</code></dt>
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +0000[diff] [blame]1218 <dd><p>Saves the document to a file. In this case, the compression
1219 interface is triggered if it has been turned on.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1220 </dd>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +0000[diff] [blame]1221</dl>
Daniel Veillard10c6a8f1998-10-28 01:00:12 +0000[diff] [blame]1222
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000[diff] [blame]1223<h3><a name="Compressio">Compression</a></h3>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1224
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]1225<p>The library transparently handles compression when doing file-based
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +0000[diff] [blame]1226accesses. The level of compression on saves can be turned on either globally
1227or individually for one file:</p>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +0000[diff] [blame]1228<dl>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1229 <dt><code>int xmlGetDocCompressMode (xmlDocPtr doc);</code></dt>
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]1230 <dd><p>Gets the document compression ratio (0-9).</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1231 </dd>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +0000[diff] [blame]1232</dl>
1233<dl>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1234 <dt><code>void xmlSetDocCompressMode (xmlDocPtr doc, int mode);</code></dt>
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]1235 <dd><p>Sets the document compression ratio.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1236 </dd>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +0000[diff] [blame]1237</dl>
1238<dl>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1239 <dt><code>int xmlGetCompressMode(void);</code></dt>
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]1240 <dd><p>Gets the default compression ratio.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1241 </dd>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +0000[diff] [blame]1242</dl>
1243<dl>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1244 <dt><code>void xmlSetCompressMode(int mode);</code></dt>
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]1245 <dd><p>Sets the default compression ratio.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1246 </dd>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +0000[diff] [blame]1247</dl>
1248
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000[diff] [blame]1249<h2><a name="Entities">Entities or no entities</a></h2>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]1250
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]1251<p>Entities in principle are similar to simple C macros. An entity defines an
1252abbreviation for a given string that you can reuse many times throughout the
1253content of your document. Entities are especially useful when a given string
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +0000[diff] [blame]1254may occur frequently within a document, or to confine the change needed to a
1255document to a restricted area in the internal subset of the document (at the
1256beginning). Example:</p>
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]1257<pre>1 &lt;?xml version="1.0"?&gt;
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]12582 &lt;!DOCTYPE EXAMPLE SYSTEM "example.dtd" [
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]12593 &lt;!ENTITY xml "Extensible Markup Language"&gt;
12604 ]&gt;
12615 &lt;EXAMPLE&gt;
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]12626 &amp;xml;
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]12637 &lt;/EXAMPLE&gt;</pre>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]1264
1265<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]1266its name with '&amp;' and following it by ';' without any spaces added. There
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]1267are 5 predefined entities in libxml allowing you to escape charaters with
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]1268predefined meaning in some parts of the xml document content:
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]1269<strong>&amp;lt;</strong> for the character '&lt;', <strong>&amp;gt;</strong>
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]1270for the character '&gt;', <strong>&amp;apos;</strong> for the character ''',
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]1271<strong>&amp;quot;</strong> for the character '"', and
1272<strong>&amp;amp;</strong> for the character '&amp;'.</p>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]1273
1274<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]1275substitute an entity's content so that you can see the replacement text in
1276your application. Or you may prefer to keep entity references as such in the
1277content to be able to save the document back without losing this usually
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame^]1278precious information (if the user went through the pain of explicitly
1279defining entities, he may have a a rather negative attitude if you blindly
1280susbtitute them as saving time). The <a
Daniel Veillard9cb5ff42001-01-29 08:22:21 +0000[diff] [blame]1281href="html/libxml-parser.html#XMLSUBSTITUTEENTITIESDEFAULT">xmlSubstituteEntitiesDefault()</a>
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]1282function allows you to check and change the behaviour, which is to not
1283substitute entities by default.</p>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]1284
1285<p>Here is the DOM tree built by libxml for the previous document in the
1286default case:</p>
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]1287<pre>/gnome/src/gnome-xml -&gt; ./xmllint --debug test/ent1
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]1288DOCUMENT
1289version=1.0
1290 ELEMENT EXAMPLE
1291 TEXT
1292 content=
1293 ENTITY_REF
1294 INTERNAL_GENERAL_ENTITY xml
1295 content=Extensible Markup Language
1296 TEXT
1297 content=</pre>
1298
1299<p>And here is the result when substituting entities:</p>
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]1300<pre>/gnome/src/gnome-xml -&gt; ./tester --debug --noent test/ent1
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]1301DOCUMENT
1302version=1.0
1303 ELEMENT EXAMPLE
1304 TEXT
1305 content= Extensible Markup Language</pre>
1306
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]1307<p>So, entities or no entities? Basically, it depends on your use case. I
1308suggest that you keep the non-substituting default behaviour and avoid using
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]1309entities in your XML document or data if you are not willing to handle the
1310entity references elements in the DOM tree.</p>
1311
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000[diff] [blame]1312<p>Note that at save time libxml enforces the conversion of the predefined
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]1313entities where necessary to prevent well-formedness problems, and will also
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000[diff] [blame]1314transparently replace those with chars (i.e. it will not generate entity
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]1315reference elements in the DOM tree or call the reference() SAX callback when
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]1316finding them in the input).</p>
1317
Daniel Veillard7b9c4b72000-08-25 16:26:50 +0000[diff] [blame]1318<p><span style="background-color: #FF0000">WARNING</span>: handling entities
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000[diff] [blame]1319on top of the libxml SAX interface is difficult!!! If you plan to use
Daniel Veillard7b9c4b72000-08-25 16:26:50 +0000[diff] [blame]1320non-predefined entities in your documents, then the learning cuvre to handle
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000[diff] [blame]1321then 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]1322strongly suggest you consider using the DOM interface instead and let libxml
Daniel Veillard8c6d6af2000-08-25 17:14:13 +0000[diff] [blame]1323deal with the complexity rather than trying to do it yourself.</p>
Daniel Veillard7b9c4b72000-08-25 16:26:50 +0000[diff] [blame]1324
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000[diff] [blame]1325<h2><a name="Namespaces">Namespaces</a></h2>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]1326
Daniel Veillardec303412000-03-24 13:41:54 +0000[diff] [blame]1327<p>The libxml library implements <a
1328href="http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml-names/">XML namespaces</a> support by
1329recognizing namespace contructs in the input, and does namespace lookup
1330automatically when building the DOM tree. A namespace declaration is
1331associated with an in-memory structure and all elements or attributes within
1332that namespace point to it. Hence testing the namespace is a simple and fast
1333equality operation at the user level.</p>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]1334
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +0000[diff] [blame]1335<p>I suggest that people using libxml use a namespace, and declare it in the
1336root element of their document as the default namespace. Then they don't need
1337to 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]1338refinement and merging of data from different sources. This doesn't increase
Daniel Veillardec70e912001-02-26 20:10:45 +0000[diff] [blame]1339the size of the XML output significantly, but significantly increases its
1340value in the long-term. Example:</p>
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]1341<pre>&lt;mydoc xmlns="http://mydoc.example.org/schemas/"&gt;
1342 &lt;elem1&gt;...&lt;/elem1&gt;
1343 &lt;elem2&gt;...&lt;/elem2&gt;
1344&lt;/mydoc&gt;</pre>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]1345
Daniel Veillardec70e912001-02-26 20:10:45 +0000[diff] [blame]1346<p>The namespace value has to be an absolute URL, but the URL doesn't have to
1347point to any existing resource on the Web. It will bind all the element and
1348atributes with that URL. I suggest to use an URL within a domain you control,
1349and that the URL should contain some kind of version information if possible.
1350For example, <code>"http://www.gnome.org/gnumeric/1.0/"</code> is a good
1351namespace scheme.</p>
Daniel Veillardec303412000-03-24 13:41:54 +0000[diff] [blame]1352
1353<p>Then when you load a file, make sure that a namespace carrying the
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]1354version-independent prefix is installed on the root element of your document,
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]1355and if the version information don't match something you know, warn the user
1356and 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]1357namespace checking on the prefix value. &lt;foo:text&gt; may be exactly the
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000[diff] [blame]1358same as &lt;bar:text&gt; in another document. What really matters is the URI
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]1359associated with the element or the attribute, not the prefix string (which is
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000[diff] [blame]1360just a shortcut for the full URI). In libxml, element and attributes have an
Daniel Veillardec303412000-03-24 13:41:54 +0000[diff] [blame]1361<code>ns</code> field pointing to an xmlNs structure detailing the namespace
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000[diff] [blame]1362prefix and its URI.</p>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]1363
1364<p>@@Interfaces@@</p>
1365
1366<p>@@Examples@@</p>
1367
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000[diff] [blame]1368<p>Usually people object to using namespaces together with validity checking.
1369I will try to make sure that using namespaces won't break validity checking,
1370so even if you plan to use or currently are using validation I strongly
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +0000[diff] [blame]1371suggest adding namespaces to your document. A default namespace scheme
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]1372<code>xmlns="http://...."</code> should not break validity even on less
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000[diff] [blame]1373flexible parsers. Using namespaces to mix and differentiate content coming
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame^]1374from multiple DTDs will certainly break current validation schemes. I will
1375try to provide ways to do this, but this may not be portable or
1376standardized.</p>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]1377
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000[diff] [blame]1378<h2><a name="Validation">Validation, or are you afraid of DTDs ?</a></h2>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]1379
1380<p>Well what is validation and what is a DTD ?</p>
1381
1382<p>Validation is the process of checking a document against a set of
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000[diff] [blame]1383construction rules; a <strong>DTD</strong> (Document Type Definition) is such
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]1384a set of rules.</p>
1385
1386<p>The validation process and building DTDs are the two most difficult parts
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000[diff] [blame]1387of the XML life cycle. Briefly a DTD defines all the possibles element to be
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame^]1388found within your document, what is the formal shape of your document tree
1389(by defining the allowed content of an element, either text, a regular
1390expression for the allowed list of children, or mixed content i.e. both text
1391and children). The DTD also defines the allowed attributes for all elements
1392and the types of the attributes. For more detailed information, I suggest
1393that you read the related parts of the XML specification, the examples found
1394under gnome-xml/test/valid/dtd and any of the large number of books available
1395on XML. The dia example in gnome-xml/test/valid should be both simple and
Daniel Veillardec70e912001-02-26 20:10:45 +0000[diff] [blame]1396complete enough to allow you to build your own.</p>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]1397
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000[diff] [blame]1398<p>A word of warning, building a good DTD which will fit the needs of your
1399application in the long-term is far from trivial; however, the extra level of
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame^]1400quality it can ensure is well worth the price for some sets of applications
1401or if you already have already a DTD defined for your application field.</p>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]1402
1403<p>The validation is not completely finished but in a (very IMHO) usable
1404state. Until a real validation interface is defined the way to do it is to
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame^]1405define and set the <strong>xmlDoValidityCheckingDefaultValue</strong>
1406external variable to 1, this will of course be changed at some point:</p>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]1407
1408<p>extern int xmlDoValidityCheckingDefaultValue;</p>
1409
1410<p>...</p>
1411
1412<p>xmlDoValidityCheckingDefaultValue = 1;</p>
1413
1414<p></p>
1415
1416<p>To handle external entities, use the function
1417<strong>xmlSetExternalEntityLoader</strong>(xmlExternalEntityLoader f); to
1418link in you HTTP/FTP/Entities database library to the standard libxml
1419core.</p>
1420
1421<p>@@interfaces@@</p>
1422
Daniel Veillard35008381999-10-25 13:15:52 +0000[diff] [blame]1423<h2><a name="DOM"></a><a name="Principles">DOM Principles</a></h2>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1424
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame^]1425<p><a href="http://www.w3.org/DOM/">DOM</a> stands for the <em>Document
1426Object Model</em>; this is an API for accessing XML or HTML structured
1427documents. Native support for DOM in Gnome is on the way (module gnome-dom),
1428and will be based on gnome-xml. This will be a far cleaner interface to
1429manipulate XML files within Gnome since it won't expose the internal
1430structure.</p>
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +0000[diff] [blame]1431
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]1432<p>The current DOM implementation on top of libxml is the <a
Daniel Veillarda47fb3d2001-03-25 17:23:49 +0000[diff] [blame]1433href="http://cvs.gnome.org/lxr/source/gdome2/">gdome2 Gnome module</a>, this
1434is a full DOM interface, thanks to Paolo Casarini, check the <a
1435href="http://www.cs.unibo.it/~casarini/gdome2/">Gdome2 homepage</a> for more
1436informations.</p>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]1437
Daniel Veillard35008381999-10-25 13:15:52 +0000[diff] [blame]1438<h2><a name="Example"></a><a name="real">A real example</a></h2>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1439
1440<p>Here is a real size example, where the actual content of the application
1441data 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]1442a proposal to keep a database of jobs related to Gnome, with an XML based
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1443storage structure. Here is an <a href="gjobs.xml">XML encoded jobs
1444base</a>:</p>
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]1445<pre>&lt;?xml version="1.0"?&gt;
1446&lt;gjob:Helping xmlns:gjob="http://www.gnome.org/some-location"&gt;
1447 &lt;gjob:Jobs&gt;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +0000[diff] [blame]1448
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]1449 &lt;gjob:Job&gt;
1450 &lt;gjob:Project ID="3"/&gt;
1451 &lt;gjob:Application&gt;GBackup&lt;/gjob:Application&gt;
1452 &lt;gjob:Category&gt;Development&lt;/gjob:Category&gt;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +0000[diff] [blame]1453
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]1454 &lt;gjob:Update&gt;
1455 &lt;gjob:Status&gt;Open&lt;/gjob:Status&gt;
1456 &lt;gjob:Modified&gt;Mon, 07 Jun 1999 20:27:45 -0400 MET DST&lt;/gjob:Modified&gt;
1457 &lt;gjob:Salary&gt;USD 0.00&lt;/gjob:Salary&gt;
1458 &lt;/gjob:Update&gt;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +0000[diff] [blame]1459
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]1460 &lt;gjob:Developers&gt;
1461 &lt;gjob:Developer&gt;
1462 &lt;/gjob:Developer&gt;
1463 &lt;/gjob:Developers&gt;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +0000[diff] [blame]1464
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]1465 &lt;gjob:Contact&gt;
1466 &lt;gjob:Person&gt;Nathan Clemons&lt;/gjob:Person&gt;
1467 &lt;gjob:Email&gt;nathan@windsofstorm.net&lt;/gjob:Email&gt;
1468 &lt;gjob:Company&gt;
1469 &lt;/gjob:Company&gt;
1470 &lt;gjob:Organisation&gt;
1471 &lt;/gjob:Organisation&gt;
1472 &lt;gjob:Webpage&gt;
1473 &lt;/gjob:Webpage&gt;
1474 &lt;gjob:Snailmail&gt;
1475 &lt;/gjob:Snailmail&gt;
1476 &lt;gjob:Phone&gt;
1477 &lt;/gjob:Phone&gt;
1478 &lt;/gjob:Contact&gt;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +0000[diff] [blame]1479
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]1480 &lt;gjob:Requirements&gt;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +0000[diff] [blame]1481 The program should be released as free software, under the GPL.
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]1482 &lt;/gjob:Requirements&gt;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +0000[diff] [blame]1483
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]1484 &lt;gjob:Skills&gt;
1485 &lt;/gjob:Skills&gt;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +0000[diff] [blame]1486
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]1487 &lt;gjob:Details&gt;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +0000[diff] [blame]1488 A GNOME based system that will allow a superuser to configure
1489 compressed and uncompressed files and/or file systems to be backed
1490 up with a supported media in the system. This should be able to
1491 perform via find commands generating a list of files that are passed
1492 to tar, dd, cpio, cp, gzip, etc., to be directed to the tape machine
1493 or via operations performed on the filesystem itself. Email
1494 notification and GUI status display very important.
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]1495 &lt;/gjob:Details&gt;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +0000[diff] [blame]1496
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]1497 &lt;/gjob:Job&gt;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +0000[diff] [blame]1498
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]1499 &lt;/gjob:Jobs&gt;
1500&lt;/gjob:Helping&gt;</pre>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1501
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame^]1502<p>While loading the XML file into an internal DOM tree is a matter of
1503calling only a couple of functions, browsing the tree to gather the ata and
1504generate the internal structures is harder, and more error prone.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1505
1506<p>The suggested principle is to be tolerant with respect to the input
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame^]1507structure. For example, the ordering of the attributes is not significant,
1508the 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]1509depend on the order of the children of a given node, unless it really makes
1510things harder. Here is some code to parse the information for a person:</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1511<pre>/*
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +0000[diff] [blame]1512 * A person record
1513 */
1514typedef struct person {
1515 char *name;
1516 char *email;
1517 char *company;
1518 char *organisation;
1519 char *smail;
1520 char *webPage;
1521 char *phone;
1522} person, *personPtr;
1523
1524/*
1525 * And the code needed to parse it
1526 */
1527personPtr parsePerson(xmlDocPtr doc, xmlNsPtr ns, xmlNodePtr cur) {
1528 personPtr ret = NULL;
1529
1530DEBUG("parsePerson\n");
1531 /*
1532 * allocate the struct
1533 */
1534 ret = (personPtr) malloc(sizeof(person));
1535 if (ret == NULL) {
1536 fprintf(stderr,"out of memory\n");
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1537 return(NULL);
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +0000[diff] [blame]1538 }
1539 memset(ret, 0, sizeof(person));
1540
1541 /* We don't care what the top level element name is */
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]1542 cur = cur-&gt;xmlChildrenNode;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +0000[diff] [blame]1543 while (cur != NULL) {
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]1544 if ((!strcmp(cur-&gt;name, "Person")) &amp;&amp; (cur-&gt;ns == ns))
1545 ret-&gt;name = xmlNodeListGetString(doc, cur-&gt;xmlChildrenNode, 1);
1546 if ((!strcmp(cur-&gt;name, "Email")) &amp;&amp; (cur-&gt;ns == ns))
1547 ret-&gt;email = xmlNodeListGetString(doc, cur-&gt;xmlChildrenNode, 1);
1548 cur = cur-&gt;next;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +0000[diff] [blame]1549 }
1550
1551 return(ret);
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1552}</pre>
1553
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000[diff] [blame]1554<p>Here are a couple of things to notice:</p>
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +0000[diff] [blame]1555<ul>
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000[diff] [blame]1556 <li>Usually a recursive parsing style is the more convenient one: XML data
1557 is by nature subject to repetitive constructs and usually exibits highly
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1558 stuctured patterns.</li>
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame^]1559 <li>The two arguments of type <em>xmlDocPtr</em> and <em>xmlNsPtr</em>,
1560 i.e. the pointer to the global XML document and the namespace reserved to
1561 the application. Document wide information are needed for example to
1562 decode entities and it's a good coding practice to define a namespace for
1563 your application set of data and test that the element and attributes
1564 you're analyzing actually pertains to your application space. This is
1565 done by a simple equality test (cur-&gt;ns == ns).</li>
Daniel Veillardec70e912001-02-26 20:10:45 +0000[diff] [blame]1566 <li>To retrieve text and attributes value, you can use the function
1567 <em>xmlNodeListGetString</em> to gather all the text and entity reference
1568 nodes generated by the DOM output and produce an single text string.</li>
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +0000[diff] [blame]1569</ul>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1570
1571<p>Here is another piece of code used to parse another level of the
1572structure:</p>
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]1573<pre>#include &lt;libxml/tree.h&gt;
Daniel Veillard361d8452000-04-03 19:48:13 +0000[diff] [blame]1574/*
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +0000[diff] [blame]1575 * a Description for a Job
1576 */
1577typedef struct job {
1578 char *projectID;
1579 char *application;
1580 char *category;
1581 personPtr contact;
1582 int nbDevelopers;
1583 personPtr developers[100]; /* using dynamic alloc is left as an exercise */
1584} job, *jobPtr;
1585
1586/*
1587 * And the code needed to parse it
1588 */
1589jobPtr parseJob(xmlDocPtr doc, xmlNsPtr ns, xmlNodePtr cur) {
1590 jobPtr ret = NULL;
1591
1592DEBUG("parseJob\n");
1593 /*
1594 * allocate the struct
1595 */
1596 ret = (jobPtr) malloc(sizeof(job));
1597 if (ret == NULL) {
1598 fprintf(stderr,"out of memory\n");
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1599 return(NULL);
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +0000[diff] [blame]1600 }
1601 memset(ret, 0, sizeof(job));
1602
1603 /* We don't care what the top level element name is */
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]1604 cur = cur-&gt;xmlChildrenNode;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +0000[diff] [blame]1605 while (cur != NULL) {
1606
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]1607 if ((!strcmp(cur-&gt;name, "Project")) &amp;&amp; (cur-&gt;ns == ns)) {
1608 ret-&gt;projectID = xmlGetProp(cur, "ID");
1609 if (ret-&gt;projectID == NULL) {
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1610 fprintf(stderr, "Project has no ID\n");
1611 }
1612 }
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]1613 if ((!strcmp(cur-&gt;name, "Application")) &amp;&amp; (cur-&gt;ns == ns))
1614 ret-&gt;application = xmlNodeListGetString(doc, cur-&gt;xmlChildrenNode, 1);
1615 if ((!strcmp(cur-&gt;name, "Category")) &amp;&amp; (cur-&gt;ns == ns))
1616 ret-&gt;category = xmlNodeListGetString(doc, cur-&gt;xmlChildrenNode, 1);
1617 if ((!strcmp(cur-&gt;name, "Contact")) &amp;&amp; (cur-&gt;ns == ns))
1618 ret-&gt;contact = parsePerson(doc, ns, cur);
1619 cur = cur-&gt;next;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +0000[diff] [blame]1620 }
1621
1622 return(ret);
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1623}</pre>
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +0000[diff] [blame]1624
Daniel Veillardec70e912001-02-26 20:10:45 +0000[diff] [blame]1625<p>Once you are used to it, writing this kind of code is quite simple, but
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame^]1626boring. Ultimately, it could be possble to write stubbers taking either C
1627data structure definitions, a set of XML examples or an XML DTD and produce
1628the code needed to import and export the content between C data and XML
1629storage. This is left as an exercise to the reader :-)</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1630
Daniel Veillard6f0adb52000-07-03 11:41:26 +0000[diff] [blame]1631<p>Feel free to use <a href="example/gjobread.c">the code for the full C
1632parsing example</a> as a template, it is also available with Makefile in the
1633Gnome CVS base under gnome-xml/example</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1634
Daniel Veillardc310d562000-06-23 18:32:15 +0000[diff] [blame]1635<h2><a name="Contributi">Contributions</a></h2>
1636<ul>
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame^]1637 <li><a href="mailto:ari@lusis.org">Ari Johnson</a>
1638 provides a C++ wrapper for libxml:
Daniel Veillardc310d562000-06-23 18:32:15 +0000[diff] [blame]1639 <p>Website: <a
1640 href="http://lusis.org/~ari/xml++/">http://lusis.org/~ari/xml++/</a></p>
1641 <p>Download: <a
1642 href="http://lusis.org/~ari/xml++/libxml++.tar.gz">http://lusis.org/~ari/xml++/libxml++.tar.gz</a></p>
1643 </li>
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame^]1644 <li><a href="mailto:izlatkovic@daenet.de">Igor Zlatkovic</a>
1645 is now the maintainer of the Windows port, <a
Daniel Veillard95189532001-07-26 18:30:26 +0000[diff] [blame]1646 href="http://www.fh-frankfurt.de/~igor/projects/libxml/index.html">he
1647 provides binaries</a></li>
Daniel Veillarde356c282001-03-10 12:32:04 +0000[diff] [blame]1648 <li><a
1649 href="http://mail.gnome.org/archives/xml/2001-March/msg00014.html">Matt
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame^]1650 Sergeant</a>
1651 developped <a href="http://axkit.org/download/">XML::LibXSLT</a>, a perl
1652 wrapper for libxml2/libxslt as part of the <a
1653 href="http://axkit.com/">AxKit XML application server</a></li>
1654 <li><a href="mailto:fnatter@gmx.net">Felix Natter</a>
1655 and <a href="mailto:geertk@ai.rug.nl">Geert Kloosterman</a> provide <a
Daniel Veillardca989762001-06-23 17:39:29 +0000[diff] [blame]1656 href="libxml-doc.el">an emacs module</a> to lookup libxml(2) functions
Daniel Veillard3f6f7f62000-06-30 17:58:25 +0000[diff] [blame]1657 documentation</li>
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame^]1658 <li><a href="mailto:sherwin@nlm.nih.gov">Ziying Sherwin</a>
1659 provided <a href="http://xmlsoft.org/messages/0488.html">man
1660 pages</a></li>
Daniel Veillard5168dbf2001-07-07 00:18:23 +0000[diff] [blame]1661 <li>there is a module for <a
1662 href="http://acs-misc.sourceforge.net/nsxml.html">libxml/libxslt support
1663 in OpenNSD/AOLServer</a></li>
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame^]1664 <li><a href="mailto:dkuhlman@cutter.rexx.com">Dave Kuhlman</a>
1665 provides libxml/libxslt <a href="http://www.rexx.com/~dkuhlman">wrappers
1666 for Python</a></li>
Daniel Veillardc310d562000-06-23 18:32:15 +0000[diff] [blame]1667</ul>
1668
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]1669<p></p>
1670
Daniel Veillard33a67802001-03-07 09:44:02 +0000[diff] [blame]1671<p><a href="mailto:Daniel.Veillard@imag.fr">Daniel Veillard</a></p>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]1672
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame^]1673<p>$Id: xml.html,v 1.104 2001/07/27 18:56:57 veillard Exp $</p>
Daniel Veillardccb09631998-10-27 06:21:04 +0000[diff] [blame]1674</body>
1675</html>