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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 Veillardec78c0f2000-08-25 10:25:23 +0000[diff] [blame]11<h1 align="center">The XML C library for Gnome</h1>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]12
Daniel Veillard9c466822001-10-25 12:03:39 +0000[diff] [blame]13<h1>Note: this is the flat content of the <a href="index.html">web
14site</a></h1>
15
Daniel Veillardc9484202001-10-24 12:35:52 +0000[diff] [blame]16<h1 style="text-align: center">libxml, a.k.a. gnome-xml</h1>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]17
18<p></p>
Daniel Veillard9c466822001-10-25 12:03:39 +0000[diff] [blame]19
20<p>Libxml is the XML C library developped for the Gnome project. XML itself
21is a metalanguage to design markup languages, i.e. text language where
22semantic and structure are added to the content using extra "markup"
23information enclosed between angle bracket. HTML is the most well-known
24markup language.</p>
25
26<p>Libxml2 implements a number of existing standards related to markup
27languages:</p>
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000[diff] [blame]28<ul>
Daniel Veillard9c466822001-10-25 12:03:39 +0000[diff] [blame]29 <li>the XML standard: <a
30 href="http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml">http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml</a></li>
31 <li>Namespaces in XML: <a
32 href="http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml-names/">http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml-names/</a></li>
33 <li>XML Base: <a
34 href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xmlbase/">http://www.w3.org/TR/xmlbase/</a></li>
35 <li><a href="http://www.cis.ohio-state.edu/rfc/rfc2396.txt">RFC 2396</a>
Daniel Veillardc6271d22001-10-27 07:50:58 +0000[diff] [blame]36 : Uniform Resource Identifiers <a
Daniel Veillard9c466822001-10-25 12:03:39 +0000[diff] [blame]37 href="http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2396.txt">http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2396.txt</a></li>
38 <li>XML Path Language (XPath) 1.0: <a
39 href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xpath">http://www.w3.org/TR/xpath</a></li>
40 <li>HTML4 parser: <a
41 href="http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/">http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/</a></li>
42 <li>most of XML Pointer Language (XPointer) Version 1.0: <a
43 href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xptr">http://www.w3.org/TR/xptr</a></li>
44 <li>XML Inclusions (XInclude) Version 1.0: <a
45 href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xinclude/">http://www.w3.org/TR/xinclude/</a></li>
46 <li>[ISO-8859-1], <a
47 href="http://www.cis.ohio-state.edu/rfc/rfc2044.txt">rfc2044</a> [UTF-8]
48 and <a href="http://www.cis.ohio-state.edu/rfc/rfc2781.txt">rfc2781</a>
49 [UTF-16] core encodings</li>
50 <li>part of SGML Open Technical Resolution TR9401:1997</li>
51 <li>XML Catalogs Working Draft 06 August 2001: <a
52 href="http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/entity/spec-2001-08-06.html">http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/entity/spec-2001-08-06.html</a></li>
Daniel Veillard96984452000-08-31 13:50:12 +0000[diff] [blame]53</ul>
54
Daniel Veillard9c466822001-10-25 12:03:39 +0000[diff] [blame]55<p>In most cases libxml tries to implement the specifications in a relatively
Daniel Veillarda5393562002-02-20 11:40:49 +0000[diff] [blame]56strict way. As of release 2.4.16, libxml2 passes all 1800+ tests from the <a
57href="http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/xml-conformance/">OASIS XML Tests
58Suite</a>.</p>
Daniel Veillard5b16f582002-02-20 11:38:46 +0000[diff] [blame]59
60<p>To some extent libxml2 provide some support for the following other
61specification but don't claim to implement them:</p>
Daniel Veillard9c466822001-10-25 12:03:39 +0000[diff] [blame]62<ul>
63 <li>Document Object Model (DOM) <a
64 href="http://www.w3.org/TR/DOM-Level-2-Core/">http://www.w3.org/TR/DOM-Level-2-Core/</a>
65 it doesn't implement the API itself, gdome2 does this in top of
66 libxml2</li>
67 <li><a href="http://www.cis.ohio-state.edu/rfc/rfc959.txt">RFC 959</a>
Daniel Veillardc6271d22001-10-27 07:50:58 +0000[diff] [blame]68 : libxml implements a basic FTP client code</li>
Daniel Veillard9c466822001-10-25 12:03:39 +0000[diff] [blame]69 <li><a href="http://www.cis.ohio-state.edu/rfc/rfc1945.txt">RFC 1945</a>
Daniel Veillardc6271d22001-10-27 07:50:58 +0000[diff] [blame]70 : HTTP/1.0, again a basic HTTP client code</li>
Daniel Veillard9c466822001-10-25 12:03:39 +0000[diff] [blame]71 <li>SAX: a minimal SAX implementation compatible with early expat
72 versions</li>
73 <li>DocBook SGML v4: libxml2 includes a hackish parser to transition to
74 XML</li>
75</ul>
76
Daniel Veillard845cce42002-01-09 11:51:37 +0000[diff] [blame]77<p>Libxml2 is known to be very portable, should build and work without
78serious troubles on a variety of systems (Linux, Unix, Windows, CygWin,
79MacOs, MacOsX, RISC Os, OS/2, VMS, QNX, MVS, ...)</p>
Daniel Veillard9c466822001-10-25 12:03:39 +0000[diff] [blame]80
Daniel Veillard96984452000-08-31 13:50:12 +0000[diff] [blame]81<p>Separate documents:</p>
82<ul>
Daniel Veillardc6271d22001-10-27 07:50:58 +0000[diff] [blame]83 <li><a href="http://xmlsoft.org/XSLT/">the libxslt page</a>
84 providing an implementation of XSLT 1.0 and extensions on top of
85 libxml2</li>
86 <li><a href="http://www.cs.unibo.it/~casarini/gdome2/">the gdome2 page</a>
Daniel Veillard51095312001-10-28 18:51:57 +0000[diff] [blame]87 : a standard DOM2 implementation based on libxml2</li>
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000[diff] [blame]88</ul>
89
90<h2><a name="Introducti">Introduction</a></h2>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]91
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +0000[diff] [blame]92<p>This document describes libxml, the <a
Daniel Veillardec78c0f2000-08-25 10:25:23 +0000[diff] [blame]93href="http://www.w3.org/XML/">XML</a> C library developped for the <a
94href="http://www.gnome.org/">Gnome</a> project. <a
95href="http://www.w3.org/XML/">XML is a standard</a> for building tag-based
96structured documents/data.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]97
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000[diff] [blame]98<p>Here are some key points about libxml:</p>
99<ul>
Daniel Veillard189446d2000-10-13 10:23:06 +0000[diff] [blame]100 <li>Libxml exports Push and Pull type parser interfaces for both XML and
101 HTML.</li>
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000[diff] [blame]102 <li>Libxml can do DTD validation at parse time, using a parsed document
103 instance, or with an arbitrary DTD.</li>
104 <li>Libxml now includes nearly complete <a
Daniel Veillard8c2ecaf2001-07-10 17:53:07 +0000[diff] [blame]105 href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xpath">XPath</a>, <a
106 href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xptr">XPointer</a> and <a
107 href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xinclude">XInclude</a> implementations.</li>
Daniel Veillardec78c0f2000-08-25 10:25:23 +0000[diff] [blame]108 <li>It is written in plain C, making as few assumptions as possible, and
Daniel Veillard189446d2000-10-13 10:23:06 +0000[diff] [blame]109 sticking closely to ANSI C/POSIX for easy embedding. Works on
Daniel Veillardab8500d2000-10-15 21:06:19 +0000[diff] [blame]110 Linux/Unix/Windows, ported to a number of other platforms.</li>
Daniel Veillardec70e912001-02-26 20:10:45 +0000[diff] [blame]111 <li>Basic support for HTTP and FTP client allowing aplications to fetch
112 remote resources</li>
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000[diff] [blame]113 <li>The design is modular, most of the extensions can be compiled out.</li>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000[diff] [blame]114 <li>The internal document repesentation is as close as possible to the <a
115 href="http://www.w3.org/DOM/">DOM</a> interfaces.</li>
116 <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]117 like interface</a>; the interface is designed to be compatible with <a
118 href="http://www.jclark.com/xml/expat.html">Expat</a>.</li>
Daniel Veillardc575b992002-02-08 13:28:40 +0000[diff] [blame]119 <li>This library is released under the <a
120 href="http://www.opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.html">MIT
121 Licence</a> see the Copyright file in the distribution for the precise
122 wording.</li>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000[diff] [blame]123</ul>
Daniel Veillardccb09631998-10-27 06:21:04 +0000[diff] [blame]124
Daniel Veillarde0c1d722001-03-21 10:28:36 +0000[diff] [blame]125<p>Warning: unless you are forced to because your application links with a
126Gnome library requiring it, <strong><span
127style="background-color: #FF0000">Do Not Use libxml1</span></strong>, use
128libxml2</p>
129
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]130<h2><a name="FAQ">FAQ</a></h2>
131
132<p>Table of Content:</p>
133<ul>
134 <li><a href="FAQ.html#Licence">Licence(s)</a></li>
135 <li><a href="FAQ.html#Installati">Installation</a></li>
136 <li><a href="FAQ.html#Compilatio">Compilation</a></li>
137 <li><a href="FAQ.html#Developer">Developer corner</a></li>
138</ul>
139
140<h3><a name="Licence">Licence</a>(s)</h3>
141<ol>
142 <li><em>Licensing Terms for libxml</em>
Daniel Veillardc575b992002-02-08 13:28:40 +0000[diff] [blame]143 <p>libxml is released under the <a
144 href="http://www.opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.html">MIT
145 Licence</a>, see the file Copyright in the distribution for the precise
146 wording</p>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]147 </li>
148 <li><em>Can I embed libxml in a proprietary application ?</em>
Daniel Veillardc575b992002-02-08 13:28:40 +0000[diff] [blame]149 <p>Yes. The MIT Licence allows you to also keep proprietary the changes
150 you made to libxml, but it would be graceful to provide back bugfixes and
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]151 improvements as patches for possible incorporation in the main
152 development tree</p>
153 </li>
154</ol>
155
156<h3><a name="Installati">Installation</a></h3>
157<ol>
158 <li>Unless you are forced to because your application links with a Gnome
159 library requiring it, <strong><span style="background-color: #FF0000">Do
160 Not Use libxml1</span></strong>, use libxml2</li>
161 <li><em>Where can I get libxml</em>
162 ?
163 <p>The original distribution comes from <a
164 href="ftp://rpmfind.net/pub/libxml/">rpmfind.net</a> or <a
165 href="ftp://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/stable/sources/libxml/">gnome.org</a></p>
166 <p>Most linux and Bsd distribution includes libxml, this is probably the
167 safer way for end-users</p>
168 <p>David Doolin provides precompiled Windows versions at <a
169 href="http://www.ce.berkeley.edu/~doolin/code/libxmlwin32/ ">http://www.ce.berkeley.edu/~doolin/code/libxmlwin32/</a></p>
170 </li>
171 <li><em>I see libxml and libxml2 releases, which one should I install ?</em>
172 <ul>
173 <li>If you are not concerned by any existing backward compatibility
174 with existing application, install libxml2 only</li>
175 <li>If you are not doing development, you can safely install both.
176 usually the packages <a
177 href="http://rpmfind.net/linux/RPM/libxml.html">libxml</a> and <a
178 href="http://rpmfind.net/linux/RPM/libxml2.html">libxml2</a> are
179 compatible (this is not the case for development packages)</li>
180 <li>If you are a developer and your system provides separate packaging
181 for shared libraries and the development components, it is possible
182 to install libxml and libxml2, and also <a
183 href="http://rpmfind.net/linux/RPM/libxml-devel.html">libxml-devel</a>
184 and <a
185 href="http://rpmfind.net/linux/RPM/libxml2-devel.html">libxml2-devel</a>
186 too for libxml2 &gt;= 2.3.0</li>
187 <li>If you are developing a new application, please develop against
188 libxml2(-devel)</li>
189 </ul>
190 </li>
191 <li><em>I can't install the libxml package it conflicts with libxml0</em>
192 <p>You probably have an old libxml0 package used to provide the shared
193 library for libxml.so.0, you can probably safely remove it. Anyway the
194 libxml packages provided on <a
195 href="ftp://rpmfind.net/pub/libxml/">rpmfind.net</a> provides
196 libxml.so.0</p>
197 </li>
198 <li><em>I can't install the libxml(2) RPM package due to failed
199 dependancies</em>
200 <p>The most generic solution is to refetch the latest src.rpm , and
201 rebuild it locally with</p>
202 <p><code>rpm --rebuild libxml(2)-xxx.src.rpm</code></p>
203 <p>if everything goes well it will generate two binary rpm (one providing
204 the shared libs and xmllint, and the other one, the -devel package
205 providing includes, static libraries and scripts needed to build
206 applications with libxml(2)) that you can install locally.</p>
207 </li>
208</ol>
209
210<h3><a name="Compilatio">Compilation</a></h3>
211<ol>
212 <li><em>What is the process to compile libxml ?</em>
213 <p>As most UNIX libraries libxml follows the "standard":</p>
214 <p><code>gunzip -c xxx.tar.gz | tar xvf -</code></p>
215 <p><code>cd libxml-xxxx</code></p>
216 <p><code>./configure --help</code></p>
217 <p>to see the options, then the compilation/installation proper</p>
218 <p><code>./configure [possible options]</code></p>
219 <p><code>make</code></p>
220 <p><code>make install</code></p>
221 <p>At that point you may have to rerun ldconfig or similar utility to
222 update your list of installed shared libs.</p>
223 </li>
224 <li><em>What other libraries are needed to compile/install libxml ?</em>
225 <p>Libxml does not requires any other library, the normal C ANSI API
226 should be sufficient (please report any violation to this rule you may
227 find).</p>
228 <p>However if found at configuration time libxml will detect and use the
229 following libs:</p>
230 <ul>
231 <li><a href="http://www.info-zip.org/pub/infozip/zlib/">libz</a>
232 : a highly portable and available widely compression library</li>
233 <li>iconv: a powerful character encoding conversion library. It's
234 included by default on recent glibc libraries, so it doesn't need to
235 be installed specifically on linux. It seems it's now <a
236 href="http://www.opennc.org/onlinepubs/7908799/xsh/iconv.html">part
237 of the official UNIX</a> specification. Here is one <a
238 href="http://clisp.cons.org/~haible/packages-libiconv.html">implementation
239 of the library</a> which source can be found <a
240 href="ftp://ftp.ilog.fr/pub/Users/haible/gnu/">here</a>.</li>
241 </ul>
242 </li>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]243 <li><em>make check fails on some platforms</em>
244 <p>Sometime the regression tests results don't completely match the value
245 produced by the parser, and the makefile uses diff to print the delta. On
246 some platforms the diff return breaks the compilation process, if the
Daniel Veillarde46182c2002-02-12 14:29:11 +0000[diff] [blame]247 diff is small this is probably not a serious problem.</p>
248 <p>Sometimes (especially on Solaris) make checks fails due to limitations
249 in make. Try using GNU-make instead.</p>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]250 </li>
251 <li><em>I use the CVS version and there is no configure script</em>
252 <p>The configure (and other Makefiles) are generated. Use the autogen.sh
253 script to regenerate the configure and Makefiles, like:</p>
254 <p><code>./autogen.sh --prefix=/usr --disable-shared</code></p>
255 </li>
256 <li><em>I have troubles when running make tests with gcc-3.0</em>
257 <p>It seems the initial release of gcc-3.0 has a problem with the
258 optimizer which miscompiles the URI module. Please use another
259 compiler</p>
260 </li>
261</ol>
262
263<h3><a name="Developer">Developer</a> corner</h3>
264<ol>
265 <li><em>xmlDocDump() generates output on one line</em>
266 <p>libxml will not <strong>invent</strong> spaces in the content of a
267 document since <strong>all spaces in the content of a document are
268 significant</strong>. If you build a tree from the API and want
269 indentation:</p>
270 <ol>
271 <li>the correct way is to generate those yourself too</li>
272 <li>the dangerous way is to ask libxml to add those blanks to your
273 content <strong>modifying the content of your document in the
274 process</strong>. The result may not be what you expect. There is
275 <strong>NO</strong> way to guarantee that such a modification won't
276 impact other part of the content of your document. See <a
277 href="http://xmlsoft.org/html/libxml-parser.html#XMLKEEPBLANKSDEFAULT">xmlKeepBlanksDefault
278 ()</a> and <a
279 href="http://xmlsoft.org/html/libxml-tree.html#XMLSAVEFORMATFILE">xmlSaveFormatFile
280 ()</a></li>
281 </ol>
282 </li>
283 <li>Extra nodes in the document:
284 <p><em>For a XML file as below:</em></p>
285 <pre>&lt;?xml version="1.0"?&gt;
286&lt;PLAN xmlns="http://www.argus.ca/autotest/1.0/"&gt;
287&lt;NODE CommFlag="0"/&gt;
288&lt;NODE CommFlag="1"/&gt;
289&lt;/PLAN&gt;</pre>
290 <p><em>after parsing it with the function
291 pxmlDoc=xmlParseFile(...);</em></p>
292 <p><em>I want to the get the content of the first node (node with the
293 CommFlag="0")</em></p>
294 <p><em>so I did it as following;</em></p>
295 <pre>xmlNodePtr pode;
296pnode=pxmlDoc-&gt;children-&gt;children;</pre>
297 <p><em>but it does not work. If I change it to</em></p>
298 <pre>pnode=pxmlDoc-&gt;children-&gt;children-&gt;next;</pre>
299 <p><em>then it works. Can someone explain it to me.</em></p>
300 <p></p>
301 <p>In XML all characters in the content of the document are significant
302 <strong>including blanks and formatting line breaks</strong>.</p>
303 <p>The extra nodes you are wondering about are just that, text nodes with
304 the formatting spaces wich are part of the document but that people tend
305 to forget. There is a function <a
306 href="http://xmlsoft.org/html/libxml-parser.html">xmlKeepBlanksDefault
307 ()</a> to remove those at parse time, but that's an heuristic, and its
308 use should be limited to case where you are sure there is no
309 mixed-content in the document.</p>
310 </li>
311 <li><em>I get compilation errors of existing code like when accessing
312 <strong>root</strong> or <strong>childs fields</strong> of nodes</em>
313 <p>You are compiling code developed for libxml version 1 and using a
314 libxml2 development environment. Either switch back to libxml v1 devel or
315 even better fix the code to compile with libxml2 (or both) by <a
316 href="upgrade.html">following the instructions</a>.</p>
317 </li>
318 <li><em>I get compilation errors about non existing
319 <strong>xmlRootNode</strong> or <strong>xmlChildrenNode</strong>
320 fields</em>
321 <p>The source code you are using has been <a
322 href="upgrade.html">upgraded</a> to be able to compile with both libxml
323 and libxml2, but you need to install a more recent version:
324 libxml(-devel) &gt;= 1.8.8 or libxml2(-devel) &gt;= 2.1.0</p>
325 </li>
326 <li><em>XPath implementation looks seriously broken</em>
327 <p>XPath implementation prior to 2.3.0 was really incomplete, upgrade to
328 a recent version, the implementation and debug of libxslt generated fixes
329 for most obvious problems.</p>
330 </li>
331 <li><em>The example provided in the web page does not compile</em>
332 <p>It's hard to maintain the documentation in sync with the code
333 &lt;grin/&gt; ...</p>
334 <p>Check the previous points 1/ and 2/ raised before, and send
335 patches.</p>
336 </li>
337 <li><em>Where can I get more examples and informations than in the web
338 page</em>
339 <p>Ideally a libxml book would be nice. I have no such plan ... But you
340 can:</p>
341 <ul>
342 <li>check more deeply the <a href="html/libxml-lib.html">existing
343 generated doc</a></li>
344 <li>looks for examples of use for libxml function using the Gnome code
345 for example the following will query the full Gnome CVs base for the
346 use of the <strong>xmlAddChild()</strong> function:
347 <p><a
348 href="http://cvs.gnome.org/lxr/search?string=xmlAddChild">http://cvs.gnome.org/lxr/search?string=xmlAddChild</a></p>
349 <p>This may be slow, a large hardware donation to the gnome project
350 could cure this :-)</p>
351 </li>
352 <li><a
353 href="http://cvs.gnome.org/bonsai/rview.cgi?cvsroot=/cvs/gnome&amp;dir=gnome-xml">Browse
354 the libxml source</a>
355 , I try to write code as clean and documented as possible, so
356 looking at it may be helpful</li>
357 </ul>
358 </li>
359 <li>What about C++ ?
360 <p>libxml is written in pure C in order to allow easy reuse on a number
361 of platforms, including embedded systems. I don't intend to convert to
362 C++.</p>
363 <p>There is however a C++ wrapper provided by Ari Johnson
364 &lt;ari@btigate.com&gt; which may fullfill your needs:</p>
365 <p>Website: <a
366 href="http://lusis.org/~ari/xml++/">http://lusis.org/~ari/xml++/</a></p>
367 <p>Download: <a
368 href="http://lusis.org/~ari/xml++/libxml++.tar.gz">http://lusis.org/~ari/xml++/libxml++.tar.gz</a></p>
369 </li>
370 <li>How to validate a document a posteriori ?
371 <p>It is possible to validate documents which had not been validated at
372 initial parsing time or documents who have been built from scratch using
373 the API. Use the <a
374 href="http://xmlsoft.org/html/libxml-valid.html#XMLVALIDATEDTD">xmlValidateDtd()</a>
375 function. It is also possible to simply add a Dtd to an existing
376 document:</p>
377 <pre>xmlDocPtr doc; /* your existing document */
378 xmlDtdPtr dtd = xmlParseDTD(NULL, filename_of_dtd); /* parse the DTD */
379 dtd-&gt;name = xmlStrDup((xmlChar*)"root_name"); /* use the given root */
380
381 doc-&gt;intSubset = dtd;
382 if (doc-&gt;children == NULL) xmlAddChild((xmlNodePtr)doc, (xmlNodePtr)dtd);
383 else xmlAddPrevSibling(doc-&gt;children, (xmlNodePtr)dtd);
384 </pre>
385 </li>
386 <li>etc ...</li>
387</ol>
388
389<p></p>
390
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000[diff] [blame]391<h2><a name="Documentat">Documentation</a></h2>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]392
Daniel Veillard402e8c82000-02-29 22:57:47 +0000[diff] [blame]393<p>There are some on-line resources about using libxml:</p>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000[diff] [blame]394<ol>
Daniel Veillard365e13b2000-07-02 07:56:37 +0000[diff] [blame]395 <li>Check the <a href="FAQ.html">FAQ</a></li>
Daniel Veillardc19fccc2000-07-03 11:52:01 +0000[diff] [blame]396 <li>Check the <a href="http://xmlsoft.org/html/libxml-lib.html">extensive
Daniel Veillard8c6d6af2000-08-25 17:14:13 +0000[diff] [blame]397 documentation</a> automatically extracted from code comments (using <a
398 href="http://cvs.gnome.org/bonsai/rview.cgi?cvsroot=/cvs/gnome&amp;dir=gtk-doc">gtk
399 doc</a>).</li>
Daniel Veillard8d869642000-07-14 12:12:59 +0000[diff] [blame]400 <li>Look at the documentation about <a href="encoding.html">libxml
401 internationalization support</a></li>
Daniel Veillardbc66f852002-01-14 09:49:20 +0000[diff] [blame]402 <li>This page provides a global overview and <a href="example.html">some
Daniel Veillard402e8c82000-02-29 22:57:47 +0000[diff] [blame]403 examples</a> on how to use libxml.</li>
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame]404 <li><a href="mailto:james@daa.com.au">James Henstridge</a>
405 wrote <a
Daniel Veillard402e8c82000-02-29 22:57:47 +0000[diff] [blame]406 href="http://www.daa.com.au/~james/gnome/xml-sax/xml-sax.html">some nice
407 documentation</a> explaining how to use the libxml SAX interface.</li>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000[diff] [blame]408 <li>George Lebl wrote <a
409 href="http://www-4.ibm.com/software/developer/library/gnome3/">an article
Daniel Veillard402e8c82000-02-29 22:57:47 +0000[diff] [blame]410 for IBM developerWorks</a> about using libxml.</li>
Daniel Veillardec303412000-03-24 13:41:54 +0000[diff] [blame]411 <li>Check <a href="http://cvs.gnome.org/lxr/source/gnome-xml/TODO">the TODO
412 file</a></li>
413 <li>Read the <a href="upgrade.html">1.x to 2.x upgrade path</a>. If you are
414 starting a new project using libxml you should really use the 2.x
415 version.</li>
Daniel Veillard845cce42002-01-09 11:51:37 +0000[diff] [blame]416 <li>And don't forget to look at the <a
417 href="http://mail.gnome.org/archives/xml/">mailing-list archive</a>.</li>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000[diff] [blame]418</ol>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]419
Daniel Veillardd5f97f82000-09-17 16:38:14 +0000[diff] [blame]420<h2><a name="Reporting">Reporting bugs and getting help</a></h2>
Daniel Veillard4c3a2031999-11-19 17:46:26 +0000[diff] [blame]421
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame]422<p>Well, bugs or missing features are always possible, and I will make a
423point of fixing them in a timely fashion. The best way to report a bug is to
424use the <a href="http://bugzilla.gnome.org/buglist.cgi?product=libxml">Gnome
425bug tracking database</a> (make sure to use the "libxml" module name). I look
426at reports there regularly and it's good to have a reminder when a bug is
Daniel Veillard51095312001-10-28 18:51:57 +0000[diff] [blame]427still open. Be sure to specify that the bug is for the package libxml.</p>
Daniel Veillard4c3a2031999-11-19 17:46:26 +0000[diff] [blame]428
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000[diff] [blame]429<p>There is also a mailing-list <a
Daniel Veillard3197f162001-04-04 00:40:08 +0000[diff] [blame]430href="mailto:xml@gnome.org">xml@gnome.org</a> for libxml, with an <a
431href="http://mail.gnome.org/archives/xml/">on-line archive</a> (<a
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame]432href="http://xmlsoft.org/messages">old</a>). To subscribe to this list,
433please visit the <a
434href="http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/xml">associated Web</a> page and
435follow the instructions. <strong>Do not send code, I won't debug it</strong>
436(but patches are really appreciated!).</p>
Daniel Veillard234547b2001-07-05 09:46:10 +0000[diff] [blame]437
Daniel Veillard008186f2001-09-13 14:24:44 +0000[diff] [blame]438<p>Check the following <strong><span style="color: #FF0000">before
439posting</span></strong>:</p>
Daniel Veillard234547b2001-07-05 09:46:10 +0000[diff] [blame]440<ul>
Daniel Veillarddadd0872001-09-15 09:21:44 +0000[diff] [blame]441 <li>read the <a href="FAQ.html">FAQ</a></li>
Daniel Veillard234547b2001-07-05 09:46:10 +0000[diff] [blame]442 <li>make sure you are <a href="ftp://xmlsoft.org/">using a recent
443 version</a>, and that the problem still shows up in those</li>
444 <li>check the <a href="http://mail.gnome.org/archives/xml/">list
445 archives</a> to see if the problem was reported already, in this case
Daniel Veillarde7ead2d2001-08-22 23:44:09 +0000[diff] [blame]446 there is probably a fix available, similary check the <a
447 href="http://bugzilla.gnome.org/buglist.cgi?product=libxml">registered
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame]448 open bugs</a></li>
Daniel Veillard234547b2001-07-05 09:46:10 +0000[diff] [blame]449 <li>make sure you can reproduce the bug with xmllint or one of the test
450 programs found in source in the distribution</li>
451 <li>Please send the command showing the error as well as the input (as an
452 attachement)</li>
453</ul>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000[diff] [blame]454
Daniel Veillarddadd0872001-09-15 09:21:44 +0000[diff] [blame]455<p>Then send the bug with associated informations to reproduce it to the <a
Daniel Veillard33a67802001-03-07 09:44:02 +0000[diff] [blame]456href="mailto:xml@gnome.org">xml@gnome.org</a> list; if it's really libxml
Daniel Veillard008186f2001-09-13 14:24:44 +0000[diff] [blame]457related I will approve it.. Please do not send me mail directly, it makes
458things really harder to track and in some cases I'm not the best person to
459answer a given question, ask the list instead.</p>
Daniel Veillard4c3a2031999-11-19 17:46:26 +0000[diff] [blame]460
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000[diff] [blame]461<p>Of course, bugs reported with a suggested patch for fixing them will
Daniel Veillardec303412000-03-24 13:41:54 +0000[diff] [blame]462probably be processed faster.</p>
463
464<p>If you're looking for help, a quick look at <a
Daniel Veillardf7ed3362001-08-17 12:01:21 +0000[diff] [blame]465href="http://mail.gnome.org/archives/xml/">the list archive</a> may actually
Daniel Veillardec303412000-03-24 13:41:54 +0000[diff] [blame]466provide the answer, I usually send source samples when answering libxml usage
Daniel Veillard6f0adb52000-07-03 11:41:26 +0000[diff] [blame]467questions. The <a href="http://xmlsoft.org/html/book1.html">auto-generated
Daniel Veillardec303412000-03-24 13:41:54 +0000[diff] [blame]468documentantion</a> is not as polished as I would like (i need to learn more
469about Docbook), but it's a good starting point.</p>
470
Daniel Veillardd5f97f82000-09-17 16:38:14 +0000[diff] [blame]471<h2><a name="help">How to help</a></h2>
472
473<p>You can help the project in various ways, the best thing to do first is to
474subscribe to the mailing-list as explained before, check the <a
Daniel Veillardf7ed3362001-08-17 12:01:21 +0000[diff] [blame]475href="http://mail.gnome.org/archives/xml/">archives </a>and the <a
476href="http://bugzilla.gnome.org/buglist.cgi?product=libxml">Gnome bug
Daniel Veillardd5f97f82000-09-17 16:38:14 +0000[diff] [blame]477database:</a>:</p>
478<ol>
479 <li>provide patches when you find problems</li>
Daniel Veillard189446d2000-10-13 10:23:06 +0000[diff] [blame]480 <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]481 be integrated in all cases but help pinpointing portability problems
482 and</li>
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000[diff] [blame]483 <li>provide documentation fixes (either as patches to the code comments or
Daniel Veillardd5f97f82000-09-17 16:38:14 +0000[diff] [blame]484 as HTML diffs).</li>
485 <li>provide new documentations pieces (translations, examples, etc ...)</li>
486 <li>Check the TODO file and try to close one of the items</li>
487 <li>take one of the points raised in the archive or the bug database and
Daniel Veillarde7ead2d2001-08-22 23:44:09 +0000[diff] [blame]488 provide a fix. <a href="mailto:daniel@veillard.com">Get in touch with me
489 </a>before to avoid synchronization problems and check that the suggested
490 fix will fit in nicely :-)</li>
Daniel Veillardd5f97f82000-09-17 16:38:14 +0000[diff] [blame]491</ol>
492
Daniel Veillard10a2c651999-12-12 13:03:50 +0000[diff] [blame]493<h2><a name="Downloads">Downloads</a></h2>
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000[diff] [blame]494
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]495<p>The latest versions of libxml can be found on <a
Daniel Veillard20c8cf22001-06-26 22:47:36 +0000[diff] [blame]496href="ftp://xmlsoft.org/">xmlsoft.org</a> (<a
497href="ftp://speakeasy.rpmfind.net/pub/libxml/">Seattle</a>, <a
498href="ftp://fr.rpmfind.net/pub/libxml/">France</a>) or on the <a
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000[diff] [blame]499href="ftp://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/MIRRORS.html">Gnome FTP server</a> either
Daniel Veillard10a2c651999-12-12 13:03:50 +0000[diff] [blame]500as a <a href="ftp://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/stable/sources/libxml/">source
Daniel Veillard306be992000-07-03 12:38:45 +0000[diff] [blame]501archive</a> or <a
Daniel Veillarda41123c2001-04-22 19:31:20 +0000[diff] [blame]502href="ftp://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/stable/redhat/i386/libxml/">RPM
503packages</a>. (NOTE that you need both the <a
Daniel Veillardc19fccc2000-07-03 11:52:01 +0000[diff] [blame]504href="http://rpmfind.net/linux/RPM/libxml2.html">libxml(2)</a> and <a
505href="http://rpmfind.net/linux/RPM/libxml2-devel.html">libxml(2)-devel</a>
Daniel Veillard95189532001-07-26 18:30:26 +0000[diff] [blame]506packages installed to compile applications using libxml.) <a
507href="mailto:izlatkovic@daenet.de">Igor Zlatkovic</a> is now the maintainer
508of the Windows port, <a
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame]509href="http://www.fh-frankfurt.de/~igor/projects/libxml/index.html">he
Daniel Veillardc6271d22001-10-27 07:50:58 +0000[diff] [blame]510provides binaries</a>. <a href="mailto:Gary.Pennington@sun.com">Gary
Daniel Veillard1aadc442001-11-28 13:10:32 +0000[diff] [blame]511Pennington</a> provides <a href="http://garypennington.net/libxml2/">Solaris
512binaries</a>.</p>
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000[diff] [blame]513
Daniel Veillard6c8b1172000-03-01 00:40:41 +0000[diff] [blame]514<p><a name="Snapshot">Snapshot:</a></p>
515<ul>
516 <li>Code from the W3C cvs base libxml <a
Daniel Veillard33a67802001-03-07 09:44:02 +0000[diff] [blame]517 href="ftp://xmlsoft.org/cvs-snapshot.tar.gz">cvs-snapshot.tar.gz</a></li>
Daniel Veillard6c8b1172000-03-01 00:40:41 +0000[diff] [blame]518 <li>Docs, content of the web site, the list archive included <a
Daniel Veillard33a67802001-03-07 09:44:02 +0000[diff] [blame]519 href="ftp://xmlsoft.org/libxml-docs.tar.gz">libxml-docs.tar.gz</a></li>
Daniel Veillard6c8b1172000-03-01 00:40:41 +0000[diff] [blame]520</ul>
521
Daniel Veillardc6271d22001-10-27 07:50:58 +0000[diff] [blame]522<p><a name="Contribs">Contributions:</a></p>
Daniel Veillard6c8b1172000-03-01 00:40:41 +0000[diff] [blame]523
524<p>I do accept external contributions, especially if compiling on another
Daniel Veillardc6271d22001-10-27 07:50:58 +0000[diff] [blame]525platform, get in touch with me to upload the package, wrappers for various
Daniel Veillard51095312001-10-28 18:51:57 +0000[diff] [blame]526languages have been provided, and can be found in the <a
527href="contribs.html">contrib section</a></p>
Daniel Veillard6c8b1172000-03-01 00:40:41 +0000[diff] [blame]528
Daniel Veillard82687162001-01-22 15:32:01 +0000[diff] [blame]529<p>Libxml is also available from CVS:</p>
Daniel Veillard10a2c651999-12-12 13:03:50 +0000[diff] [blame]530<ul>
Daniel Veillard10a2c651999-12-12 13:03:50 +0000[diff] [blame]531 <li><p>The <a
532 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]533 CVS base</a>. Check the <a
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame]534 href="http://developer.gnome.org/tools/cvs.html">Gnome CVS Tools</a>
535 page; the CVS module is <b>gnome-xml</b>.</p>
Daniel Veillard10a2c651999-12-12 13:03:50 +0000[diff] [blame]536 </li>
Daniel Veillard82687162001-01-22 15:32:01 +0000[diff] [blame]537 <li>The <strong>libxslt</strong> module is also present there</li>
Daniel Veillard10a2c651999-12-12 13:03:50 +0000[diff] [blame]538</ul>
539
540<h2><a name="News">News</a></h2>
541
Daniel Veillard944b5ff1999-12-15 19:08:24 +0000[diff] [blame]542<h3>CVS only : check the <a
543href="http://cvs.gnome.org/lxr/source/gnome-xml/ChangeLog">Changelog</a> file
Daniel Veillard189446d2000-10-13 10:23:06 +0000[diff] [blame]544for a really accurate description</h3>
Daniel Veillardab8500d2000-10-15 21:06:19 +0000[diff] [blame]545
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000[diff] [blame]546<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]547you want to test those</p>
548<ul>
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame]549 <li>Implementing <a href="http://xmlsoft.org/XSLT">XSLT</a>, this is done
550 as a separate C library on top of libxml called libxslt</li>
Daniel Veillard28929b22000-11-13 18:22:49 +0000[diff] [blame]551 <li>Finishing up <a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xptr">XPointer</a> and <a
552 href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xinclude">XInclude</a></li>
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame]553 <li>(seeems working but delayed from release) parsing/import of Docbook
554 SGML docs</li>
555</ul>
556
Daniel Veillard5f4b5992002-02-20 10:22:49 +0000[diff] [blame]557<h3>2.4.16: Feb 20 2002</h3>
558<ul>
559 <li>a lot of bug fixes, most of them were triggered by the XML Testsuite
560 from OASIS and W3C. Compliance has been significantly improved.</li>
561 <li>a couple of portability fixes too.</li>
562</ul>
563
Daniel Veillard397ff112002-02-11 18:27:20 +0000[diff] [blame]564<h3>2.4.15: Feb 11 2002</h3>
565<ul>
566 <li>Fixed the Makefiles, especially the python module ones</li>
567 <li>A few bug fixes and cleanup</li>
568 <li>Includes cleanup</li>
569</ul>
570
Daniel Veillardb6c1e2f2002-02-08 14:52:52 +0000[diff] [blame]571<h3>2.4.14: Feb 8 2002</h3>
572<ul>
573 <li>Change of Licence to the <a
574 href="http://www.opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.html">MIT
575 Licence</a> basisally for integration in XFree86 codebase, and removing
576 confusion around the previous dual-licencing</li>
577 <li>added Python bindings, beta software but should already be quite
578 complete</li>
579 <li>a large number of fixes and cleanups, especially for all tree
580 manipulations</li>
581 <li>cleanup of the headers, generation of a reference API definition in
582 XML</li>
583</ul>
584
585<h3>2.4.13: Jan 14 2002</h3>
Daniel Veillard744683d2002-01-14 17:30:20 +0000[diff] [blame]586<ul>
587 <li>update of the documentation: John Fleck and Charlie Bozeman</li>
588 <li>cleanup of timing code from Justin Fletcher</li>
589 <li>fixes for Windows and initial thread support on Win32: Igor and Serguei
590 Narojnyi</li>
591 <li>Cygwin patch from Robert Collins</li>
592 <li>added xmlSetEntityReferenceFunc() for Keith Isdale work on xsldbg</li>
593</ul>
594
Daniel Veillardef90ba72001-12-07 14:24:22 +0000[diff] [blame]595<h3>2.4.12: Dec 7 2001</h3>
596<ul>
597 <li>a few bug fixes: thread (Gary Pennington), xmllint (Geert Kloosterman),
598 XML parser (Robin Berjon), XPointer (Danny Jamshy), I/O cleanups
599 (robert)</li>
600 <li>Eric Lavigne contributed project files for MacOS</li>
601 <li>some makefiles cleanups</li>
602</ul>
603
Daniel Veillarda4871052001-11-26 13:19:48 +0000[diff] [blame]604<h3>2.4.11: Nov 26 2001</h3>
605<ul>
606 <li>fixed a couple of errors in the includes, fixed a few bugs, some code
607 cleanups</li>
608 <li>xmllint man pages improvement by Heiko Rupp</li>
609 <li>updated VMS build instructions from John A Fotheringham</li>
610 <li>Windows Makefiles updates from Igor</li>
611</ul>
612
Daniel Veillard43d3f612001-11-10 11:57:23 +0000[diff] [blame]613<h3>2.4.10: Nov 10 2001</h3>
614<ul>
615 <li>URI escaping fix (Joel Young)</li>
616 <li>added xmlGetNodePath() (for paths or XPointers generation)</li>
617 <li>Fixes namespace handling problems when using DTD and validation</li>
618 <li>improvements on xmllint: Morus Walter patches for --format and
619 --encode, Stefan Kost and Heiko Rupp improvements on the --shell</li>
620 <li>fixes for xmlcatalog linking pointed by Weiqi Gao</li>
621 <li>fixes to the HTML parser</li>
622</ul>
623
624<h3>2.4.9: Nov 6 2001</h3>
625<ul>
626 <li>fixes more catalog bugs</li>
627 <li>avoid a compilation problem, improve xmlGetLineNo()</li>
628</ul>
629
Daniel Veillarded421aa2001-11-04 21:22:45 +0000[diff] [blame]630<h3>2.4.8: Nov 4 2001</h3>
631<ul>
632 <li>fixed SGML catalogs broken in previous release, updated xmlcatalog
633 tool</li>
634 <li>fixed a compile errors and some includes troubles.</li>
635</ul>
636
Daniel Veillard52dcab32001-10-30 12:51:17 +0000[diff] [blame]637<h3>2.4.7: Oct 30 2001</h3>
638<ul>
639 <li>exported some debugging interfaces</li>
640 <li>serious rewrite of the catalog code</li>
641 <li>integrated Gary Pennington thread safety patch, added configure option
642 and regression tests</li>
643 <li>removed an HTML parser bug</li>
644 <li>fixed a couple of potentially serious validation bugs</li>
645 <li>integrated the SGML DocBook support in xmllint</li>
646 <li>changed the nanoftp anonymous login passwd</li>
647 <li>some I/O cleanup and a couple of interfaces for Perl wrapper</li>
648 <li>general bug fixes</li>
649 <li>updated xmllint man page by John Fleck</li>
650 <li>some VMS and Windows updates</li>
651</ul>
652
Daniel Veillard60087f32001-10-10 09:45:09 +0000[diff] [blame]653<h3>2.4.6: Oct 10 2001</h3>
654<ul>
Daniel Veillard52dcab32001-10-30 12:51:17 +0000[diff] [blame]655 <li>added an updated man pages by John Fleck</li>
Daniel Veillard60087f32001-10-10 09:45:09 +0000[diff] [blame]656 <li>portability and configure fixes</li>
657 <li>an infinite loop on the HTML parser was removed (William)</li>
658 <li>Windows makefile patches from Igor</li>
659 <li>fixed half a dozen bugs reported fof libxml or libxslt</li>
660 <li>updated xmlcatalog to be able to modify SGML super catalogs</li>
661</ul>
662
Daniel Veillarddadd0872001-09-15 09:21:44 +0000[diff] [blame]663<h3>2.4.5: Sep 14 2001</h3>
664<ul>
665 <li>Remove a few annoying bugs in 2.4.4</li>
666 <li>forces the HTML serializer to output decimal charrefs since some
667 version of Netscape can't handle hexadecimal ones</li>
668</ul>
669
670<h3>1.8.16: Sep 14 2001</h3>
671<ul>
672 <li>maintenance release of the old libxml1 branch, couple of bug and
673 portability fixes</li>
674</ul>
675
Daniel Veillard04382ae2001-09-12 18:51:30 +0000[diff] [blame]676<h3>2.4.4: Sep 12 2001</h3>
677<ul>
678 <li>added --convert to xmlcatalog, bug fixes and cleanups of XML
679 Catalog</li>
680 <li>a few bug fixes and some portability changes</li>
681 <li>some documentation cleanups</li>
682</ul>
683
Daniel Veillard39936902001-08-24 00:49:01 +0000[diff] [blame]684<h3>2.4.3: Aug 23 2001</h3>
685<ul>
686 <li>XML Catalog support see the doc</li>
687 <li>New NaN/Infinity floating point code</li>
688 <li>A few bug fixes</li>
689</ul>
690
691<h3>2.4.2: Aug 15 2001</h3>
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame]692<ul>
693 <li>adds xmlLineNumbersDefault() to control line number generation</li>
694 <li>lot of bug fixes</li>
695 <li>the Microsoft MSC projects files shuld now be up to date</li>
696 <li>inheritance of namespaces from DTD defaulted attributes</li>
697 <li>fixes a serious potential security bug</li>
698 <li>added a --format option to xmllint</li>
699</ul>
700
701<h3>2.4.1: July 24 2001</h3>
702<ul>
703 <li>possibility to keep line numbers in the tree</li>
704 <li>some computation NaN fixes</li>
705 <li>extension of the XPath API</li>
706 <li>cleanup for alpha and ia64 targets</li>
707 <li>patch to allow saving through HTTP PUT or POST</li>
Daniel Veillard09ab7e12001-07-10 15:49:44 +0000[diff] [blame]708</ul>
709
710<h3>2.4.0: July 10 2001</h3>
711<ul>
712 <li>Fixed a few bugs in XPath, validation, and tree handling.</li>
713 <li>Fixed XML Base implementation, added a coupel of examples to the
714 regression tests</li>
715 <li>A bit of cleanup</li>
Daniel Veillardab8500d2000-10-15 21:06:19 +0000[diff] [blame]716</ul>
717
Daniel Veillard5b43fde2001-07-05 23:31:40 +0000[diff] [blame]718<h3>2.3.14: July 5 2001</h3>
719<ul>
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame]720 <li>fixed some entities problems and reduce mem requirement when
721 substituing them</li>
Daniel Veillard5b43fde2001-07-05 23:31:40 +0000[diff] [blame]722 <li>lots of improvements in the XPath queries interpreter can be
723 substancially faster</li>
724 <li>Makefiles and configure cleanups</li>
725 <li>Fixes to XPath variable eval, and compare on empty node set</li>
726 <li>HTML tag closing bug fixed</li>
727 <li>Fixed an URI reference computating problem when validating</li>
728</ul>
729
Daniel Veillard2adbb512001-06-28 16:20:36 +0000[diff] [blame]730<h3>2.3.13: June 28 2001</h3>
731<ul>
732 <li>2.3.12 configure.in was broken as well as the push mode XML parser</li>
733 <li>a few more fixes for compilation on Windows MSC by Yon Derek</li>
734</ul>
735
736<h3>1.8.14: June 28 2001</h3>
737<ul>
738 <li>Zbigniew Chyla gave a patch to use the old XML parser in push mode</li>
739 <li>Small Makefile fix</li>
740</ul>
741
Daniel Veillard11648102001-06-26 16:08:24 +0000[diff] [blame]742<h3>2.3.12: June 26 2001</h3>
743<ul>
744 <li>lots of cleanup</li>
745 <li>a couple of validation fix</li>
746 <li>fixed line number counting</li>
747 <li>fixed serious problems in the XInclude processing</li>
748 <li>added support for UTF8 BOM at beginning of entities</li>
749 <li>fixed a strange gcc optimizer bugs in xpath handling of float, gcc-3.0
750 miscompile uri.c (William), Thomas Leitner provided a fix for the
751 optimizer on Tru64</li>
752 <li>incorporated Yon Derek and Igor Zlatkovic fixes and improvements for
753 compilation on Windows MSC</li>
754 <li>update of libxml-doc.el (Felix Natter)</li>
755 <li>fixed 2 bugs in URI normalization code</li>
756</ul>
757
Daniel Veillarde3c81b52001-06-17 14:50:34 +0000[diff] [blame]758<h3>2.3.11: June 17 2001</h3>
759<ul>
760 <li>updates to trio, Makefiles and configure should fix some portability
761 problems (alpha)</li>
762 <li>fixed some HTML serialization problems (pre, script, and block/inline
763 handling), added encoding aware APIs, cleanup of this code</li>
764 <li>added xmlHasNsProp()</li>
765 <li>implemented a specific PI for encoding support in the DocBook SGML
766 parser</li>
767 <li>some XPath fixes (-Infinity, / as a function parameter and namespaces
768 node selection)</li>
769 <li>fixed a performance problem and an error in the validation code</li>
770 <li>fixed XInclude routine to implement the recursive behaviour</li>
771 <li>fixed xmlFreeNode problem when libxml is included statically twice</li>
772 <li>added --version to xmllint for bug reports</li>
773</ul>
774
Daniel Veillard2e4f1882001-06-01 10:11:57 +0000[diff] [blame]775<h3>2.3.10: June 1 2001</h3>
776<ul>
777 <li>fixed the SGML catalog support</li>
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame]778 <li>a number of reported bugs got fixed, in XPath, iconv detection,
779 XInclude processing</li>
Daniel Veillard2e4f1882001-06-01 10:11:57 +0000[diff] [blame]780 <li>XPath string function should now handle unicode correctly</li>
781</ul>
782
Daniel Veillard4623acd2001-05-19 15:13:15 +0000[diff] [blame]783<h3>2.3.9: May 19 2001</h3>
784
785<p>Lots of bugfixes, and added a basic SGML catalog support:</p>
786<ul>
787 <li>HTML push bugfix #54891 and another patch from Jonas Borgström</li>
788 <li>some serious speed optimisation again</li>
789 <li>some documentation cleanups</li>
790 <li>trying to get better linking on solaris (-R)</li>
791 <li>XPath API cleanup from Thomas Broyer</li>
792 <li>Validation bug fixed #54631, added a patch from Gary Pennington, fixed
793 xmlValidGetValidElements()</li>
794 <li>Added an INSTALL file</li>
795 <li>Attribute removal added to API: #54433</li>
796 <li>added a basic support for SGML catalogs</li>
797 <li>fixed xmlKeepBlanksDefault(0) API</li>
798 <li>bugfix in xmlNodeGetLang()</li>
799 <li>fixed a small configure portability problem</li>
800 <li>fixed an inversion of SYSTEM and PUBLIC identifier in HTML document</li>
801</ul>
802
Daniel Veillarda265af72001-05-14 11:13:58 +0000[diff] [blame]803<h3>1.8.13: May 14 2001</h3>
804<ul>
805 <li>bugfixes release of the old libxml1 branch used by Gnome</li>
806</ul>
807
Daniel Veillard3bbbe6f2001-05-03 11:15:37 +0000[diff] [blame]808<h3>2.3.8: May 3 2001</h3>
809<ul>
810 <li>Integrated an SGML DocBook parser for the Gnome project</li>
811 <li>Fixed a few things in the HTML parser</li>
812 <li>Fixed some XPath bugs raised by XSLT use, tried to fix the floating
813 point portability issue</li>
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame]814 <li>Speed improvement (8M/s for SAX, 3M/s for DOM, 1.5M/s for
815 DOM+validation using the XML REC as input and a 700MHz celeron).</li>
Daniel Veillard3bbbe6f2001-05-03 11:15:37 +0000[diff] [blame]816 <li>incorporated more Windows cleanup</li>
817 <li>added xmlSaveFormatFile()</li>
818 <li>fixed problems in copying nodes with entities references (gdome)</li>
819 <li>removed some troubles surrounding the new validation module</li>
820</ul>
821
Daniel Veillarda41123c2001-04-22 19:31:20 +0000[diff] [blame]822<h3>2.3.7: April 22 2001</h3>
823<ul>
824 <li>lots of small bug fixes, corrected XPointer</li>
825 <li>Non determinist content model validation support</li>
826 <li>added xmlDocCopyNode for gdome2</li>
827 <li>revamped the way the HTML parser handles end of tags</li>
828 <li>XPath: corrctions of namespacessupport and number formatting</li>
829 <li>Windows: Igor Zlatkovic patches for MSC compilation</li>
830 <li>HTML ouput fixes from P C Chow and William M. Brack</li>
831 <li>Improved validation speed sensible for DocBook</li>
832 <li>fixed a big bug with ID declared in external parsed entities</li>
833 <li>portability fixes, update of Trio from Bjorn Reese</li>
834</ul>
835
Daniel Veillardafc73112001-04-11 11:51:41 +0000[diff] [blame]836<h3>2.3.6: April 8 2001</h3>
837<ul>
838 <li>Code cleanup using extreme gcc compiler warning options, found and
839 cleared half a dozen potential problem</li>
840 <li>the Eazel team found an XML parser bug</li>
841 <li>cleaned up the user of some of the string formatting function. used the
842 trio library code to provide the one needed when the platform is missing
843 them</li>
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame]844 <li>xpath: removed a memory leak and fixed the predicate evaluation
845 problem, extended the testsuite and cleaned up the result. XPointer seems
846 broken ...</li>
Daniel Veillardafc73112001-04-11 11:51:41 +0000[diff] [blame]847</ul>
848
Daniel Veillard56a4cb82001-03-24 17:00:36 +0000[diff] [blame]849<h3>2.3.5: Mar 23 2001</h3>
850<ul>
851 <li>Biggest change is separate parsing and evaluation of XPath expressions,
852 there is some new APIs for this too</li>
853 <li>included a number of bug fixes(XML push parser, 51876, notations,
854 52299)</li>
855 <li>Fixed some portability issues</li>
856</ul>
857
Daniel Veillarde356c282001-03-10 12:32:04 +0000[diff] [blame]858<h3>2.3.4: Mar 10 2001</h3>
859<ul>
860 <li>Fixed bugs #51860 and #51861</li>
861 <li>Added a global variable xmlDefaultBufferSize to allow default buffer
862 size to be application tunable.</li>
863 <li>Some cleanup in the validation code, still a bug left and this part
864 should probably be rewritten to support ambiguous content model :-\</li>
865 <li>Fix a couple of serious bugs introduced or raised by changes in 2.3.3
866 parser</li>
867 <li>Fixed another bug in xmlNodeGetContent()</li>
868 <li>Bjorn fixed XPath node collection and Number formatting</li>
869 <li>Fixed a loop reported in the HTML parsing</li>
870 <li>blank space are reported even if the Dtd content model proves that they
871 are formatting spaces, this is for XmL conformance</li>
872</ul>
873
Daniel Veillardb402c072001-03-01 17:28:58 +0000[diff] [blame]874<h3>2.3.3: Mar 1 2001</h3>
875<ul>
876 <li>small change in XPath for XSLT</li>
877 <li>documentation cleanups</li>
878 <li>fix in validation by Gary Pennington</li>
879 <li>serious parsing performances improvements</li>
880</ul>
881
Daniel Veillardec70e912001-02-26 20:10:45 +0000[diff] [blame]882<h3>2.3.2: Feb 24 2001</h3>
Daniel Veillard71681102001-02-24 17:48:53 +0000[diff] [blame]883<ul>
884 <li>chasing XPath bugs, found a bunch, completed some TODO</li>
885 <li>fixed a Dtd parsing bug</li>
886 <li>fixed a bug in xmlNodeGetContent</li>
887 <li>ID/IDREF support partly rewritten by Gary Pennington</li>
888</ul>
889
Daniel Veillardec70e912001-02-26 20:10:45 +0000[diff] [blame]890<h3>2.3.1: Feb 15 2001</h3>
Daniel Veillard6e6a6cc2001-02-15 15:55:44 +0000[diff] [blame]891<ul>
892 <li>some XPath and HTML bug fixes for XSLT</li>
893 <li>small extension of the hash table interfaces for DOM gdome2
894 implementation</li>
895 <li>A few bug fixes</li>
896</ul>
897
Daniel Veillardec70e912001-02-26 20:10:45 +0000[diff] [blame]898<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]899<ul>
900 <li>Lots of XPath bug fixes</li>
901 <li>Add a mode with Dtd lookup but without validation error reporting for
902 XSLT</li>
903 <li>Add support for text node without escaping (XSLT)</li>
904 <li>bug fixes for xmlCheckFilename</li>
905 <li>validation code bug fixes from Gary Pennington</li>
906 <li>Patch from Paul D. Smith correcting URI path normalization</li>
907 <li>Patch to allow simultaneous install of libxml-devel and
908 libxml2-devel</li>
909 <li>the example Makefile is now fixed</li>
910 <li>added HTML to the RPM packages</li>
911 <li>tree copying bugfixes</li>
912 <li>updates to Windows makefiles</li>
913 <li>optimisation patch from Bjorn Reese</li>
914</ul>
915
Daniel Veillardec70e912001-02-26 20:10:45 +0000[diff] [blame]916<h3>2.2.11: Jan 4 2001</h3>
Daniel Veillard503b8932001-01-05 06:36:31 +0000[diff] [blame]917<ul>
918 <li>bunch of bug fixes (memory I/O, xpath, ftp/http, ...)</li>
919 <li>added htmlHandleOmittedElem()</li>
920 <li>Applied Bjorn Reese's IPV6 first patch</li>
921 <li>Applied Paul D. Smith patches for validation of XInclude results</li>
Daniel Veillard82687162001-01-22 15:32:01 +0000[diff] [blame]922 <li>added XPointer xmlns() new scheme support</li>
Daniel Veillard503b8932001-01-05 06:36:31 +0000[diff] [blame]923</ul>
924
Daniel Veillard2ddd23d2000-11-25 10:42:19 +0000[diff] [blame]925<h3>2.2.10: Nov 25 2000</h3>
Daniel Veillard9d343c42000-11-25 10:12:43 +0000[diff] [blame]926<ul>
927 <li>Fix the Windows problems of 2.2.8</li>
928 <li>integrate OpenVMS patches</li>
929 <li>better handling of some nasty HTML input</li>
930 <li>Improved the XPointer implementation</li>
931 <li>integrate a number of provided patches</li>
932</ul>
933
Daniel Veillard2ddd23d2000-11-25 10:42:19 +0000[diff] [blame]934<h3>2.2.9: Nov 25 2000</h3>
935<ul>
936 <li>erroneous release :-(</li>
937</ul>
938
Daniel Veillard28929b22000-11-13 18:22:49 +0000[diff] [blame]939<h3>2.2.8: Nov 13 2000</h3>
940<ul>
941 <li>First version of <a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xinclude">XInclude</a>
942 support</li>
943 <li>Patch in conditional section handling</li>
944 <li>updated MS compiler project</li>
945 <li>fixed some XPath problems</li>
946 <li>added an URI escaping function</li>
947 <li>some other bug fixes</li>
948</ul>
949
950<h3>2.2.7: Oct 31 2000</h3>
951<ul>
952 <li>added message redirection</li>
953 <li>XPath improvements (thanks TOM !)</li>
954 <li>xmlIOParseDTD() added</li>
955 <li>various small fixes in the HTML, URI, HTTP and XPointer support</li>
956 <li>some cleanup of the Makefile, autoconf and the distribution content</li>
957</ul>
958
Daniel Veillard29a11cc2000-10-25 13:32:39 +0000[diff] [blame]959<h3>2.2.6: Oct 25 2000:</h3>
960<ul>
961 <li>Added an hash table module, migrated a number of internal structure to
962 those</li>
963 <li>Fixed a posteriori validation problems</li>
964 <li>HTTP module cleanups</li>
965 <li>HTML parser improvements (tag errors, script/style handling, attribute
966 normalization)</li>
967 <li>coalescing of adjacent text nodes</li>
968 <li>couple of XPath bug fixes, exported the internal API</li>
969</ul>
970
Daniel Veillardab8500d2000-10-15 21:06:19 +0000[diff] [blame]971<h3>2.2.5: Oct 15 2000:</h3>
Daniel Veillard4c3a2031999-11-19 17:46:26 +0000[diff] [blame]972<ul>
Daniel Veillard189446d2000-10-13 10:23:06 +0000[diff] [blame]973 <li>XPointer implementation and testsuite</li>
974 <li>Lot of XPath fixes, added variable and functions registration, more
975 tests</li>
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame]976 <li>Portability fixes, lots of enhancements toward an easy Windows build
977 and release</li>
Daniel Veillard189446d2000-10-13 10:23:06 +0000[diff] [blame]978 <li>Late validation fixes</li>
979 <li>Integrated a lot of contributed patches</li>
980 <li>added memory management docs</li>
Daniel Veillardab8500d2000-10-15 21:06:19 +0000[diff] [blame]981 <li>a performance problem when using large buffer seems fixed</li>
Daniel Veillard189446d2000-10-13 10:23:06 +0000[diff] [blame]982</ul>
983
984<h3>2.2.4: Oct 1 2000:</h3>
985<ul>
986 <li>main XPath problem fixed</li>
987 <li>Integrated portability patches for Windows</li>
988 <li>Serious bug fixes on the URI and HTML code</li>
Daniel Veillard361d8452000-04-03 19:48:13 +0000[diff] [blame]989</ul>
990
Daniel Veillardd5f97f82000-09-17 16:38:14 +0000[diff] [blame]991<h3>2.2.3: Sep 17 2000</h3>
992<ul>
993 <li>bug fixes</li>
994 <li>cleanup of entity handling code</li>
995 <li>overall review of all loops in the parsers, all sprintf usage has been
996 checked too</li>
997 <li>Far better handling of larges Dtd. Validating against Docbook XML Dtd
998 works smoothly now.</li>
999</ul>
1000
1001<h3>1.8.10: Sep 6 2000</h3>
1002<ul>
1003 <li>bug fix release for some Gnome projects</li>
1004</ul>
1005
1006<h3>2.2.2: August 12 2000</h3>
Daniel Veillard786d7c82000-08-12 23:38:57 +0000[diff] [blame]1007<ul>
1008 <li>mostly bug fixes</li>
Daniel Veillardec78c0f2000-08-25 10:25:23 +0000[diff] [blame]1009 <li>started adding routines to access xml parser context options</li>
Daniel Veillard786d7c82000-08-12 23:38:57 +0000[diff] [blame]1010</ul>
1011
Daniel Veillardd5f97f82000-09-17 16:38:14 +0000[diff] [blame]1012<h3>2.2.1: July 21 2000</h3>
Daniel Veillarda2679fa2000-07-22 02:38:15 +0000[diff] [blame]1013<ul>
1014 <li>a purely bug fixes release</li>
1015 <li>fixed an encoding support problem when parsing from a memory block</li>
1016 <li>fixed a DOCTYPE parsing problem</li>
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame]1017 <li>removed a bug in the function allowing to override the memory
1018 allocation routines</li>
Daniel Veillarda2679fa2000-07-22 02:38:15 +0000[diff] [blame]1019</ul>
1020
Daniel Veillardd5f97f82000-09-17 16:38:14 +0000[diff] [blame]1021<h3>2.2.0: July 14 2000</h3>
Daniel Veillard94e90602000-07-17 14:38:19 +0000[diff] [blame]1022<ul>
1023 <li>applied a lot of portability fixes</li>
1024 <li>better encoding support/cleanup and saving (content is now always
1025 encoded in UTF-8)</li>
1026 <li>the HTML parser now correctly handles encodings</li>
1027 <li>added xmlHasProp()</li>
1028 <li>fixed a serious problem with &amp;#38;</li>
1029 <li>propagated the fix to FTP client</li>
1030 <li>cleanup, bugfixes, etc ...</li>
1031 <li>Added a page about <a href="encoding.html">libxml Internationalization
1032 support</a></li>
1033</ul>
1034
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]1035<h3>1.8.9: July 9 2000</h3>
1036<ul>
1037 <li>fixed the spec the RPMs should be better</li>
1038 <li>fixed a serious bug in the FTP implementation, released 1.8.9 to solve
1039 rpmfind users problem</li>
1040</ul>
1041
Daniel Veillard6388e172000-07-03 16:07:19 +0000[diff] [blame]1042<h3>2.1.1: July 1 2000</h3>
1043<ul>
1044 <li>fixes a couple of bugs in the 2.1.0 packaging</li>
1045 <li>improvements on the HTML parser</li>
1046</ul>
1047
Daniel Veillard3f6f7f62000-06-30 17:58:25 +0000[diff] [blame]1048<h3>2.1.0 and 1.8.8: June 29 2000</h3>
1049<ul>
1050 <li>1.8.8 is mostly a comodity package for upgrading to libxml2 accoding to
1051 <a href="upgrade.html">new instructions</a>. It fixes a nasty problem
1052 about &amp;#38; charref parsing</li>
1053 <li>2.1.0 also ease the upgrade from libxml v1 to the recent version. it
1054 also contains numerous fixes and enhancements:
1055 <ul>
1056 <li>added xmlStopParser() to stop parsing</li>
1057 <li>improved a lot parsing speed when there is large CDATA blocs</li>
1058 <li>includes XPath patches provided by Picdar Technology</li>
1059 <li>tried to fix as much as possible DtD validation and namespace
1060 related problems</li>
1061 <li>output to a given encoding has been added/tested</li>
1062 <li>lot of various fixes</li>
1063 </ul>
1064 </li>
1065</ul>
1066
Daniel Veillarde0aed302000-04-16 08:52:20 +0000[diff] [blame]1067<h3>2.0.0: Apr 12 2000</h3>
Daniel Veillard361d8452000-04-03 19:48:13 +0000[diff] [blame]1068<ul>
1069 <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]1070 idea to check the 1.x to 2.x upgrade instructions. NOTE: while initally
1071 scheduled for Apr 3 the relase occured only on Apr 12 due to massive
1072 workload.</li>
Daniel Veillard361d8452000-04-03 19:48:13 +0000[diff] [blame]1073 <li>The include are now located under $prefix/include/libxml (instead of
Daniel Veillarde0aed302000-04-16 08:52:20 +0000[diff] [blame]1074 $prefix/include/gnome-xml), they also are referenced by
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]1075 <pre>#include &lt;libxml/xxx.h&gt;</pre>
Daniel Veillarde0aed302000-04-16 08:52:20 +0000[diff] [blame]1076 <p>instead of</p>
Daniel Veillard361d8452000-04-03 19:48:13 +0000[diff] [blame]1077 <pre>#include "xxx.h"</pre>
1078 </li>
Daniel Veillard8f621982000-03-20 13:07:15 +0000[diff] [blame]1079 <li>a new URI module for parsing URIs and following strictly RFC 2396</li>
1080 <li>the memory allocation routines used by libxml can now be overloaded
1081 dynamically by using xmlMemSetup()</li>
Daniel Veillard361d8452000-04-03 19:48:13 +0000[diff] [blame]1082 <li>The previously CVS only tool tester has been renamed
1083 <strong>xmllint</strong> and is now installed as part of the libxml2
1084 package</li>
Daniel Veillarde0aed302000-04-16 08:52:20 +0000[diff] [blame]1085 <li>The I/O interface has been revamped. There is now ways to plug in
1086 specific I/O modules, either at the URI scheme detection level using
1087 xmlRegisterInputCallbacks() or by passing I/O functions when creating a
1088 parser context using xmlCreateIOParserCtxt()</li>
1089 <li>there is a C preprocessor macro LIBXML_VERSION providing the version
1090 number of the libxml module in use</li>
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame]1091 <li>a number of optional features of libxml can now be excluded at
1092 configure time (FTP/HTTP/HTML/XPath/Debug)</li>
Daniel Veillardedfb29b2000-03-14 19:59:05 +0000[diff] [blame]1093</ul>
1094
1095<h3>2.0.0beta: Mar 14 2000</h3>
1096<ul>
1097 <li>This is a first Beta release of libxml version 2</li>
Daniel Veillarde356c282001-03-10 12:32:04 +0000[diff] [blame]1098 <li>It's available only from<a href="ftp://xmlsoft.org/">xmlsoft.org
1099 FTP</a>, it's packaged as libxml2-2.0.0beta and available as tar and
1100 RPMs</li>
Daniel Veillardedfb29b2000-03-14 19:59:05 +0000[diff] [blame]1101 <li>This version is now the head in the Gnome CVS base, the old one is
1102 available under the tag LIB_XML_1_X</li>
1103 <li>This includes a very large set of changes. Froma programmatic point of
1104 view applications should not have to be modified too much, check the <a
1105 href="upgrade.html">upgrade page</a></li>
1106 <li>Some interfaces may changes (especially a bit about encoding).</li>
1107 <li>the updates includes:
Daniel Veillard6c8b1172000-03-01 00:40:41 +0000[diff] [blame]1108 <ul>
Daniel Veillardedfb29b2000-03-14 19:59:05 +0000[diff] [blame]1109 <li>fix I18N support. ISO-Latin-x/UTF-8/UTF-16 (nearly) seems correctly
1110 handled now</li>
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame]1111 <li>Better handling of entities, especially well formedness checking
1112 and proper PEref extensions in external subsets</li>
Daniel Veillard6c8b1172000-03-01 00:40:41 +0000[diff] [blame]1113 <li>DTD conditional sections</li>
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +0000[diff] [blame]1114 <li>Validation now correcly handle entities content</li>
Daniel Veillard6c8b1172000-03-01 00:40:41 +0000[diff] [blame]1115 <li><a href="http://rpmfind.net/tools/gdome/messages/0039.html">change
1116 structures to accomodate DOM</a></li>
Daniel Veillard6c8b1172000-03-01 00:40:41 +0000[diff] [blame]1117 </ul>
1118 </li>
Daniel Veillardedfb29b2000-03-14 19:59:05 +0000[diff] [blame]1119 <li>Serious progress were made toward compliance, <a
1120 href="conf/result.html">here are the result of the test</a> against the
1121 OASIS testsuite (except the japanese tests since I don't support that
1122 encoding yet). This URL is rebuilt every couple of hours using the CVS
1123 head version.</li>
Daniel Veillarde41f2b72000-01-30 20:00:07 +0000[diff] [blame]1124</ul>
1125
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +0000[diff] [blame]1126<h3>1.8.7: Mar 6 2000</h3>
1127<ul>
1128 <li>This is a bug fix release:</li>
1129 <li>It is possible to disable the ignorable blanks heuristic used by
1130 libxml-1.x, a new function xmlKeepBlanksDefault(0) will allow this. Note
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame]1131 that for adherence to XML spec, this behaviour will be disabled by
1132 default in 2.x . The same function will allow to keep compatibility for
1133 old code.</li>
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]1134 <li>Blanks in &lt;a&gt; &lt;/a&gt; constructs are not ignored anymore,
1135 avoiding heuristic is really the Right Way :-\</li>
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +0000[diff] [blame]1136 <li>The unchecked use of snprintf which was breaking libxml-1.8.6
1137 compilation on some platforms has been fixed</li>
1138 <li>nanoftp.c nanohttp.c: Fixed '#' and '?' stripping when processing
1139 URIs</li>
1140</ul>
1141
Daniel Veillarde41f2b72000-01-30 20:00:07 +0000[diff] [blame]1142<h3>1.8.6: Jan 31 2000</h3>
1143<ul>
1144 <li>added a nanoFTP transport module, debugged until the new version of <a
1145 href="http://rpmfind.net/linux/rpm2html/rpmfind.html">rpmfind</a> can use
1146 it without troubles</li>
Daniel Veillardda07c342000-01-25 18:31:22 +0000[diff] [blame]1147</ul>
1148
1149<h3>1.8.5: Jan 21 2000</h3>
1150<ul>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000[diff] [blame]1151 <li>adding APIs to parse a well balanced chunk of XML (production <a
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame]1152 href="http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml#NT-content">[43] content</a> of the
1153 XML spec)</li>
Daniel Veillard461a66c2000-01-18 18:01:01 +0000[diff] [blame]1154 <li>fixed a hideous bug in xmlGetProp pointed by Rune.Djurhuus@fast.no</li>
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]1155 <li>Jody Goldberg &lt;jgoldberg@home.com&gt; provided another patch trying
1156 to solve the zlib checks problems</li>
Daniel Veillard461a66c2000-01-18 18:01:01 +0000[diff] [blame]1157 <li>The current state in gnome CVS base is expected to ship as 1.8.5 with
1158 gnumeric soon</li>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000[diff] [blame]1159</ul>
1160
1161<h3>1.8.4: Jan 13 2000</h3>
1162<ul>
1163 <li>bug fixes, reintroduced xmlNewGlobalNs(), fixed xmlNewNs()</li>
1164 <li>all exit() call should have been removed from libxml</li>
1165 <li>fixed a problem with INCLUDE_WINSOCK on WIN32 platform</li>
1166 <li>added newDocFragment()</li>
Daniel Veillardf84f71f2000-01-05 19:54:23 +0000[diff] [blame]1167</ul>
1168
1169<h3>1.8.3: Jan 5 2000</h3>
1170<ul>
1171 <li>a Push interface for the XML and HTML parsers</li>
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +0000[diff] [blame]1172 <li>a shell-like interface to the document tree (try tester --shell :-)</li>
Daniel Veillarddbfd6411999-12-28 16:35:14 +0000[diff] [blame]1173 <li>lots of bug fixes and improvement added over XMas hollidays</li>
Daniel Veillard437b87b2000-01-03 17:30:46 +0000[diff] [blame]1174 <li>fixed the DTD parsing code to work with the xhtml DTD</li>
Daniel Veillardf84f71f2000-01-05 19:54:23 +0000[diff] [blame]1175 <li>added xmlRemoveProp(), xmlRemoveID() and xmlRemoveRef()</li>
1176 <li>Fixed bugs in xmlNewNs()</li>
Daniel Veillard437b87b2000-01-03 17:30:46 +0000[diff] [blame]1177 <li>External entity loading code has been revamped, now it uses
Daniel Veillardf84f71f2000-01-05 19:54:23 +0000[diff] [blame]1178 xmlLoadExternalEntity(), some fix on entities processing were added</li>
Daniel Veillard437b87b2000-01-03 17:30:46 +0000[diff] [blame]1179 <li>cleaned up WIN32 includes of socket stuff</li>
Daniel Veillard5cb5ab81999-12-21 15:35:29 +0000[diff] [blame]1180</ul>
1181
1182<h3>1.8.2: Dec 21 1999</h3>
1183<ul>
Daniel Veillardb24054a1999-12-18 15:32:46 +0000[diff] [blame]1184 <li>I got another problem with includes and C++, I hope this issue is fixed
1185 for good this time</li>
Daniel Veillard5cb5ab81999-12-21 15:35:29 +0000[diff] [blame]1186 <li>Added a few tree modification functions: xmlReplaceNode,
1187 xmlAddPrevSibling, xmlAddNextSibling, xmlNodeSetName and
1188 xmlDocSetRootElement</li>
1189 <li>Tried to improve the HTML output with help from <a
1190 href="mailto:clahey@umich.edu">Chris Lahey</a></li>
Daniel Veillarde4e51311999-12-18 15:32:46 +0000[diff] [blame]1191</ul>
Daniel Veillardb24054a1999-12-18 15:32:46 +0000[diff] [blame]1192
Daniel Veillarde4e51311999-12-18 15:32:46 +0000[diff] [blame]1193<h3>1.8.1: Dec 18 1999</h3>
1194<ul>
1195 <li>various patches to avoid troubles when using libxml with C++ compilers
1196 the "namespace" keyword and C escaping in include files</li>
1197 <li>a problem in one of the core macros IS_CHAR was corrected</li>
1198 <li>fixed a bug introduced in 1.8.0 breaking default namespace processing,
1199 and more specifically the Dia application</li>
Daniel Veillard944b5ff1999-12-15 19:08:24 +0000[diff] [blame]1200 <li>fixed a posteriori validation (validation after parsing, or by using a
1201 Dtd not specified in the original document)</li>
Daniel Veillardb24054a1999-12-18 15:32:46 +0000[diff] [blame]1202 <li>fixed a bug in</li>
Daniel Veillard10a2c651999-12-12 13:03:50 +0000[diff] [blame]1203</ul>
1204
1205<h3>1.8.0: Dec 12 1999</h3>
1206<ul>
1207 <li>cleanup, especially memory wise</li>
1208 <li>the parser should be more reliable, especially the HTML one, it should
1209 not crash, whatever the input !</li>
1210 <li>Integrated various patches, especially a speedup improvement for large
1211 dataset from <a href="mailto:cnygard@bellatlantic.net">Carl Nygard</a>,
1212 configure with --with-buffers to enable them.</li>
1213 <li>attribute normalization, oops should have been added long ago !</li>
1214 <li>attributes defaulted from Dtds should be available, xmlSetProp() now
1215 does entities escapting by default.</li>
Daniel Veillard4c3a2031999-11-19 17:46:26 +0000[diff] [blame]1216</ul>
Daniel Veillard35008381999-10-25 13:15:52 +0000[diff] [blame]1217
1218<h3>1.7.4: Oct 25 1999</h3>
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000[diff] [blame]1219<ul>
Daniel Veillard35008381999-10-25 13:15:52 +0000[diff] [blame]1220 <li>Lots of HTML improvement</li>
1221 <li>Fixed some errors when saving both XML and HTML</li>
1222 <li>More examples, the regression tests should now look clean</li>
1223 <li>Fixed a bug with contiguous charref</li>
1224</ul>
1225
1226<h3>1.7.3: Sep 29 1999</h3>
1227<ul>
1228 <li>portability problems fixed</li>
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000[diff] [blame]1229 <li>snprintf was used unconditionnally, leading to link problems on system
Daniel Veillard35008381999-10-25 13:15:52 +0000[diff] [blame]1230 were it's not available, fixed</li>
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000[diff] [blame]1231</ul>
1232
1233<h3>1.7.1: Sep 24 1999</h3>
1234<ul>
1235 <li>The basic type for strings manipulated by libxml has been renamed in
1236 1.7.1 from <strong>CHAR</strong> to <strong>xmlChar</strong>. The reason
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame]1237 is that CHAR was conflicting with a predefined type on Windows. However
1238 on non WIN32 environment, compatibility is provided by the way of a
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000[diff] [blame]1239 <strong>#define </strong>.</li>
1240 <li>Changed another error : the use of a structure field called errno, and
1241 leading to troubles on platforms where it's a macro</li>
1242</ul>
1243
1244<h3>1.7.0: sep 23 1999</h3>
1245<ul>
1246 <li>Added the ability to fetch remote DTD or parsed entities, see the <a
Daniel Veillard9cb5ff42001-01-29 08:22:21 +0000[diff] [blame]1247 href="html/libxml-nanohttp.html">nanohttp</a> module.</li>
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000[diff] [blame]1248 <li>Added an errno to report errors by another mean than a simple printf
1249 like callback</li>
1250 <li>Finished ID/IDREF support and checking when validation</li>
1251 <li>Serious memory leaks fixed (there is now a <a
Daniel Veillard9cb5ff42001-01-29 08:22:21 +0000[diff] [blame]1252 href="html/libxml-xmlmemory.html">memory wrapper</a> module)</li>
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000[diff] [blame]1253 <li>Improvement of <a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xpath">XPath</a>
1254 implementation</li>
1255 <li>Added an HTML parser front-end</li>
1256</ul>
1257
1258<h2><a name="XML">XML</a></h2>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]1259
Daniel Veillard402e8c82000-02-29 22:57:47 +0000[diff] [blame]1260<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]1261markup-based structured documents. Here is <a name="example">an example XML
1262document</a>:</p>
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]1263<pre>&lt;?xml version="1.0"?&gt;
1264&lt;EXAMPLE prop1="gnome is great" prop2="&amp;amp; linux too"&gt;
1265 &lt;head&gt;
1266 &lt;title&gt;Welcome to Gnome&lt;/title&gt;
1267 &lt;/head&gt;
1268 &lt;chapter&gt;
1269 &lt;title&gt;The Linux adventure&lt;/title&gt;
1270 &lt;p&gt;bla bla bla ...&lt;/p&gt;
1271 &lt;image href="linus.gif"/&gt;
1272 &lt;p&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;
1273 &lt;/chapter&gt;
1274&lt;/EXAMPLE&gt;</pre>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1275
Daniel Veillard402e8c82000-02-29 22:57:47 +0000[diff] [blame]1276<p>The first line specifies that it's an XML document and gives useful
1277information about its encoding. Then the document is a text format whose
1278structure is specified by tags between brackets. <strong>Each tag opened has
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +0000[diff] [blame]1279to be closed</strong>. XML is pedantic about this. However, if a tag is empty
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame]1280(no content), a single tag can serve as both the opening and closing tag if
1281it ends with <code>/&gt;</code> rather than with <code>&gt;</code>. Note
1282that, for example, the image tag has no content (just an attribute) and is
1283closed by ending the tag with <code>/&gt;</code>.</p>
Daniel Veillardccb09631998-10-27 06:21:04 +0000[diff] [blame]1284
Daniel Veillard402e8c82000-02-29 22:57:47 +0000[diff] [blame]1285<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]1286structured document maintenance (where it follows the steps of SGML) to
1287simple data encoding mechanisms like configuration file formatting (glade),
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +0000[diff] [blame]1288spreadsheets (gnumeric), or even shorter lived documents such as WebDAV where
1289it is used to encode remote calls between a client and a server.</p>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]1290
Daniel Veillard82687162001-01-22 15:32:01 +0000[diff] [blame]1291<h2><a name="XSLT">XSLT</a></h2>
1292
Daniel Veillard6e6a6cc2001-02-15 15:55:44 +0000[diff] [blame]1293<p>Check <a href="http://xmlsoft.org/XSLT">the separate libxslt page</a></p>
1294
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame]1295<p><a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xslt">XSL Transformations</a>, is a
1296language for transforming XML documents into other XML documents (or
1297HTML/textual output).</p>
Daniel Veillard82687162001-01-22 15:32:01 +0000[diff] [blame]1298
1299<p>A separate library called libxslt is being built on top of libxml2. This
1300module "libxslt" can be found in the Gnome CVS base too.</p>
1301
Daniel Veillard383b1472001-01-23 11:39:52 +0000[diff] [blame]1302<p>You can check the <a
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame]1303href="http://cvs.gnome.org/lxr/source/libxslt/FEATURES">features</a>
1304supported and the progresses on the <a
Daniel Veillard6dbcaf82002-02-20 14:37:47 +0000[diff] [blame^]1305href="http://cvs.gnome.org/lxr/source/libxslt/ChangeLog"
1306name="Changelog">Changelog</a></p>
1307
1308<h2><a name="Python">Python and bindings</a></h2>
1309
1310<p>There is a number of language bindings and wrappers available for libxml2,
1311the list below is not exhaustive. Please contact the <a
1312href="http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/xml-bindings">xml-bindings@gnome.org</a>
1313(<a href="http://mail.gnome.org/archives/xml-bindings/">archives</a>) in
1314order to get updates to this list or to discuss the specific topic of libxml2
1315or libxslt wrappers or bindings:</p>
1316<ul>
1317 <li><a href="mailto:ari@lusis.org">Ari Johnson</a>
1318 provides a C++ wrapper for libxml:<br>
1319 Website: <a
1320 href="http://lusis.org/~ari/xml++/">http://lusis.org/~ari/xml++/</a><br>
1321 Download: <a
1322 href="http://lusis.org/~ari/xml++/libxml++.tar.gz">http://lusis.org/~ari/xml++/libxml++.tar.gz</a></li>
1323 <li>There is another <a href="http://libgdome-cpp.berlios.de/">C++ wrapper
1324 based on the gdome2 </a>bindings maintained by Tobias Peters.</li>
1325 <li><a
1326 href="http://mail.gnome.org/archives/xml/2001-March/msg00014.html">Matt
1327 Sergeant</a>
1328 developped <a href="http://axkit.org/download/">XML::LibXSLT</a>, a perl
1329 wrapper for libxml2/libxslt as part of the <a
1330 href="http://axkit.com/">AxKit XML application server</a></li>
1331 <li><a href="mailto:dkuhlman@cutter.rexx.com">Dave Kuhlman</a>
1332 provides and earlier version of the libxml/libxslt <a
1333 href="http://www.rexx.com/~dkuhlman">wrappers for Python</a></li>
1334 <li>Petr Kozelka provides <a
1335 href="http://sourceforge.net/projects/libxml2-pas">Pascal units to glue
1336 libxml2</a> with Kylix, Delphi and other Pascal compilers</li>
1337 <li>Wai-Sun "Squidster" Chia provides <a
1338 href="http://www.rubycolor.org/arc/redist/">bindings for Ruby</a> and
1339 libxml2 bindings are also available in Ruby through the <a
1340 href="http://libgdome-ruby.berlios.de/">libgdome-ruby</a> module
1341 maintained by Tobias Peters.</li>
1342</ul>
1343
1344<p>The distribution includes a set of Python bindings, which are garanteed to
1345be maintained as part of the library in the future, though the Python
1346interface have not yet reached the maturity of the C API. The distribution
1347includes a set of examples and regression tests for the python bindings in
1348the <code>python/tests</code> directory. Here are some excepts from those
1349tests:</p>
1350
1351<h3>tst.py:</h3>
1352
1353<p>This is a basic test of the file interface and DOM navigation:</p>
1354<pre>import libxml2
1355
1356doc = libxml2.parseFile("tst.xml")
1357if doc.name != "tst.xml":
1358 print "doc.name failed"
1359 sys.exit(1)
1360root = doc.children
1361if root.name != "doc":
1362 print "root.name failed"
1363 sys.exit(1)
1364child = root.children
1365if child.name != "foo":
1366 print "child.name failed"
1367 sys.exit(1)
1368doc.freeDoc()</pre>
1369
1370<p>The Python module is called libxml2, parseFile is the equivalent of
1371xmlParseFile (most of the bindings are automatically generated, and the xml
1372prefix is removed and the casing convention are kept). All node seen at the
1373binding level share the same subset of accesors:</p>
1374<ul>
1375 <li><code>name</code>
1376 : returns the node name</li>
1377 <li><code>type</code>
1378 : returns a string indicating the node typ<code>e</code></li>
1379 <li><code>content</code>
1380 : returns the content of the node, it is based on xmlNodeGetContent() and
1381 hence is recursive.</li>
1382 <li><code>parent</code>
1383 , <code>children</code>, <code>last</code>, <code>next</code>,
1384 <code>prev</code>, <code>doc</code>, <code>properties</code>: pointing to
1385 the associated element in the tree, those may return None in case no such
1386 link exists.</li>
1387</ul>
1388
1389<p>Also note the need to explicitely deallocate documents with freeDoc() .
1390Reference counting for libxml2 trees would need quite a lot of work to
1391function properly, and rather than risk memory leaks if not implemented
1392correctly it sounds safer to have an explicit function to free a tree. The
1393wrapper python objects like doc, root or child are them automatically garbage
1394collected.</p>
1395
1396<h3>validate.py:</h3>
1397
1398<p>This test check the validation interfaces and redirection of error
1399messages:</p>
1400<pre>import libxml2
1401
1402#desactivate error messages from the validation
1403def noerr(ctx, str):
1404 pass
1405
1406libxml2.registerErrorHandler(noerr, None)
1407
1408ctxt = libxml2.createFileParserCtxt("invalid.xml")
1409ctxt.validate(1)
1410ctxt.parseDocument()
1411doc = ctxt.doc()
1412valid = ctxt.isValid()
1413doc.freeDoc()
1414if valid != 0:
1415 print "validity chec failed"</pre>
1416
1417<p>The first thing to notice is the call to registerErrorHandler(), it
1418defines a new error handler global to the library. It is used to avoid seeing
1419the error messages when trying to validate the invalid document.</p>
1420
1421<p>The main interest of that test is the creation of a parser context with
1422createFileParserCtxt() and how the behaviour can be changed before calling
1423parseDocument() . Similary the informations resulting from the parsing phase
1424are also available using context methods.</p>
1425
1426<p>Contexts like nodes are defined as class and the libxml2 wrappers maps the
1427C function interfaces in terms of objects method as much as possible. The
1428best to get a complete view of what methods are supported is to look at the
1429libxml2.py module containing all the wrappers.</p>
1430
1431<h3>push.py:</h3>
1432
1433<p>This test show how to activate the push parser interface:</p>
1434<pre>import libxml2
1435
1436ctxt = libxml2.createPushParser(None, "&lt;foo", 4, "test.xml")
1437ctxt.parseChunk("/&gt;", 2, 1)
1438doc = ctxt.doc()
1439
1440doc.freeDoc()</pre>
1441
1442<p>The context is created with a speciall call based on the
1443xmlCreatePushParser() from the C library. The first argument is an optional
1444SAX callback object, then the initial set of data, the lenght and the name of
1445the resource in case URI-References need to be computed by the parser.</p>
1446
1447<p>Then the data are pushed using the parseChunk() method, the last call
1448setting the thrird argument terminate to 1.</p>
1449
1450<h3>pushSAX.py:</h3>
1451
1452<p>this test show the use of the event based parsing interfaces. In this case
1453the parser does not build a document, but provides callback information as
1454the parser makes progresses analyzing the data being provided:</p>
1455<pre>import libxml2
1456log = ""
1457
1458class callback:
1459 def startDocument(self):
1460 global log
1461 log = log + "startDocument:"
1462
1463 def endDocument(self):
1464 global log
1465 log = log + "endDocument:"
1466
1467 def startElement(self, tag, attrs):
1468 global log
1469 log = log + "startElement %s %s:" % (tag, attrs)
1470
1471 def endElement(self, tag):
1472 global log
1473 log = log + "endElement %s:" % (tag)
1474
1475 def characters(self, data):
1476 global log
1477 log = log + "characters: %s:" % (data)
1478
1479 def warning(self, msg):
1480 global log
1481 log = log + "warning: %s:" % (msg)
1482
1483 def error(self, msg):
1484 global log
1485 log = log + "error: %s:" % (msg)
1486
1487 def fatalError(self, msg):
1488 global log
1489 log = log + "fatalError: %s:" % (msg)
1490
1491handler = callback()
1492
1493ctxt = libxml2.createPushParser(handler, "&lt;foo", 4, "test.xml")
1494chunk = " url='tst'&gt;b"
1495ctxt.parseChunk(chunk, len(chunk), 0)
1496chunk = "ar&lt;/foo&gt;"
1497ctxt.parseChunk(chunk, len(chunk), 1)
1498
1499reference = "startDocument:startElement foo {'url': 'tst'}:characters: bar:endElement foo:endDocument:"
1500if log != reference:
1501 print "Error got: %s" % log
1502 print "Exprected: %s" % reference</pre>
1503
1504<p>The key object in that test is the handler, it provides a number of entry
1505points which can be called by the parser as it makes progresses to indicate
1506the information set obtained. The full set of callback is larger than what
1507the callback class in that specific example implements (see the SAX
1508definition for a complete list). The wrapper will only call those supplied by
1509the object when activated. The startElement receives the names of the element
1510and a dictionnary containing the attributes carried by this element.</p>
1511
1512<p>Also note that the reference string generated from the callback shows a
1513single character call even though the string "bar" is passed to the parser
1514from 2 different call to parseChunk()</p>
1515
1516<h3>xpath.py:</h3>
1517
1518<p>This is a basic test of XPath warppers support</p>
1519<pre>import libxml2
1520
1521doc = libxml2.parseFile("tst.xml")
1522ctxt = doc.xpathNewContext()
1523res = ctxt.xpathEval("//*")
1524if len(res) != 2:
1525 print "xpath query: wrong node set size"
1526 sys.exit(1)
1527if res[0].name != "doc" or res[1].name != "foo":
1528 print "xpath query: wrong node set value"
1529 sys.exit(1)
1530doc.freeDoc()
1531ctxt.xpathFreeContext()</pre>
1532
1533<p>This test parses a file, then create an XPath context to evaluate XPath
1534expression on it. The xpathEval() method execute an XPath query and returns
1535the result mapped in a Python way. String and numbers are natively converted,
1536and node sets are returned as a tuple of libxml2 Python nodes wrappers. Like
1537the document, the XPath context need to be freed explicitely, also not that
1538the result of the XPath query may point back to the document tree and hence
1539the document must be freed after the result of the query is used.</p>
1540
1541<h3>xpathext.py:</h3>
1542
1543<p>This test shows how to extend the XPath engine with functions written in
1544python:</p>
1545<pre>import libxml2
1546
1547def foo(ctx, x):
1548 return x + 1
1549
1550doc = libxml2.parseFile("tst.xml")
1551ctxt = doc.xpathNewContext()
1552libxml2.registerXPathFunction(ctxt._o, "foo", None, foo)
1553res = ctxt.xpathEval("foo(1)")
1554if res != 2:
1555 print "xpath extension failure"
1556doc.freeDoc()
1557ctxt.xpathFreeContext()</pre>
1558
1559<p>Note how the extension function is registered with the context (but that
1560part is not yet finalized, ths may change slightly in the future).</p>
1561
1562<h3>tstxpath.py:</h3>
1563
1564<p>This test is similar to the previousone but shows how the extension
1565function can access the XPath evaluation context:</p>
1566<pre>def foo(ctx, x):
1567 global called
1568
1569 #
1570 # test that access to the XPath evaluation contexts
1571 #
1572 pctxt = libxml2.xpathParserContext(_obj=ctx)
1573 ctxt = pctxt.context()
1574 called = ctxt.function()
1575 return x + 1</pre>
1576
1577<p>All the interfaces around the XPath parser(or rather evaluation) context
1578are not finalized, but it should be sufficient to do contextual work at the
1579evaluation point.</p>
1580
1581<h3>Memory debugging:</h3>
1582
1583<p>last but not least, all tests starts with the following prologue:</p>
1584<pre>#memory debug specific
1585libxml2.debugMemory(1)
1586</pre>
1587
1588<p>and ends with the following epilogue:</p>
1589<pre>#memory debug specific
1590libxml2.cleanupParser()
1591if libxml2.debugMemory(1) == 0:
1592 print "OK"
1593else:
1594 print "Memory leak %d bytes" % (libxml2.debugMemory(1))
1595 libxml2.dumpMemory()</pre>
1596
1597<p>Those activate the memory debugging interface of libxml2 where all
1598alloacted block in the library are tracked. The prologue then cleans up the
1599library state and checks that all allocated memory has been freed. If not it
1600calls dumpMemory() which saves that list in a <code>.memdump</code> file.</p>
Daniel Veillard82687162001-01-22 15:32:01 +0000[diff] [blame]1601
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]1602<h2><a name="architecture">libxml architecture</a></h2>
Daniel Veillard4540be42000-08-19 16:40:28 +0000[diff] [blame]1603
Daniel Veillardec70e912001-02-26 20:10:45 +0000[diff] [blame]1604<p>Libxml is made of multiple components; some of them are optional, and most
1605of the block interfaces are public. The main components are:</p>
Daniel Veillard4540be42000-08-19 16:40:28 +0000[diff] [blame]1606<ul>
1607 <li>an Input/Output layer</li>
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000[diff] [blame]1608 <li>FTP and HTTP client layers (optional)</li>
Daniel Veillard4540be42000-08-19 16:40:28 +0000[diff] [blame]1609 <li>an Internationalization layer managing the encodings support</li>
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000[diff] [blame]1610 <li>a URI module</li>
Daniel Veillard4540be42000-08-19 16:40:28 +0000[diff] [blame]1611 <li>the XML parser and its basic SAX interface</li>
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000[diff] [blame]1612 <li>an HTML parser using the same SAX interface (optional)</li>
Daniel Veillard4540be42000-08-19 16:40:28 +0000[diff] [blame]1613 <li>a SAX tree module to build an in-memory DOM representation</li>
1614 <li>a tree module to manipulate the DOM representation</li>
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000[diff] [blame]1615 <li>a validation module using the DOM representation (optional)</li>
Daniel Veillard4540be42000-08-19 16:40:28 +0000[diff] [blame]1616 <li>an XPath module for global lookup in a DOM representation
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000[diff] [blame]1617 (optional)</li>
1618 <li>a debug module (optional)</li>
Daniel Veillard4540be42000-08-19 16:40:28 +0000[diff] [blame]1619</ul>
1620
1621<p>Graphically this gives the following:</p>
1622
1623<p><img src="libxml.gif" alt="a graphical view of the various"></p>
1624
1625<p></p>
1626
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000[diff] [blame]1627<h2><a name="tree">The tree output</a></h2>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1628
1629<p>The parser returns a tree built during the document analysis. The value
Daniel Veillard402e8c82000-02-29 22:57:47 +0000[diff] [blame]1630returned is an <strong>xmlDocPtr</strong> (i.e., a pointer to an
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +0000[diff] [blame]1631<strong>xmlDoc</strong> structure). This structure contains information such
Daniel Veillard306be992000-07-03 12:38:45 +0000[diff] [blame]1632as the file name, the document type, and a <strong>children</strong> pointer
1633which is the root of the document (or more exactly the first child under the
1634root which is the document). The tree is made of <strong>xmlNode</strong>s,
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000[diff] [blame]1635chained in double-linked lists of siblings and with a children&lt;-&gt;parent
Daniel Veillard306be992000-07-03 12:38:45 +0000[diff] [blame]1636relationship. An xmlNode can also carry properties (a chain of xmlAttr
1637structures). An attribute may have a value which is a list of TEXT or
1638ENTITY_REF nodes.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1639
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]1640<p>Here is an example (erroneous with respect to the XML spec since there
1641should be only one ELEMENT under the root):</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1642
1643<p><img src="structure.gif" alt=" structure.gif "></p>
1644
1645<p>In the source package there is a small program (not installed by default)
Daniel Veillard361d8452000-04-03 19:48:13 +0000[diff] [blame]1646called <strong>xmllint</strong> which parses XML files given as argument and
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +0000[diff] [blame]1647prints them back as parsed. This is useful for detecting errors both in XML
1648code and in the XML parser itself. It has an option <strong>--debug</strong>
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000[diff] [blame]1649which prints the actual in-memory structure of the document; here is the
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +0000[diff] [blame]1650result with the <a href="#example">example</a> given before:</p>
Daniel Veillard10c6a8f1998-10-28 01:00:12 +0000[diff] [blame]1651<pre>DOCUMENT
1652version=1.0
1653standalone=true
1654 ELEMENT EXAMPLE
1655 ATTRIBUTE prop1
1656 TEXT
1657 content=gnome is great
1658 ATTRIBUTE prop2
1659 ENTITY_REF
1660 TEXT
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000[diff] [blame]1661 content= linux too
Daniel Veillard402e8c82000-02-29 22:57:47 +0000[diff] [blame]1662 ELEMENT head
Daniel Veillard10c6a8f1998-10-28 01:00:12 +0000[diff] [blame]1663 ELEMENT title
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +0000[diff] [blame]1664 TEXT
1665 content=Welcome to Gnome
Daniel Veillard10c6a8f1998-10-28 01:00:12 +0000[diff] [blame]1666 ELEMENT chapter
1667 ELEMENT title
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +0000[diff] [blame]1668 TEXT
1669 content=The Linux adventure
Daniel Veillard10c6a8f1998-10-28 01:00:12 +0000[diff] [blame]1670 ELEMENT p
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +0000[diff] [blame]1671 TEXT
1672 content=bla bla bla ...
Daniel Veillard10c6a8f1998-10-28 01:00:12 +0000[diff] [blame]1673 ELEMENT image
1674 ATTRIBUTE href
1675 TEXT
1676 content=linus.gif
1677 ELEMENT p
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +0000[diff] [blame]1678 TEXT
1679 content=...</pre>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1680
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]1681<p>This should be useful for learning the internal representation model.</p>
Daniel Veillardccb09631998-10-27 06:21:04 +0000[diff] [blame]1682
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000[diff] [blame]1683<h2><a name="interface">The SAX interface</a></h2>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]1684
Daniel Veillard402e8c82000-02-29 22:57:47 +0000[diff] [blame]1685<p>Sometimes the DOM tree output is just too large to fit reasonably into
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]1686memory. 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]1687loaded using libxml), it's better to use the SAX interface of libxml. SAX is
1688a <strong>callback-based interface</strong> to the parser. Before parsing,
1689the application layer registers a customized set of callbacks which are
1690called by the library as it progresses through the XML input.</p>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]1691
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]1692<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]1693libxml, see the <a
1694href="http://www.daa.com.au/~james/gnome/xml-sax/xml-sax.html">nice
1695documentation</a>.written by <a href="mailto:james@daa.com.au">James
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]1696Henstridge</a>.</p>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]1697
1698<p>You can debug the SAX behaviour by using the <strong>testSAX</strong>
1699program located in the gnome-xml module (it's usually not shipped in the
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]1700binary packages of libxml, but you can find it in the tar source
Daniel Veillard402e8c82000-02-29 22:57:47 +0000[diff] [blame]1701distribution). Here is the sequence of callbacks that would be reported by
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]1702testSAX when parsing the example XML document shown earlier:</p>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]1703<pre>SAX.setDocumentLocator()
1704SAX.startDocument()
1705SAX.getEntity(amp)
1706SAX.startElement(EXAMPLE, prop1='gnome is great', prop2='&amp;amp; linux too')
1707SAX.characters( , 3)
1708SAX.startElement(head)
1709SAX.characters( , 4)
1710SAX.startElement(title)
1711SAX.characters(Welcome to Gnome, 16)
1712SAX.endElement(title)
1713SAX.characters( , 3)
1714SAX.endElement(head)
1715SAX.characters( , 3)
1716SAX.startElement(chapter)
1717SAX.characters( , 4)
1718SAX.startElement(title)
1719SAX.characters(The Linux adventure, 19)
1720SAX.endElement(title)
1721SAX.characters( , 4)
1722SAX.startElement(p)
1723SAX.characters(bla bla bla ..., 15)
1724SAX.endElement(p)
1725SAX.characters( , 4)
1726SAX.startElement(image, href='linus.gif')
1727SAX.endElement(image)
1728SAX.characters( , 4)
1729SAX.startElement(p)
1730SAX.characters(..., 3)
1731SAX.endElement(p)
1732SAX.characters( , 3)
1733SAX.endElement(chapter)
1734SAX.characters( , 1)
1735SAX.endElement(EXAMPLE)
1736SAX.endDocument()</pre>
1737
Daniel Veillardec70e912001-02-26 20:10:45 +0000[diff] [blame]1738<p>Most of the other interfaces of libxml are based on the DOM tree-building
1739facility, so nearly everything up to the end of this document presupposes the
1740use of the standard DOM tree build. Note that the DOM tree itself is built by
1741a set of registered default callbacks, without internal specific
1742interface.</p>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]1743
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]1744<h2><a name="Validation">Validation &amp; DTDs</a></h2>
1745
1746<p>Table of Content:</p>
1747<ol>
1748 <li><a href="#General5">General overview</a></li>
1749 <li><a href="#definition">The definition</a></li>
1750 <li><a href="#Simple">Simple rules</a>
1751 <ol>
Daniel Veillard9c466822001-10-25 12:03:39 +0000[diff] [blame]1752 <li><a href="#reference">How to reference a DTD from a document</a></li>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]1753 <li><a href="#Declaring">Declaring elements</a></li>
1754 <li><a href="#Declaring1">Declaring attributes</a></li>
1755 </ol>
1756 </li>
1757 <li><a href="#Some">Some examples</a></li>
1758 <li><a href="#validate">How to validate</a></li>
1759 <li><a href="#Other">Other resources</a></li>
1760</ol>
1761
1762<h3><a name="General5">General overview</a></h3>
1763
1764<p>Well what is validation and what is a DTD ?</p>
1765
1766<p>DTD is the acronym for Document Type Definition. This is a description of
1767the content for a familly of XML files. This is part of the XML 1.0
1768specification, and alows to describe and check that a given document instance
1769conforms to a set of rules detailing its structure and content.</p>
1770
1771<p>Validation is the process of checking a document against a DTD (more
1772generally against a set of construction rules).</p>
1773
1774<p>The validation process and building DTDs are the two most difficult parts
1775of the XML life cycle. Briefly a DTD defines all the possibles element to be
1776found within your document, what is the formal shape of your document tree
1777(by defining the allowed content of an element, either text, a regular
1778expression for the allowed list of children, or mixed content i.e. both text
1779and children). The DTD also defines the allowed attributes for all elements
1780and the types of the attributes.</p>
1781
1782<h3><a name="definition1">The definition</a></h3>
1783
1784<p>The <a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml">W3C XML Recommendation</a> (<a
1785href="http://www.xml.com/axml/axml.html">Tim Bray's annotated version of
1786Rev1</a>):</p>
1787<ul>
1788 <li><a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml#elemdecls">Declaring
1789 elements</a></li>
1790 <li><a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml#attdecls">Declaring
1791 attributes</a></li>
1792</ul>
1793
1794<p>(unfortunately) all this is inherited from the SGML world, the syntax is
1795ancient...</p>
1796
1797<h3><a name="Simple1">Simple rules</a></h3>
1798
1799<p>Writing DTD can be done in multiple ways, the rules to build them if you
1800need something fixed or something which can evolve over time can be radically
1801different. Really complex DTD like Docbook ones are flexible but quite harder
1802to design. I will just focuse on DTDs for a formats with a fixed simple
1803structure. It is just a set of basic rules, and definitely not exhaustive nor
1804useable for complex DTD design.</p>
1805
1806<h4><a name="reference1">How to reference a DTD from a document</a>:</h4>
1807
1808<p>Assuming the top element of the document is <code>spec</code> and the dtd
1809is placed in the file <code>mydtd</code> in the subdirectory
1810<code>dtds</code> of the directory from where the document were loaded:</p>
1811
1812<p><code>&lt;!DOCTYPE spec SYSTEM "dtds/mydtd"&gt;</code></p>
1813
1814<p>Notes:</p>
1815<ul>
1816 <li>the system string is actually an URI-Reference (as defined in <a
1817 href="http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2396.txt">RFC 2396</a>) so you can use a
1818 full URL string indicating the location of your DTD on the Web, this is a
1819 really good thing to do if you want others to validate your document</li>
1820 <li>it is also possible to associate a <code>PUBLIC</code> identifier (a
1821 magic string) so that the DTd is looked up in catalogs on the client side
1822 without having to locate it on the web</li>
1823 <li>a dtd contains a set of elements and attributes declarations, but they
1824 don't define what the root of the document should be. This is explicitely
1825 told to the parser/validator as the first element of the
1826 <code>DOCTYPE</code> declaration.</li>
1827</ul>
1828
1829<h4><a name="Declaring2">Declaring elements</a>:</h4>
1830
1831<p>The following declares an element <code>spec</code>:</p>
1832
1833<p><code>&lt;!ELEMENT spec (front, body, back?)&gt;</code></p>
1834
1835<p>it also expresses that the spec element contains one <code>front</code>,
1836one <code>body</code> and one optionnal <code>back</code> children elements
1837in this order. The declaration of one element of the structure and its
1838content are done in a single declaration. Similary the following declares
1839<code>div1</code> elements:</p>
1840
Daniel Veillard51737272002-01-23 23:10:38 +0000[diff] [blame]1841<p><code>&lt;!ELEMENT div1 (head, (p | list | note)*, div2?)&gt;</code></p>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]1842
1843<p>means div1 contains one <code>head</code> then a series of optional
1844<code>p</code>, <code>list</code>s and <code>note</code>s and then an
1845optional <code>div2</code>. And last but not least an element can contain
1846text:</p>
1847
1848<p><code>&lt;!ELEMENT b (#PCDATA)&gt;</code></p>
1849
1850<p><code>b</code> contains text or being of mixed content (text and elements
1851in no particular order):</p>
1852
1853<p><code>&lt;!ELEMENT p (#PCDATA|a|ul|b|i|em)*&gt;</code></p>
1854
1855<p><code>p </code>can contain text or <code>a</code>, <code>ul</code>,
1856<code>b</code>, <code>i </code>or <code>em</code> elements in no particular
1857order.</p>
1858
1859<h4><a name="Declaring1">Declaring attributes</a>:</h4>
1860
1861<p>again the attributes declaration includes their content definition:</p>
1862
1863<p><code>&lt;!ATTLIST termdef name CDATA #IMPLIED&gt;</code></p>
1864
1865<p>means that the element <code>termdef</code> can have a <code>name</code>
1866attribute containing text (<code>CDATA</code>) and which is optionnal
1867(<code>#IMPLIED</code>). The attribute value can also be defined within a
1868set:</p>
1869
1870<p><code>&lt;!ATTLIST list type (bullets|ordered|glossary)
1871"ordered"&gt;</code></p>
1872
1873<p>means <code>list</code> element have a <code>type</code> attribute with 3
1874allowed values "bullets", "ordered" or "glossary" and which default to
1875"ordered" if the attribute is not explicitely specified.</p>
1876
1877<p>The content type of an attribute can be text (<code>CDATA</code>),
1878anchor/reference/references
1879(<code>ID</code>/<code>IDREF</code>/<code>IDREFS</code>), entity(ies)
1880(<code>ENTITY</code>/<code>ENTITIES</code>) or name(s)
1881(<code>NMTOKEN</code>/<code>NMTOKENS</code>). The following defines that a
1882<code>chapter</code> element can have an optional <code>id</code> attribute
1883of type <code>ID</code>, usable for reference from attribute of type
1884IDREF:</p>
1885
1886<p><code>&lt;!ATTLIST chapter id ID #IMPLIED&gt;</code></p>
1887
1888<p>The last value of an attribute definition can be <code>#REQUIRED
1889</code>meaning that the attribute has to be given, <code>#IMPLIED</code>
1890meaning that it is optional, or the default value (possibly prefixed by
1891<code>#FIXED</code> if it is the only allowed).</p>
1892
1893<p>Notes:</p>
1894<ul>
1895 <li>usually the attributes pertaining to a given element are declared in a
1896 single expression, but it is just a convention adopted by a lot of DTD
1897 writers:
1898 <pre>&lt;!ATTLIST termdef
1899 id ID #REQUIRED
1900 name CDATA #IMPLIED&gt;</pre>
1901 <p>The previous construct defines both <code>id</code> and
1902 <code>name</code> attributes for the element <code>termdef</code></p>
1903 </li>
1904</ul>
1905
1906<h3><a name="Some1">Some examples</a></h3>
1907
1908<p>The directory <code>test/valid/dtds/</code> in the libxml distribution
1909contains some complex DTD examples. The <code>test/valid/dia.xml</code>
1910example shows an XML file where the simple DTD is directly included within
1911the document.</p>
1912
1913<h3><a name="validate1">How to validate</a></h3>
1914
1915<p>The simplest is to use the xmllint program comming with libxml. The
1916<code>--valid</code> option turn on validation of the files given as input,
1917for example the following validates a copy of the first revision of the XML
19181.0 specification:</p>
1919
1920<p><code>xmllint --valid --noout test/valid/REC-xml-19980210.xml</code></p>
1921
1922<p>the -- noout is used to not output the resulting tree.</p>
1923
1924<p>The <code>--dtdvalid dtd</code> allows to validate the document(s) against
1925a given DTD.</p>
1926
1927<p>Libxml exports an API to handle DTDs and validation, check the <a
1928href="http://xmlsoft.org/html/libxml-valid.html">associated
1929description</a>.</p>
1930
1931<h3><a name="Other1">Other resources</a></h3>
1932
1933<p>DTDs are as old as SGML. So there may be a number of examples on-line, I
1934will just list one for now, others pointers welcome:</p>
1935<ul>
1936 <li><a href="http://www.xml101.com:8081/dtd/">XML-101 DTD</a></li>
1937</ul>
1938
1939<p>I suggest looking at the examples found under test/valid/dtd and any of
1940the large number of books available on XML. The dia example in test/valid
1941should be both simple and complete enough to allow you to build your own.</p>
1942
1943<p></p>
1944
1945<h2><a name="Memory">Memory Management</a></h2>
1946
1947<p>Table of Content:</p>
1948<ol>
1949 <li><a href="#General3">General overview</a></li>
Daniel Veillard9c466822001-10-25 12:03:39 +0000[diff] [blame]1950 <li><a href="#setting">Setting libxml set of memory routines</a></li>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]1951 <li><a href="#cleanup">Cleaning up after parsing</a></li>
1952 <li><a href="#Debugging">Debugging routines</a></li>
1953 <li><a href="#General4">General memory requirements</a></li>
1954</ol>
1955
1956<h3><a name="General3">General overview</a></h3>
1957
1958<p>The module <code><a
1959href="http://xmlsoft.org/html/libxml-xmlmemory.html">xmlmemory.h</a></code>
1960provides the interfaces to the libxml memory system:</p>
1961<ul>
1962 <li>libxml does not use the libc memory allocator directly but xmlFree(),
1963 xmlMalloc() and xmlRealloc()</li>
1964 <li>those routines can be reallocated to a specific set of routine, by
1965 default the libc ones i.e. free(), malloc() and realloc()</li>
1966 <li>the xmlmemory.c module includes a set of debugging routine</li>
1967</ul>
1968
1969<h3><a name="setting">Setting libxml set of memory routines</a></h3>
1970
1971<p>It is sometimes useful to not use the default memory allocator, either for
1972debugging, analysis or to implement a specific behaviour on memory management
1973(like on embedded systems). Two function calls are available to do so:</p>
1974<ul>
1975 <li><a href="http://xmlsoft.org/html/libxml-xmlmemory.html">xmlMemGet ()</a>
1976 which return the current set of functions in use by the parser</li>
1977 <li><a
1978 href="http://xmlsoft.org/html/libxml-xmlmemory.html">xmlMemSetup()</a>
1979 which allow to set up a new set of memory allocation functions</li>
1980</ul>
1981
1982<p>Of course a call to xmlMemSetup() should probably be done before calling
1983any other libxml routines (unless you are sure your allocations routines are
1984compatibles).</p>
1985
1986<h3><a name="cleanup">Cleaning up after parsing</a></h3>
1987
1988<p>Libxml is not stateless, there is a few set of memory structures needing
1989allocation before the parser is fully functionnal (some encoding structures
1990for example). This also mean that once parsing is finished there is a tiny
1991amount of memory (a few hundred bytes) which can be recollected if you don't
1992reuse the parser immediately:</p>
1993<ul>
1994 <li><a href="http://xmlsoft.org/html/libxml-parser.html">xmlCleanupParser
1995 ()</a>
1996 is a centralized routine to free the parsing states. Note that it won't
1997 deallocate any produced tree if any (use the xmlFreeDoc() and related
1998 routines for this).</li>
1999 <li><a href="http://xmlsoft.org/html/libxml-parser.html">xmlInitParser
2000 ()</a>
2001 is the dual routine allowing to preallocate the parsing state which can
2002 be useful for example to avoid initialization reentrancy problems when
2003 using libxml in multithreaded applications</li>
2004</ul>
2005
2006<p>Generally xmlCleanupParser() is safe, if needed the state will be rebuild
2007at the next invocation of parser routines, but be careful of the consequences
2008in multithreaded applications.</p>
2009
2010<h3><a name="Debugging">Debugging routines</a></h3>
2011
2012<p>When configured using --with-mem-debug flag (off by default), libxml uses
2013a set of memory allocation debugging routineskeeping track of all allocated
2014blocks and the location in the code where the routine was called. A couple of
2015other debugging routines allow to dump the memory allocated infos to a file
2016or call a specific routine when a given block number is allocated:</p>
2017<ul>
2018 <li><a
2019 href="http://xmlsoft.org/html/libxml-xmlmemory.html">xmlMallocLoc()</a>
2020 <a
2021 href="http://xmlsoft.org/html/libxml-xmlmemory.html">xmlReallocLoc()</a>
2022 and <a
2023 href="http://xmlsoft.org/html/libxml-xmlmemory.html">xmlMemStrdupLoc()</a>
2024 are the memory debugging replacement allocation routines</li>
2025 <li><a href="http://xmlsoft.org/html/libxml-xmlmemory.html">xmlMemoryDump
2026 ()</a>
2027 dumps all the informations about the allocated memory block lefts in the
2028 <code>.memdump</code> file</li>
2029</ul>
2030
2031<p>When developping libxml memory debug is enabled, the tests programs call
2032xmlMemoryDump () and the "make test" regression tests will check for any
2033memory leak during the full regression test sequence, this helps a lot
2034ensuring that libxml does not leak memory and bullet proof memory
2035allocations use (some libc implementations are known to be far too permissive
2036resulting in major portability problems!).</p>
2037
2038<p>If the .memdump reports a leak, it displays the allocation function and
2039also tries to give some informations about the content and structure of the
2040allocated blocks left. This is sufficient in most cases to find the culprit,
2041but not always. Assuming the allocation problem is reproductible, it is
2042possible to find more easilly:</p>
2043<ol>
2044 <li>write down the block number xxxx not allocated</li>
2045 <li>export the environement variable XML_MEM_BREAKPOINT=xxxx</li>
2046 <li>run the program under a debugger and set a breakpoint on
2047 xmlMallocBreakpoint() a specific function called when this precise block
2048 is allocated</li>
2049 <li>when the breakpoint is reached you can then do a fine analysis of the
2050 allocation an step to see the condition resulting in the missing
2051 deallocation.</li>
2052</ol>
2053
2054<p>I used to use a commercial tool to debug libxml memory problems but after
2055noticing that it was not detecting memory leaks that simple mechanism was
2056used and proved extremely efficient until now.</p>
2057
2058<h3><a name="General4">General memory requirements</a></h3>
2059
2060<p>How much libxml memory require ? It's hard to tell in average it depends
2061of a number of things:</p>
2062<ul>
2063 <li>the parser itself should work in a fixed amout of memory, except for
2064 information maintained about the stacks of names and entities locations.
2065 The I/O and encoding handlers will probably account for a few KBytes.
2066 This is true for both the XML and HTML parser (though the HTML parser
2067 need more state).</li>
2068 <li>If you are generating the DOM tree then memory requirements will grow
2069 nearly lineary with the size of the data. In general for a balanced
2070 textual document the internal memory requirement is about 4 times the
2071 size of the UTF8 serialization of this document (exmple the XML-1.0
2072 recommendation is a bit more of 150KBytes and takes 650KBytes of main
2073 memory when parsed). Validation will add a amount of memory required for
2074 maintaining the external Dtd state which should be linear with the
2075 complexity of the content model defined by the Dtd</li>
2076 <li>If you don't care about the advanced features of libxml like
2077 validation, DOM, XPath or XPointer, but really need to work fixed memory
2078 requirements, then the SAX interface should be used.</li>
2079</ul>
2080
2081<p></p>
2082
2083<h2><a name="Encodings">Encodings support</a></h2>
2084
2085<p>Table of Content:</p>
2086<ol>
2087 <li><a href="encoding.html#What">What does internationalization support
2088 mean ?</a></li>
2089 <li><a href="encoding.html#internal">The internal encoding, how and
2090 why</a></li>
2091 <li><a href="encoding.html#implemente">How is it implemented ?</a></li>
2092 <li><a href="encoding.html#Default">Default supported encodings</a></li>
2093 <li><a href="encoding.html#extend">How to extend the existing
2094 support</a></li>
2095</ol>
2096
2097<h3><a name="What">What does internationalization support mean ?</a></h3>
2098
2099<p>XML was designed from the start to allow the support of any character set
2100by using Unicode. Any conformant XML parser has to support the UTF-8 and
2101UTF-16 default encodings which can both express the full unicode ranges. UTF8
2102is a variable length encoding whose greatest point are to resuse the same
2103emcoding for ASCII and to save space for Western encodings, but it is a bit
2104more complex to handle in practice. UTF-16 use 2 bytes per characters (and
2105sometimes combines two pairs), it makes implementation easier, but looks a
2106bit overkill for Western languages encoding. Moreover the XML specification
2107allows document to be encoded in other encodings at the condition that they
2108are clearly labelled as such. For example the following is a wellformed XML
2109document encoded in ISO-8859 1 and using accentuated letter that we French
2110likes for both markup and content:</p>
2111<pre>&lt;?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?&gt;
2112&lt;très&gt;là&lt;/très&gt;</pre>
2113
2114<p>Having internationalization support in libxml means the foolowing:</p>
2115<ul>
2116 <li>the document is properly parsed</li>
2117 <li>informations about it's encoding are saved</li>
2118 <li>it can be modified</li>
2119 <li>it can be saved in its original encoding</li>
2120 <li>it can also be saved in another encoding supported by libxml (for
2121 example straight UTF8 or even an ASCII form)</li>
2122</ul>
2123
2124<p>Another very important point is that the whole libxml API, with the
2125exception of a few routines to read with a specific encoding or save to a
2126specific encoding, is completely agnostic about the original encoding of the
2127document.</p>
2128
2129<p>It should be noted too that the HTML parser embedded in libxml now obbey
2130the same rules too, the following document will be (as of 2.2.2) handled in
2131an internationalized fashion by libxml too:</p>
2132<pre>&lt;!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN"
2133 "http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd"&gt;
2134&lt;html lang="fr"&gt;
2135&lt;head&gt;
2136 &lt;META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Type" CONTENT="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1"&gt;
2137&lt;/head&gt;
2138&lt;body&gt;
2139&lt;p&gt;W3C crée des standards pour le Web.&lt;/body&gt;
2140&lt;/html&gt;</pre>
2141
2142<h3><a name="internal">The internal encoding, how and why</a></h3>
2143
2144<p>One of the core decision was to force all documents to be converted to a
2145default internal encoding, and that encoding to be UTF-8, here are the
2146rationale for those choices:</p>
2147<ul>
2148 <li>keeping the native encoding in the internal form would force the libxml
2149 users (or the code associated) to be fully aware of the encoding of the
2150 original document, for examples when adding a text node to a document,
2151 the content would have to be provided in the document encoding, i.e. the
2152 client code would have to check it before hand, make sure it's conformant
2153 to the encoding, etc ... Very hard in practice, though in some specific
2154 cases this may make sense.</li>
2155 <li>the second decision was which encoding. From the XML spec only UTF8 and
2156 UTF16 really makes sense as being the two only encodings for which there
2157 is amndatory support. UCS-4 (32 bits fixed size encoding) could be
2158 considered an intelligent choice too since it's a direct Unicode mapping
2159 support. I selected UTF-8 on the basis of efficiency and compatibility
2160 with surrounding software:
2161 <ul>
2162 <li>UTF-8 while a bit more complex to convert from/to (i.e. slightly
2163 more costly to import and export CPU wise) is also far more compact
2164 than UTF-16 (and UCS-4) for a majority of the documents I see it used
2165 for right now (RPM RDF catalogs, advogato data, various configuration
2166 file formats, etc.) and the key point for today's computer
2167 architecture is efficient uses of caches. If one nearly double the
2168 memory requirement to store the same amount of data, this will trash
2169 caches (main memory/external caches/internal caches) and my take is
2170 that this harms the system far more than the CPU requirements needed
2171 for the conversion to UTF-8</li>
2172 <li>Most of libxml version 1 users were using it with straight ASCII
2173 most of the time, doing the conversion with an internal encoding
2174 requiring all their code to be rewritten was a serious show-stopper
2175 for using UTF-16 or UCS-4.</li>
2176 <li>UTF-8 is being used as the de-facto internal encoding standard for
2177 related code like the <a href="http://www.pango.org/">pango</a>
2178 upcoming Gnome text widget, and a lot of Unix code (yep another place
2179 where Unix programmer base takes a different approach from Microsoft
2180 - they are using UTF-16)</li>
2181 </ul>
2182 </li>
2183</ul>
2184
2185<p>What does this mean in practice for the libxml user:</p>
2186<ul>
2187 <li>xmlChar, the libxml data type is a byte, those bytes must be assembled
2188 as UTF-8 valid strings. The proper way to terminate an xmlChar * string
2189 is simply to append 0 byte, as usual.</li>
2190 <li>One just need to make sure that when using chars outside the ASCII set,
2191 the values has been properly converted to UTF-8</li>
2192</ul>
2193
2194<h3><a name="implemente">How is it implemented ?</a></h3>
2195
2196<p>Let's describe how all this works within libxml, basically the I18N
2197(internationalization) support get triggered only during I/O operation, i.e.
2198when reading a document or saving one. Let's look first at the reading
2199sequence:</p>
2200<ol>
2201 <li>when a document is processed, we usually don't know the encoding, a
2202 simple heuristic allows to detect UTF-18 and UCS-4 from whose where the
2203 ASCII range (0-0x7F) maps with ASCII</li>
2204 <li>the xml declaration if available is parsed, including the encoding
2205 declaration. At that point, if the autodetected encoding is different
2206 from the one declared a call to xmlSwitchEncoding() is issued.</li>
2207 <li>If there is no encoding declaration, then the input has to be in either
2208 UTF-8 or UTF-16, if it is not then at some point when processing the
2209 input, the converter/checker of UTF-8 form will raise an encoding error.
2210 You may end-up with a garbled document, or no document at all ! Example:
2211 <pre>~/XML -&gt; ./xmllint err.xml
2212err.xml:1: error: Input is not proper UTF-8, indicate encoding !
2213&lt;très&gt;là&lt;/très&gt;
2214 ^
2215err.xml:1: error: Bytes: 0xE8 0x73 0x3E 0x6C
2216&lt;très&gt;là&lt;/très&gt;
2217 ^</pre>
2218 </li>
2219 <li>xmlSwitchEncoding() does an encoding name lookup, canonalize it, and
2220 then search the default registered encoding converters for that encoding.
2221 If it's not within the default set and iconv() support has been compiled
2222 it, it will ask iconv for such an encoder. If this fails then the parser
2223 will report an error and stops processing:
2224 <pre>~/XML -&gt; ./xmllint err2.xml
2225err2.xml:1: error: Unsupported encoding UnsupportedEnc
2226&lt;?xml version="1.0" encoding="UnsupportedEnc"?&gt;
2227 ^</pre>
2228 </li>
2229 <li>From that point the encoder process progressingly the input (it is
2230 plugged as a front-end to the I/O module) for that entity. It captures
2231 and convert on-the-fly the document to be parsed to UTF-8. The parser
2232 itself just does UTF-8 checking of this input and process it
2233 transparently. The only difference is that the encoding information has
2234 been added to the parsing context (more precisely to the input
2235 corresponding to this entity).</li>
2236 <li>The result (when using DOM) is an internal form completely in UTF-8
2237 with just an encoding information on the document node.</li>
2238</ol>
2239
2240<p>Ok then what's happen when saving the document (assuming you
2241colllected/built an xmlDoc DOM like structure) ? It depends on the function
2242called, xmlSaveFile() will just try to save in the original encoding, while
2243xmlSaveFileTo() and xmlSaveFileEnc() can optionally save to a given
2244encoding:</p>
2245<ol>
2246 <li>if no encoding is given, libxml will look for an encoding value
2247 associated to the document and if it exists will try to save to that
2248 encoding,
2249 <p>otherwise everything is written in the internal form, i.e. UTF-8</p>
2250 </li>
2251 <li>so if an encoding was specified, either at the API level or on the
2252 document, libxml will again canonalize the encoding name, lookup for a
2253 converter in the registered set or through iconv. If not found the
2254 function will return an error code</li>
2255 <li>the converter is placed before the I/O buffer layer, as another kind of
2256 buffer, then libxml will simply push the UTF-8 serialization to through
2257 that buffer, which will then progressively be converted and pushed onto
2258 the I/O layer.</li>
2259 <li>It is possible that the converter code fails on some input, for example
2260 trying to push an UTF-8 encoded chinese character through the UTF-8 to
2261 ISO-8859-1 converter won't work. Since the encoders are progressive they
2262 will just report the error and the number of bytes converted, at that
2263 point libxml will decode the offending character, remove it from the
2264 buffer and replace it with the associated charRef encoding &amp;#123; and
2265 resume the convertion. This guarante that any document will be saved
2266 without losses (except for markup names where this is not legal, this is
2267 a problem in the current version, in pactice avoid using non-ascci
2268 characters for tags or attributes names @@). A special "ascii" encoding
2269 name is used to save documents to a pure ascii form can be used when
2270 portability is really crucial</li>
2271</ol>
2272
2273<p>Here is a few examples based on the same test document:</p>
2274<pre>~/XML -&gt; ./xmllint isolat1
2275&lt;?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?&gt;
2276&lt;très&gt;là&lt;/très&gt;
2277~/XML -&gt; ./xmllint --encode UTF-8 isolat1
2278&lt;?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?&gt;
2279&lt;très&gt;là  &lt;/très&gt;
2280~/XML -&gt; </pre>
2281
2282<p>The same processing is applied (and reuse most of the code) for HTML I18N
2283processing. Looking up and modifying the content encoding is a bit more
2284difficult since it is located in a &lt;meta&gt; tag under the &lt;head&gt;,
2285so a couple of functions htmlGetMetaEncoding() and htmlSetMetaEncoding() have
2286been provided. The parser also attempts to switch encoding on the fly when
2287detecting such a tag on input. Except for that the processing is the same
2288(and again reuses the same code).</p>
2289
2290<h3><a name="Default">Default supported encodings</a></h3>
2291
2292<p>libxml has a set of default converters for the following encodings
2293(located in encoding.c):</p>
2294<ol>
2295 <li>UTF-8 is supported by default (null handlers)</li>
2296 <li>UTF-16, both little and big endian</li>
2297 <li>ISO-Latin-1 (ISO-8859-1) covering most western languages</li>
2298 <li>ASCII, useful mostly for saving</li>
2299 <li>HTML, a specific handler for the conversion of UTF-8 to ASCII with HTML
2300 predefined entities like &amp;copy; for the Copyright sign.</li>
2301</ol>
2302
2303<p>More over when compiled on an Unix platfor with iconv support the full set
2304of encodings supported by iconv can be instantly be used by libxml. On a
2305linux machine with glibc-2.1 the list of supported encodings and aliases fill
23063 full pages, and include UCS-4, the full set of ISO-Latin encodings, and the
2307various Japanese ones.</p>
2308
2309<h4>Encoding aliases</h4>
2310
2311<p>From 2.2.3, libxml has support to register encoding names aliases. The
2312goal is to be able to parse document whose encoding is supported but where
2313the name differs (for example from the default set of names accepted by
2314iconv). The following functions allow to register and handle new aliases for
2315existing encodings. Once registered libxml will automatically lookup the
2316aliases when handling a document:</p>
2317<ul>
2318 <li>int xmlAddEncodingAlias(const char *name, const char *alias);</li>
2319 <li>int xmlDelEncodingAlias(const char *alias);</li>
2320 <li>const char * xmlGetEncodingAlias(const char *alias);</li>
2321 <li>void xmlCleanupEncodingAliases(void);</li>
2322</ul>
2323
2324<h3><a name="extend">How to extend the existing support</a></h3>
2325
2326<p>Well adding support for new encoding, or overriding one of the encoders
2327(assuming it is buggy) should not be hard, just write an input and output
2328conversion routines to/from UTF-8, and register them using
2329xmlNewCharEncodingHandler(name, xxxToUTF8, UTF8Toxxx), and they will be
2330called automatically if the parser(s) encounter such an encoding name
2331(register it uppercase, this will help). The description of the encoders,
2332their arguments and expected return values are described in the encoding.h
2333header.</p>
2334
2335<p>A quick note on the topic of subverting the parser to use a different
2336internal encoding than UTF-8, in some case people will absolutely want to
2337keep the internal encoding different, I think it's still possible (but the
2338encoding must be compliant with ASCII on the same subrange) though I didn't
2339tried it. The key is to override the default conversion routines (by
2340registering null encoders/decoders for your charsets), and bypass the UTF-8
2341checking of the parser by setting the parser context charset
2342(ctxt-&gt;charset) to something different than XML_CHAR_ENCODING_UTF8, but
2343there is no guarantee taht this will work. You may also have some troubles
2344saving back.</p>
2345
2346<p>Basically proper I18N support is important, this requires at least
2347libxml-2.0.0, but a lot of features and corrections are really available only
2348starting 2.2.</p>
2349
2350<h2><a name="IO">I/O Interfaces</a></h2>
2351
2352<p>Table of Content:</p>
2353<ol>
2354 <li><a href="#General1">General overview</a></li>
2355 <li><a href="#basic">The basic buffer type</a></li>
2356 <li><a href="#Input">Input I/O handlers</a></li>
2357 <li><a href="#Output">Output I/O handlers</a></li>
2358 <li><a href="#entities">The entities loader</a></li>
2359 <li><a href="#Example2">Example of customized I/O</a></li>
2360</ol>
2361
2362<h3><a name="General1">General overview</a></h3>
2363
2364<p>The module <code><a
2365href="http://xmlsoft.org/html/libxml-xmlio.html">xmlIO.h</a></code> provides
2366the interfaces to the libxml I/O system. This consists of 4 main parts:</p>
2367<ul>
2368 <li>Entities loader, this is a routine which tries to fetch the entities
2369 (files) based on their PUBLIC and SYSTEM identifiers. The default loader
2370 don't look at the public identifier since libxml do not maintain a
2371 catalog. You can redefine you own entity loader by using
2372 <code>xmlGetExternalEntityLoader()</code> and
Daniel Veillard9c466822001-10-25 12:03:39 +0000[diff] [blame]2373 <code>xmlSetExternalEntityLoader()</code>. <a href="#entities">Check the
2374 example</a>.</li>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]2375 <li>Input I/O buffers which are a commodity structure used by the parser(s)
2376 input layer to handle fetching the informations to feed the parser. This
2377 provides buffering and is also a placeholder where the encoding
2378 convertors to UTF8 are piggy-backed.</li>
2379 <li>Output I/O buffers are similar to the Input ones and fulfill similar
2380 task but when generating a serialization from a tree.</li>
2381 <li>A mechanism to register sets of I/O callbacks and associate them with
2382 specific naming schemes like the protocol part of the URIs.
2383 <p>This affect the default I/O operations and allows to use specific I/O
2384 handlers for certain names.</p>
2385 </li>
2386</ul>
2387
2388<p>The general mechanism used when loading http://rpmfind.net/xml.html for
2389example in the HTML parser is the following:</p>
2390<ol>
2391 <li>The default entity loader calls <code>xmlNewInputFromFile()</code> with
2392 the parsing context and the URI string.</li>
2393 <li>the URI string is checked against the existing registered handlers
2394 using their match() callback function, if the HTTP module was compiled
2395 in, it is registered and its match() function will succeeds</li>
2396 <li>the open() function of the handler is called and if successful will
2397 return an I/O Input buffer</li>
2398 <li>the parser will the start reading from this buffer and progressively
2399 fetch information from the resource, calling the read() function of the
2400 handler until the resource is exhausted</li>
2401 <li>if an encoding change is detected it will be installed on the input
2402 buffer, providing buffering and efficient use of the conversion
2403 routines</li>
2404 <li>once the parser has finished, the close() function of the handler is
2405 called once and the Input buffer and associed resources are
2406 deallocated.</li>
2407</ol>
2408
2409<p>The user defined callbacks are checked first to allow overriding of the
2410default libxml I/O routines.</p>
2411
2412<h3><a name="basic">The basic buffer type</a></h3>
2413
2414<p>All the buffer manipulation handling is done using the
2415<code>xmlBuffer</code> type define in <code><a
2416href="http://xmlsoft.org/html/libxml-tree.html">tree.h</a> </code>which is a
2417resizable memory buffer. The buffer allocation strategy can be selected to be
2418either best-fit or use an exponential doubling one (CPU vs. memory use
2419tradeoff). The values are <code>XML_BUFFER_ALLOC_EXACT</code> and
2420<code>XML_BUFFER_ALLOC_DOUBLEIT</code>, and can be set individually or on a
2421system wide basis using <code>xmlBufferSetAllocationScheme()</code>. A number
2422of functions allows to manipulate buffers with names starting with the
2423<code>xmlBuffer...</code> prefix.</p>
2424
2425<h3><a name="Input">Input I/O handlers</a></h3>
2426
2427<p>An Input I/O handler is a simple structure
2428<code>xmlParserInputBuffer</code> containing a context associated to the
2429resource (file descriptor, or pointer to a protocol handler), the read() and
2430close() callbacks to use and an xmlBuffer. And extra xmlBuffer and a charset
2431encoding handler are also present to support charset conversion when
2432needed.</p>
2433
2434<h3><a name="Output">Output I/O handlers</a></h3>
2435
2436<p>An Output handler <code>xmlOutputBuffer</code> is completely similar to an
2437Input one except the callbacks are write() and close().</p>
2438
2439<h3><a name="entities">The entities loader</a></h3>
2440
2441<p>The entity loader resolves requests for new entities and create inputs for
2442the parser. Creating an input from a filename or an URI string is done
2443through the xmlNewInputFromFile() routine. The default entity loader do not
2444handle the PUBLIC identifier associated with an entity (if any). So it just
2445calls xmlNewInputFromFile() with the SYSTEM identifier (which is mandatory in
2446XML).</p>
2447
2448<p>If you want to hook up a catalog mechanism then you simply need to
2449override the default entity loader, here is an example:</p>
2450<pre>#include &lt;libxml/xmlIO.h&gt;
2451
2452xmlExternalEntityLoader defaultLoader = NULL;
2453
2454xmlParserInputPtr
2455xmlMyExternalEntityLoader(const char *URL, const char *ID,
2456 xmlParserCtxtPtr ctxt) {
2457 xmlParserInputPtr ret;
2458 const char *fileID = NULL;
2459 /* lookup for the fileID depending on ID */
2460
2461 ret = xmlNewInputFromFile(ctxt, fileID);
2462 if (ret != NULL)
2463 return(ret);
2464 if (defaultLoader != NULL)
2465 ret = defaultLoader(URL, ID, ctxt);
2466 return(ret);
2467}
2468
2469int main(..) {
2470 ...
2471
2472 /*
2473 * Install our own entity loader
2474 */
2475 defaultLoader = xmlGetExternalEntityLoader();
2476 xmlSetExternalEntityLoader(xmlMyExternalEntityLoader);
2477
2478 ...
2479}</pre>
2480
2481<h3><a name="Example2">Example of customized I/O</a></h3>
2482
2483<p>This example come from <a href="http://xmlsoft.org/messages/0708.html">a
2484real use case</a>, xmlDocDump() closes the FILE * passed by the application
2485and this was a problem. The <a
2486href="http://xmlsoft.org/messages/0711.html">solution</a> was to redefine a
2487new output handler with the closing call deactivated:</p>
2488<ol>
2489 <li>First define a new I/O ouput allocator where the output don't close the
2490 file:
2491 <pre>xmlOutputBufferPtr
2492xmlOutputBufferCreateOwn(FILE *file, xmlCharEncodingHandlerPtr encoder) {
2493    xmlOutputBufferPtr ret;
2494    
2495    if (xmlOutputCallbackInitialized == 0)
2496        xmlRegisterDefaultOutputCallbacks();
2497
2498    if (file == NULL) return(NULL);
2499    ret = xmlAllocOutputBuffer(encoder);
2500    if (ret != NULL) {
2501        ret-&gt;context = file;
2502        ret-&gt;writecallback = xmlFileWrite;
2503        ret-&gt;closecallback = NULL; /* No close callback */
2504    }
2505    return(ret); <br>
2506
2507
2508
Daniel Veillard9c466822001-10-25 12:03:39 +0000[diff] [blame]2509
2510
Daniel Veillardc6271d22001-10-27 07:50:58 +0000[diff] [blame]2511
Daniel Veillard51095312001-10-28 18:51:57 +0000[diff] [blame]2512
Daniel Veillard52dcab32001-10-30 12:51:17 +0000[diff] [blame]2513
Daniel Veillarded421aa2001-11-04 21:22:45 +0000[diff] [blame]2514
Daniel Veillard43d3f612001-11-10 11:57:23 +0000[diff] [blame]2515
Daniel Veillarda4871052001-11-26 13:19:48 +0000[diff] [blame]2516
Daniel Veillard1aadc442001-11-28 13:10:32 +0000[diff] [blame]2517
Daniel Veillardef90ba72001-12-07 14:24:22 +0000[diff] [blame]2518
Daniel Veillard9ae4b7a2001-12-13 14:24:09 +0000[diff] [blame]2519
Daniel Veillard845cce42002-01-09 11:51:37 +0000[diff] [blame]2520
Daniel Veillard744683d2002-01-14 17:30:20 +0000[diff] [blame]2521
Daniel Veillard35e937a2002-01-19 22:21:54 +0000[diff] [blame]2522
Daniel Veillardc575b992002-02-08 13:28:40 +0000[diff] [blame]2523
Daniel Veillardb6c1e2f2002-02-08 14:52:52 +0000[diff] [blame]2524
Daniel Veillard397ff112002-02-11 18:27:20 +0000[diff] [blame]2525
Daniel Veillarde46182c2002-02-12 14:29:11 +0000[diff] [blame]2526
Daniel Veillard5f4b5992002-02-20 10:22:49 +0000[diff] [blame]2527
Daniel Veillard5b16f582002-02-20 11:38:46 +0000[diff] [blame]2528
Daniel Veillarda5393562002-02-20 11:40:49 +0000[diff] [blame]2529
Daniel Veillard6dbcaf82002-02-20 14:37:47 +0000[diff] [blame^]2530
2531
2532
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]2533} </pre>
2534 </li>
2535 <li>And then use it to save the document:
2536 <pre>FILE *f;
2537xmlOutputBufferPtr output;
2538xmlDocPtr doc;
2539int res;
2540
2541f = ...
2542doc = ....
2543
2544output = xmlOutputBufferCreateOwn(f, NULL);
2545res = xmlSaveFileTo(output, doc, NULL);
2546 </pre>
2547 </li>
2548</ol>
2549
2550<h2><a name="Catalog">Catalog support</a></h2>
2551
2552<p>Table of Content:</p>
2553<ol>
2554 <li><a href="General2">General overview</a></li>
2555 <li><a href="#definition">The definition</a></li>
2556 <li><a href="#Simple">Using catalogs</a></li>
2557 <li><a href="#Some">Some examples</a></li>
2558 <li><a href="#reference">How to tune catalog usage</a></li>
2559 <li><a href="#validate">How to debug catalog processing</a></li>
2560 <li><a href="#Declaring">How to create and maintain catalogs</a></li>
2561 <li><a href="#implemento">The implementor corner quick review of the
2562 API</a></li>
2563 <li><a href="#Other">Other resources</a></li>
2564</ol>
2565
2566<h3><a name="General2">General overview</a></h3>
2567
2568<p>What is a catalog? Basically it's a lookup mechanism used when an entity
2569(a file or a remote resource) references another entity. The catalog lookup
2570is inserted between the moment the reference is recognized by the software
2571(XML parser, stylesheet processing, or even images referenced for inclusion
2572in a rendering) and the time where loading that resource is actually
2573started.</p>
2574
2575<p>It is basically used for 3 things:</p>
2576<ul>
2577 <li>mapping from "logical" names, the public identifiers and a more
2578 concrete name usable for download (and URI). For example it can associate
2579 the logical name
2580 <p>"-//OASIS//DTD DocBook XML V4.1.2//EN"</p>
2581 <p>of the DocBook 4.1.2 XML DTD with the actual URL where it can be
2582 downloaded</p>
2583 <p>http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/xml/4.1.2/docbookx.dtd</p>
2584 </li>
2585 <li>remapping from a given URL to another one, like an HTTP indirection
2586 saying that
2587 <p>"http://www.oasis-open.org/committes/tr.xsl"</p>
2588 <p>should really be looked at</p>
2589 <p>"http://www.oasis-open.org/committes/entity/stylesheets/base/tr.xsl"</p>
2590 </li>
2591 <li>providing a local cache mechanism allowing to load the entities
2592 associated to public identifiers or remote resources, this is a really
2593 important feature for any significant deployment of XML or SGML since it
2594 allows to avoid the aleas and delays associated to fetching remote
2595 resources.</li>
2596</ul>
2597
2598<h3><a name="definition">The definitions</a></h3>
2599
2600<p>Libxml, as of 2.4.3 implements 2 kind of catalogs:</p>
2601<ul>
2602 <li>the older SGML catalogs, the official spec is SGML Open Technical
2603 Resolution TR9401:1997, but is better understood by reading <a
2604 href="http://www.jclark.com/sp/catalog.htm">the SP Catalog page</a> from
2605 James Clark. This is relatively old and not the preferred mode of
2606 operation of libxml.</li>
2607 <li><a href="http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/entity/spec.html">XML
2608 Catalogs</a>
2609 is far more flexible, more recent, uses an XML syntax and should scale
2610 quite better. This is the default option of libxml.</li>
2611</ul>
2612
2613<p></p>
2614
2615<h3><a name="Simple">Using catalog</a></h3>
2616
2617<p>In a normal environment libxml will by default check the presence of a
2618catalog in /etc/xml/catalog, and assuming it has been correctly populated,
2619the processing is completely transparent to the document user. To take a
2620concrete example, suppose you are authoring a DocBook document, this one
2621starts with the following DOCTYPE definition:</p>
2622<pre>&lt;?xml version='1.0'?&gt;
2623&lt;!DOCTYPE book PUBLIC "-//Norman Walsh//DTD DocBk XML V3.1.4//EN"
2624 "http://nwalsh.com/docbook/xml/3.1.4/db3xml.dtd"&gt;</pre>
2625
2626<p>When validating the document with libxml, the catalog will be
2627automatically consulted to lookup the public identifier "-//Norman Walsh//DTD
2628DocBk XML V3.1.4//EN" and the system identifier
2629"http://nwalsh.com/docbook/xml/3.1.4/db3xml.dtd", and if these entities have
2630been installed on your system and the catalogs actually point to them, libxml
2631will fetch them from the local disk.</p>
2632
2633<p style="font-size: 10pt"><strong>Note</strong>: Really don't use this
2634DOCTYPE example it's a really old version, but is fine as an example.</p>
2635
2636<p>Libxml will check the catalog each time that it is requested to load an
2637entity, this includes DTD, external parsed entities, stylesheets, etc ... If
2638your system is correctly configured all the authoring phase and processing
2639should use only local files, even if your document stays portable because it
2640uses the canonical public and system ID, referencing the remote document.</p>
2641
2642<h3><a name="Some">Some examples:</a></h3>
2643
2644<p>Here is a couple of fragments from XML Catalogs used in libxml early
2645regression tests in <code>test/catalogs</code> :</p>
2646<pre>&lt;?xml version="1.0"?&gt;
2647&lt;!DOCTYPE catalog PUBLIC
2648 "-//OASIS//DTD Entity Resolution XML Catalog V1.0//EN"
2649 "http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/entity/release/1.0/catalog.dtd"&gt;
2650&lt;catalog xmlns="urn:oasis:names:tc:entity:xmlns:xml:catalog"&gt;
2651 &lt;public publicId="-//OASIS//DTD DocBook XML V4.1.2//EN"
2652 uri="http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/xml/4.1.2/docbookx.dtd"/&gt;
2653...</pre>
2654
2655<p>This is the beginning of a catalog for DocBook 4.1.2, XML Catalogs are
2656written in XML, there is a specific namespace for catalog elements
2657"urn:oasis:names:tc:entity:xmlns:xml:catalog". The first entry in this
2658catalog is a <code>public</code> mapping it allows to associate a Public
2659Identifier with an URI.</p>
2660<pre>...
2661 &lt;rewriteSystem systemIdStartString="http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/"
2662 rewritePrefix="file:///usr/share/xml/docbook/"/&gt;
2663...</pre>
2664
2665<p>A <code>rewriteSystem</code> is a very powerful instruction, it says that
2666any URI starting with a given prefix should be looked at another URI
2667constructed by replacing the prefix with an new one. In effect this acts like
2668a cache system for a full area of the Web. In practice it is extremely useful
2669with a file prefix if you have installed a copy of those resources on your
2670local system.</p>
2671<pre>...
2672&lt;delegatePublic publicIdStartString="-//OASIS//DTD XML Catalog //"
2673 catalog="file:///usr/share/xml/docbook.xml"/&gt;
2674&lt;delegatePublic publicIdStartString="-//OASIS//ENTITIES DocBook XML"
2675 catalog="file:///usr/share/xml/docbook.xml"/&gt;
2676&lt;delegatePublic publicIdStartString="-//OASIS//DTD DocBook XML"
2677 catalog="file:///usr/share/xml/docbook.xml"/&gt;
2678&lt;delegateSystem systemIdStartString="http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/"
2679 catalog="file:///usr/share/xml/docbook.xml"/&gt;
2680&lt;delegateURI uriStartString="http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/"
2681 catalog="file:///usr/share/xml/docbook.xml"/&gt;
2682...</pre>
2683
2684<p>Delegation is the core features which allows to build a tree of catalogs,
2685easier to maintain than a single catalog, based on Public Identifier, System
2686Identifier or URI prefixes it instructs the catalog software to look up
2687entries in another resource. This feature allow to build hierarchies of
2688catalogs, the set of entries presented should be sufficient to redirect the
2689resolution of all DocBook references to the specific catalog in
2690<code>/usr/share/xml/docbook.xml</code> this one in turn could delegate all
2691references for DocBook 4.2.1 to a specific catalog installed at the same time
2692as the DocBook resources on the local machine.</p>
2693
2694<h3><a name="reference">How to tune catalog usage:</a></h3>
2695
2696<p>The user can change the default catalog behaviour by redirecting queries
2697to its own set of catalogs, this can be done by setting the
2698<code>XML_CATALOG_FILES</code> environment variable to a list of catalogs, an
2699empty one should deactivate loading the default <code>/etc/xml/catalog</code>
2700default catalog</p>
2701
2702<h3><a name="validate">How to debug catalog processing:</a></h3>
2703
2704<p>Setting up the <code>XML_DEBUG_CATALOG</code> environment variable will
2705make libxml output debugging informations for each catalog operations, for
2706example:</p>
2707<pre>orchis:~/XML -&gt; xmllint --memory --noout test/ent2
2708warning: failed to load external entity "title.xml"
2709orchis:~/XML -&gt; export XML_DEBUG_CATALOG=
2710orchis:~/XML -&gt; xmllint --memory --noout test/ent2
2711Failed to parse catalog /etc/xml/catalog
2712Failed to parse catalog /etc/xml/catalog
2713warning: failed to load external entity "title.xml"
2714Catalogs cleanup
2715orchis:~/XML -&gt; </pre>
2716
2717<p>The test/ent2 references an entity, running the parser from memory makes
2718the base URI unavailable and the the "title.xml" entity cannot be loaded.
2719Setting up the debug environment variable allows to detect that an attempt is
2720made to load the <code>/etc/xml/catalog</code> but since it's not present the
2721resolution fails.</p>
2722
2723<p>But the most advanced way to debug XML catalog processing is to use the
2724<strong>xmlcatalog</strong> command shipped with libxml2, it allows to load
2725catalogs and make resolution queries to see what is going on. This is also
2726used for the regression tests:</p>
2727<pre>orchis:~/XML -&gt; ./xmlcatalog test/catalogs/docbook.xml \
2728 "-//OASIS//DTD DocBook XML V4.1.2//EN"
2729http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/xml/4.1.2/docbookx.dtd
2730orchis:~/XML -&gt; </pre>
2731
2732<p>For debugging what is going on, adding one -v flags increase the verbosity
2733level to indicate the processing done (adding a second flag also indicate
2734what elements are recognized at parsing):</p>
2735<pre>orchis:~/XML -&gt; ./xmlcatalog -v test/catalogs/docbook.xml \
2736 "-//OASIS//DTD DocBook XML V4.1.2//EN"
2737Parsing catalog test/catalogs/docbook.xml's content
2738Found public match -//OASIS//DTD DocBook XML V4.1.2//EN
2739http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/xml/4.1.2/docbookx.dtd
2740Catalogs cleanup
2741orchis:~/XML -&gt; </pre>
2742
2743<p>A shell interface is also available to debug and process multiple queries
2744(and for regression tests):</p>
2745<pre>orchis:~/XML -&gt; ./xmlcatalog -shell test/catalogs/docbook.xml \
2746 "-//OASIS//DTD DocBook XML V4.1.2//EN"
2747&gt; help
2748Commands available:
2749public PublicID: make a PUBLIC identifier lookup
2750system SystemID: make a SYSTEM identifier lookup
2751resolve PublicID SystemID: do a full resolver lookup
2752add 'type' 'orig' 'replace' : add an entry
2753del 'values' : remove values
2754dump: print the current catalog state
2755debug: increase the verbosity level
2756quiet: decrease the verbosity level
2757exit: quit the shell
2758&gt; public "-//OASIS//DTD DocBook XML V4.1.2//EN"
2759http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/xml/4.1.2/docbookx.dtd
2760&gt; quit
2761orchis:~/XML -&gt; </pre>
2762
2763<p>This should be sufficient for most debugging purpose, this was actually
2764used heavily to debug the XML Catalog implementation itself.</p>
2765
2766<h3><a name="Declaring">How to create and maintain</a> catalogs:</h3>
2767
2768<p>Basically XML Catalogs are XML files, you can either use XML tools to
2769manage them or use <strong>xmlcatalog</strong> for this. The basic step is
2770to create a catalog the -create option provide this facility:</p>
2771<pre>orchis:~/XML -&gt; ./xmlcatalog --create tst.xml
2772&lt;?xml version="1.0"?&gt;
2773&lt;!DOCTYPE catalog PUBLIC "-//OASIS//DTD Entity Resolution XML Catalog V1.0//EN"
2774 "http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/entity/release/1.0/catalog.dtd"&gt;
2775&lt;catalog xmlns="urn:oasis:names:tc:entity:xmlns:xml:catalog"/&gt;
2776orchis:~/XML -&gt; </pre>
2777
2778<p>By default xmlcatalog does not overwrite the original catalog and save the
2779result on the standard output, this can be overridden using the -noout
2780option. The <code>-add</code> command allows to add entries in the
2781catalog:</p>
2782<pre>orchis:~/XML -&gt; ./xmlcatalog --noout --create --add "public" \
2783 "-//OASIS//DTD DocBook XML V4.1.2//EN" \
2784 http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/xml/4.1.2/docbookx.dtd tst.xml
2785orchis:~/XML -&gt; cat tst.xml
2786&lt;?xml version="1.0"?&gt;
2787&lt;!DOCTYPE catalog PUBLIC "-//OASIS//DTD Entity Resolution XML Catalog V1.0//EN" \
2788 "http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/entity/release/1.0/catalog.dtd"&gt;
2789&lt;catalog xmlns="urn:oasis:names:tc:entity:xmlns:xml:catalog"&gt;
2790&lt;public publicId="-//OASIS//DTD DocBook XML V4.1.2//EN"
2791 uri="http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/xml/4.1.2/docbookx.dtd"/&gt;
2792&lt;/catalog&gt;
2793orchis:~/XML -&gt; </pre>
2794
2795<p>The <code>-add</code> option will always take 3 parameters even if some of
2796the XML Catalog constructs (like nextCatalog) will have only a single
2797argument, just pass a third empty string, it will be ignored.</p>
2798
2799<p>Similarly the <code>-del</code> option remove matching entries from the
2800catalog:</p>
2801<pre>orchis:~/XML -&gt; ./xmlcatalog --del \
2802 "http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/xml/4.1.2/docbookx.dtd" tst.xml
2803&lt;?xml version="1.0"?&gt;
2804&lt;!DOCTYPE catalog PUBLIC "-//OASIS//DTD Entity Resolution XML Catalog V1.0//EN"
2805 "http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/entity/release/1.0/catalog.dtd"&gt;
2806&lt;catalog xmlns="urn:oasis:names:tc:entity:xmlns:xml:catalog"/&gt;
2807orchis:~/XML -&gt; </pre>
2808
2809<p>The catalog is now empty. Note that the matching of <code>-del</code> is
2810exact and would have worked in a similar fashion with the Public ID
2811string.</p>
2812
2813<p>This is rudimentary but should be sufficient to manage a not too complex
2814catalog tree of resources.</p>
2815
2816<h3><a name="implemento">The implementor corner quick review of the
2817API:</a></h3>
2818
2819<p>First, and like for every other module of libxml, there is an
2820automatically generated <a href="html/libxml-catalog.html">API page for
2821catalog support</a>.</p>
2822
2823<p>The header for the catalog interfaces should be included as:</p>
2824<pre>#include &lt;libxml/catalog.h&gt;</pre>
2825
2826<p>The API is voluntarily kept very simple. First it is not obvious that
2827applications really need access to it since it is the default behaviour of
2828libxml (Note: it is possible to completely override libxml default catalog by
2829using <a href="html/libxml-parser.html">xmlSetExternalEntityLoader</a> to
2830plug an application specific resolver).</p>
2831
2832<p>Basically libxml support 2 catalog lists:</p>
2833<ul>
2834 <li>the default one, global shared by all the application</li>
2835 <li>a per-document catalog, this one is built if the document uses the
2836 <code>oasis-xml-catalog</code> PIs to specify its own catalog list, it is
2837 associated to the parser context and destroyed when the parsing context
2838 is destroyed.</li>
2839</ul>
2840
2841<p>the document one will be used first if it exists.</p>
2842
2843<h4>Initialization routines:</h4>
2844
2845<p>xmlInitializeCatalog(), xmlLoadCatalog() and xmlLoadCatalogs() should be
2846used at startup to initialize the catalog, if the catalog should be
2847initialized with specific values xmlLoadCatalog() or xmlLoadCatalogs()
2848should be called before xmlInitializeCatalog() which would otherwise do a
2849default initialization first.</p>
2850
2851<p>The xmlCatalogAddLocal() call is used by the parser to grow the document
2852own catalog list if needed.</p>
2853
2854<h4>Preferences setup:</h4>
2855
2856<p>The XML Catalog spec requires the possibility to select default
2857preferences between public and system delegation,
2858xmlCatalogSetDefaultPrefer() allows this, xmlCatalogSetDefaults() and
2859xmlCatalogGetDefaults() allow to control if XML Catalogs resolution should
2860be forbidden, allowed for global catalog, for document catalog or both, the
2861default is to allow both.</p>
2862
2863<p>And of course xmlCatalogSetDebug() allows to generate debug messages
2864(through the xmlGenericError() mechanism).</p>
2865
2866<h4>Querying routines:</h4>
2867
2868<p>xmlCatalogResolve(), xmlCatalogResolveSystem(), xmlCatalogResolvePublic()
2869and xmlCatalogResolveURI() are relatively explicit if you read the XML
2870Catalog specification they correspond to section 7 algorithms, they should
2871also work if you have loaded an SGML catalog with a simplified semantic.</p>
2872
2873<p>xmlCatalogLocalResolve() and xmlCatalogLocalResolveURI() are the same but
2874operate on the document catalog list</p>
2875
2876<h4>Cleanup and Miscellaneous:</h4>
2877
2878<p>xmlCatalogCleanup() free-up the global catalog, xmlCatalogFreeLocal() is
2879the per-document equivalent.</p>
2880
2881<p>xmlCatalogAdd() and xmlCatalogRemove() are used to dynamically modify the
2882first catalog in the global list, and xmlCatalogDump() allows to dump a
2883catalog state, those routines are primarily designed for xmlcatalog, I'm not
2884sure that exposing more complex interfaces (like navigation ones) would be
2885really useful.</p>
2886
2887<p>The xmlParseCatalogFile() is a function used to load XML Catalog files,
2888it's similar as xmlParseFile() except it bypass all catalog lookups, it's
2889provided because this functionality may be useful for client tools.</p>
2890
2891<h4>threaded environments:</h4>
2892
2893<p>Since the catalog tree is built progressively, some care has been taken to
2894try to avoid troubles in multithreaded environments. The code is now thread
2895safe assuming that the libxml library has been compiled with threads
2896support.</p>
2897
2898<p></p>
2899
2900<h3><a name="Other">Other resources</a></h3>
2901
2902<p>The XML Catalog specification is relatively recent so there isn't much
2903literature to point at:</p>
2904<ul>
2905 <li>You can find an good rant from Norm Walsh about <a
2906 href="http://www.arbortext.com/Think_Tank/XML_Resources/Issue_Three/issue_three.html">the
2907 need for catalogs</a>, it provides a lot of context informations even if
2908 I don't agree with everything presented.</li>
2909 <li>An <a href="http://home.ccil.org/~cowan/XML/XCatalog.html">old XML
2910 catalog proposal</a> from John Cowan</li>
2911 <li>The <a href="http://www.rddl.org/">Resource Directory Description
2912 Language</a> (RDDL) another catalog system but more oriented toward
2913 providing metadata for XML namespaces.</li>
2914 <li>the page from the OASIS Technical <a
2915 href="http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/entity/">Committee on Entity
2916 Resolution</a> who maintains XML Catalog, you will find pointers to the
2917 specification update, some background and pointers to others tools
2918 providing XML Catalog support</li>
Daniel Veillard35e937a2002-01-19 22:21:54 +0000[diff] [blame]2919 <li>Here is a <a href="buildDocBookCatalog">shell script</a> to generate
2920 XML Catalogs for DocBook 4.1.2 . If it can write to the /etc/xml/
2921 directory, it will set-up /etc/xml/catalog and /etc/xml/docbook based on
2922 the resources found on the system. Otherwise it will just create
2923 ~/xmlcatalog and ~/dbkxmlcatalog and doing:
Daniel Veillardc575b992002-02-08 13:28:40 +0000[diff] [blame]2924 <p><code>export XMLCATALOG=$HOME/xmlcatalog</code></p>
Daniel Veillard35e937a2002-01-19 22:21:54 +0000[diff] [blame]2925 <p>should allow to process DocBook documentations without requiring
2926 network accesses for the DTd or stylesheets</p>
2927 </li>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]2928 <li>I have uploaded <a href="ftp://xmlsoft.org/test/dbk412catalog.tar.gz">a
Daniel Veillard35e937a2002-01-19 22:21:54 +0000[diff] [blame]2929 small tarball</a> containing XML Catalogs for DocBook 4.1.2 which seems
2930 to work fine for me too</li>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]2931 <li>The <a href="http://www.xmlsoft.org/xmlcatalog_man.html">xmlcatalog
2932 manual page</a></li>
2933</ul>
2934
2935<p>If you have suggestions for corrections or additions, simply contact
2936me:</p>
2937
2938<h2><a name="library">The parser interfaces</a></h2>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]2939
2940<p>This section is directly intended to help programmers getting bootstrapped
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame]2941using the XML library from the C language. It is not intended to be
2942extensive. I hope the automatically generated documents will provide the
2943completeness required, but as a separate set of documents. The interfaces of
2944the XML library are by principle low level, there is nearly zero abstraction.
2945Those interested in a higher level API should <a href="#DOM">look at
2946DOM</a>.</p>
Daniel Veillardccb09631998-10-27 06:21:04 +0000[diff] [blame]2947
Daniel Veillard9cb5ff42001-01-29 08:22:21 +0000[diff] [blame]2948<p>The <a href="html/libxml-parser.html">parser interfaces for XML</a> are
2949separated from the <a href="html/libxml-htmlparser.html">HTML parser
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]2950interfaces</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]2951
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]2952<h3><a name="Invoking">Invoking the parser : the pull method</a></h3>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]2953
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]2954<p>Usually, the first thing to do is to read an XML input. The parser accepts
2955documents either from in-memory strings or from files. The functions are
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]2956defined in "parser.h":</p>
Daniel Veillard10c6a8f1998-10-28 01:00:12 +0000[diff] [blame]2957<dl>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]2958 <dt><code>xmlDocPtr xmlParseMemory(char *buffer, int size);</code></dt>
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]2959 <dd><p>Parse a null-terminated string containing the document.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]2960 </dd>
Daniel Veillard10c6a8f1998-10-28 01:00:12 +0000[diff] [blame]2961</dl>
2962<dl>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]2963 <dt><code>xmlDocPtr xmlParseFile(const char *filename);</code></dt>
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +0000[diff] [blame]2964 <dd><p>Parse an XML document contained in a (possibly compressed)
2965 file.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]2966 </dd>
Daniel Veillard10c6a8f1998-10-28 01:00:12 +0000[diff] [blame]2967</dl>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]2968
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]2969<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]2970failure).</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]2971
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]2972<h3 id="Invoking1">Invoking the parser: the push method</h3>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000[diff] [blame]2973
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame]2974<p>In order for the application to keep the control when the document is
2975being fetched (which is common for GUI based programs) libxml provides a push
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]2976interface, too, as of version 1.8.3. Here are the interface functions:</p>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000[diff] [blame]2977<pre>xmlParserCtxtPtr xmlCreatePushParserCtxt(xmlSAXHandlerPtr sax,
2978 void *user_data,
2979 const char *chunk,
2980 int size,
2981 const char *filename);
2982int xmlParseChunk (xmlParserCtxtPtr ctxt,
2983 const char *chunk,
2984 int size,
2985 int terminate);</pre>
2986
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]2987<p>and here is a simple example showing how to use the interface:</p>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000[diff] [blame]2988<pre> FILE *f;
2989
2990 f = fopen(filename, "r");
2991 if (f != NULL) {
2992 int res, size = 1024;
2993 char chars[1024];
2994 xmlParserCtxtPtr ctxt;
2995
2996 res = fread(chars, 1, 4, f);
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]2997 if (res &gt; 0) {
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000[diff] [blame]2998 ctxt = xmlCreatePushParserCtxt(NULL, NULL,
2999 chars, res, filename);
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]3000 while ((res = fread(chars, 1, size, f)) &gt; 0) {
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000[diff] [blame]3001 xmlParseChunk(ctxt, chars, res, 0);
3002 }
3003 xmlParseChunk(ctxt, chars, 0, 1);
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]3004 doc = ctxt-&gt;myDoc;
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000[diff] [blame]3005 xmlFreeParserCtxt(ctxt);
3006 }
3007 }</pre>
3008
Daniel Veillardec70e912001-02-26 20:10:45 +0000[diff] [blame]3009<p>The HTML parser embedded into libxml also has a push interface; the
3010functions are just prefixed by "html" rather than "xml".</p>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000[diff] [blame]3011
3012<h3 id="Invoking2">Invoking the parser: the SAX interface</h3>
3013
Daniel Veillardec70e912001-02-26 20:10:45 +0000[diff] [blame]3014<p>The tree-building interface makes the parser memory-hungry, first loading
3015the document in memory and then building the tree itself. Reading a document
3016without building the tree is possible using the SAX interfaces (see SAX.h and
3017<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]3018Henstridge's documentation</a>). Note also that the push interface can be
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000[diff] [blame]3019limited to SAX: just use the two first arguments of
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000[diff] [blame]3020<code>xmlCreatePushParserCtxt()</code>.</p>
Daniel Veillardccb09631998-10-27 06:21:04 +0000[diff] [blame]3021
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000[diff] [blame]3022<h3><a name="Building">Building a tree from scratch</a></h3>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]3023
3024<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]3025there is a set of functions dedicated to building new elements. (These are
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame]3026also described in &lt;libxml/tree.h&gt;.) For example, here is a piece of
3027code that produces the XML document used in the previous examples:</p>
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]3028<pre> #include &lt;libxml/tree.h&gt;
Daniel Veillard361d8452000-04-03 19:48:13 +0000[diff] [blame]3029 xmlDocPtr doc;
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +0000[diff] [blame]3030 xmlNodePtr tree, subtree;
3031
3032 doc = xmlNewDoc("1.0");
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]3033 doc-&gt;children = xmlNewDocNode(doc, NULL, "EXAMPLE", NULL);
3034 xmlSetProp(doc-&gt;children, "prop1", "gnome is great");
3035 xmlSetProp(doc-&gt;children, "prop2", "&amp; linux too");
3036 tree = xmlNewChild(doc-&gt;children, NULL, "head", NULL);
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +0000[diff] [blame]3037 subtree = xmlNewChild(tree, NULL, "title", "Welcome to Gnome");
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]3038 tree = xmlNewChild(doc-&gt;children, NULL, "chapter", NULL);
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +0000[diff] [blame]3039 subtree = xmlNewChild(tree, NULL, "title", "The Linux adventure");
3040 subtree = xmlNewChild(tree, NULL, "p", "bla bla bla ...");
3041 subtree = xmlNewChild(tree, NULL, "image", NULL);
3042 xmlSetProp(subtree, "href", "linus.gif");</pre>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]3043
3044<p>Not really rocket science ...</p>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +0000[diff] [blame]3045
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000[diff] [blame]3046<h3><a name="Traversing">Traversing the tree</a></h3>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]3047
Daniel Veillard9cb5ff42001-01-29 08:22:21 +0000[diff] [blame]3048<p>Basically by <a href="html/libxml-tree.html">including "tree.h"</a> your
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame]3049code has access to the internal structure of all the elements of the tree.
3050The names should be somewhat simple like <strong>parent</strong>,
Daniel Veillard306be992000-07-03 12:38:45 +0000[diff] [blame]3051<strong>children</strong>, <strong>next</strong>, <strong>prev</strong>,
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]3052<strong>properties</strong>, etc... For example, still with the previous
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000[diff] [blame]3053example:</p>
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]3054<pre><code>doc-&gt;children-&gt;children-&gt;children</code></pre>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]3055
3056<p>points to the title element,</p>
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000[diff] [blame]3057<pre>doc-&gt;children-&gt;children-&gt;next-&gt;children-&gt;children</pre>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]3058
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +0000[diff] [blame]3059<p>points to the text node containing the chapter title "The Linux
3060adventure".</p>
Daniel Veillard10c6a8f1998-10-28 01:00:12 +0000[diff] [blame]3061
Daniel Veillardb24054a1999-12-18 15:32:46 +0000[diff] [blame]3062<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]3063present before the document root, so <code>doc-&gt;children</code> may point
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000[diff] [blame]3064to an element which is not the document Root Element; a function
Daniel Veillard5cb5ab81999-12-21 15:35:29 +0000[diff] [blame]3065<code>xmlDocGetRootElement()</code> was added for this purpose.</p>
Daniel Veillardb24054a1999-12-18 15:32:46 +0000[diff] [blame]3066
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000[diff] [blame]3067<h3><a name="Modifying">Modifying the tree</a></h3>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]3068
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]3069<p>Functions are provided for reading and writing the document content. Here
Daniel Veillard9cb5ff42001-01-29 08:22:21 +0000[diff] [blame]3070is an excerpt from the <a href="html/libxml-tree.html">tree API</a>:</p>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +0000[diff] [blame]3071<dl>
Daniel Veillarddd6b3671999-09-23 22:19:22 +0000[diff] [blame]3072 <dt><code>xmlAttrPtr xmlSetProp(xmlNodePtr node, const xmlChar *name, const
3073 xmlChar *value);</code></dt>
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame]3074 <dd><p>This sets (or changes) an attribute carried by an ELEMENT node.
3075 The value can be NULL.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]3076 </dd>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +0000[diff] [blame]3077</dl>
3078<dl>
Daniel Veillarddd6b3671999-09-23 22:19:22 +0000[diff] [blame]3079 <dt><code>const xmlChar *xmlGetProp(xmlNodePtr node, const xmlChar
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]3080 *name);</code></dt>
Daniel Veillardc92c3042000-09-29 02:42:04 +0000[diff] [blame]3081 <dd><p>This function returns a pointer to new copy of the property
3082 content. Note that the user must deallocate the result.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]3083 </dd>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +0000[diff] [blame]3084</dl>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]3085
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame]3086<p>Two functions are provided for reading and writing the text associated
3087with elements:</p>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +0000[diff] [blame]3088<dl>
Daniel Veillarddd6b3671999-09-23 22:19:22 +0000[diff] [blame]3089 <dt><code>xmlNodePtr xmlStringGetNodeList(xmlDocPtr doc, const xmlChar
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]3090 *value);</code></dt>
Daniel Veillardec70e912001-02-26 20:10:45 +0000[diff] [blame]3091 <dd><p>This function takes an "external" string and converts it to one
3092 text node or possibly to a list of entity and text nodes. All
3093 non-predefined entity references like &amp;Gnome; will be stored
3094 internally as entity nodes, hence the result of the function may not be
3095 a single node.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]3096 </dd>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +0000[diff] [blame]3097</dl>
3098<dl>
Daniel Veillarddd6b3671999-09-23 22:19:22 +0000[diff] [blame]3099 <dt><code>xmlChar *xmlNodeListGetString(xmlDocPtr doc, xmlNodePtr list, int
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]3100 inLine);</code></dt>
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +0000[diff] [blame]3101 <dd><p>This function is the inverse of
3102 <code>xmlStringGetNodeList()</code>. It generates a new string
3103 containing the content of the text and entity nodes. Note the extra
3104 argument inLine. If this argument is set to 1, the function will expand
3105 entity references. For example, instead of returning the &amp;Gnome;
3106 XML encoding in the string, it will substitute it with its value (say,
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000[diff] [blame]3107 "GNU Network Object Model Environment").</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]3108 </dd>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +0000[diff] [blame]3109</dl>
Daniel Veillard10c6a8f1998-10-28 01:00:12 +0000[diff] [blame]3110
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000[diff] [blame]3111<h3><a name="Saving">Saving a tree</a></h3>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]3112
3113<p>Basically 3 options are possible:</p>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +0000[diff] [blame]3114<dl>
Daniel Veillarddd6b3671999-09-23 22:19:22 +0000[diff] [blame]3115 <dt><code>void xmlDocDumpMemory(xmlDocPtr cur, xmlChar**mem, int
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]3116 *size);</code></dt>
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]3117 <dd><p>Returns a buffer into which the document has been saved.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]3118 </dd>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +0000[diff] [blame]3119</dl>
3120<dl>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]3121 <dt><code>extern void xmlDocDump(FILE *f, xmlDocPtr doc);</code></dt>
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]3122 <dd><p>Dumps a document to an open file descriptor.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]3123 </dd>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +0000[diff] [blame]3124</dl>
3125<dl>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]3126 <dt><code>int xmlSaveFile(const char *filename, xmlDocPtr cur);</code></dt>
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +0000[diff] [blame]3127 <dd><p>Saves the document to a file. In this case, the compression
3128 interface is triggered if it has been turned on.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]3129 </dd>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +0000[diff] [blame]3130</dl>
Daniel Veillard10c6a8f1998-10-28 01:00:12 +0000[diff] [blame]3131
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000[diff] [blame]3132<h3><a name="Compressio">Compression</a></h3>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]3133
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]3134<p>The library transparently handles compression when doing file-based
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +0000[diff] [blame]3135accesses. The level of compression on saves can be turned on either globally
3136or individually for one file:</p>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +0000[diff] [blame]3137<dl>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]3138 <dt><code>int xmlGetDocCompressMode (xmlDocPtr doc);</code></dt>
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]3139 <dd><p>Gets the document compression ratio (0-9).</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]3140 </dd>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +0000[diff] [blame]3141</dl>
3142<dl>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]3143 <dt><code>void xmlSetDocCompressMode (xmlDocPtr doc, int mode);</code></dt>
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]3144 <dd><p>Sets the document compression ratio.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]3145 </dd>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +0000[diff] [blame]3146</dl>
3147<dl>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]3148 <dt><code>int xmlGetCompressMode(void);</code></dt>
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]3149 <dd><p>Gets the default compression ratio.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]3150 </dd>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +0000[diff] [blame]3151</dl>
3152<dl>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]3153 <dt><code>void xmlSetCompressMode(int mode);</code></dt>
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]3154 <dd><p>Sets the default compression ratio.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]3155 </dd>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +0000[diff] [blame]3156</dl>
3157
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000[diff] [blame]3158<h2><a name="Entities">Entities or no entities</a></h2>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]3159
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]3160<p>Entities in principle are similar to simple C macros. An entity defines an
3161abbreviation for a given string that you can reuse many times throughout the
3162content of your document. Entities are especially useful when a given string
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +0000[diff] [blame]3163may occur frequently within a document, or to confine the change needed to a
3164document to a restricted area in the internal subset of the document (at the
3165beginning). Example:</p>
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]3166<pre>1 &lt;?xml version="1.0"?&gt;
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]31672 &lt;!DOCTYPE EXAMPLE SYSTEM "example.dtd" [
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]31683 &lt;!ENTITY xml "Extensible Markup Language"&gt;
31694 ]&gt;
31705 &lt;EXAMPLE&gt;
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]31716 &amp;xml;
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]31727 &lt;/EXAMPLE&gt;</pre>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]3173
3174<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]3175its name with '&amp;' and following it by ';' without any spaces added. There
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]3176are 5 predefined entities in libxml allowing you to escape charaters with
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]3177predefined meaning in some parts of the xml document content:
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]3178<strong>&amp;lt;</strong> for the character '&lt;', <strong>&amp;gt;</strong>
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]3179for the character '&gt;', <strong>&amp;apos;</strong> for the character ''',
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]3180<strong>&amp;quot;</strong> for the character '"', and
3181<strong>&amp;amp;</strong> for the character '&amp;'.</p>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]3182
3183<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]3184substitute an entity's content so that you can see the replacement text in
3185your application. Or you may prefer to keep entity references as such in the
3186content to be able to save the document back without losing this usually
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame]3187precious information (if the user went through the pain of explicitly
3188defining entities, he may have a a rather negative attitude if you blindly
3189susbtitute them as saving time). The <a
Daniel Veillard9cb5ff42001-01-29 08:22:21 +0000[diff] [blame]3190href="html/libxml-parser.html#XMLSUBSTITUTEENTITIESDEFAULT">xmlSubstituteEntitiesDefault()</a>
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]3191function allows you to check and change the behaviour, which is to not
3192substitute entities by default.</p>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]3193
3194<p>Here is the DOM tree built by libxml for the previous document in the
3195default case:</p>
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]3196<pre>/gnome/src/gnome-xml -&gt; ./xmllint --debug test/ent1
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]3197DOCUMENT
3198version=1.0
3199 ELEMENT EXAMPLE
3200 TEXT
3201 content=
3202 ENTITY_REF
3203 INTERNAL_GENERAL_ENTITY xml
3204 content=Extensible Markup Language
3205 TEXT
3206 content=</pre>
3207
3208<p>And here is the result when substituting entities:</p>
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]3209<pre>/gnome/src/gnome-xml -&gt; ./tester --debug --noent test/ent1
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]3210DOCUMENT
3211version=1.0
3212 ELEMENT EXAMPLE
3213 TEXT
3214 content= Extensible Markup Language</pre>
3215
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]3216<p>So, entities or no entities? Basically, it depends on your use case. I
3217suggest that you keep the non-substituting default behaviour and avoid using
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]3218entities in your XML document or data if you are not willing to handle the
3219entity references elements in the DOM tree.</p>
3220
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000[diff] [blame]3221<p>Note that at save time libxml enforces the conversion of the predefined
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]3222entities where necessary to prevent well-formedness problems, and will also
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000[diff] [blame]3223transparently replace those with chars (i.e. it will not generate entity
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]3224reference elements in the DOM tree or call the reference() SAX callback when
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]3225finding them in the input).</p>
3226
Daniel Veillard7b9c4b72000-08-25 16:26:50 +0000[diff] [blame]3227<p><span style="background-color: #FF0000">WARNING</span>: handling entities
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000[diff] [blame]3228on top of the libxml SAX interface is difficult!!! If you plan to use
Daniel Veillard7b9c4b72000-08-25 16:26:50 +0000[diff] [blame]3229non-predefined entities in your documents, then the learning cuvre to handle
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000[diff] [blame]3230then 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]3231strongly suggest you consider using the DOM interface instead and let libxml
Daniel Veillard8c6d6af2000-08-25 17:14:13 +0000[diff] [blame]3232deal with the complexity rather than trying to do it yourself.</p>
Daniel Veillard7b9c4b72000-08-25 16:26:50 +0000[diff] [blame]3233
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000[diff] [blame]3234<h2><a name="Namespaces">Namespaces</a></h2>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]3235
Daniel Veillardec303412000-03-24 13:41:54 +0000[diff] [blame]3236<p>The libxml library implements <a
3237href="http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml-names/">XML namespaces</a> support by
3238recognizing namespace contructs in the input, and does namespace lookup
3239automatically when building the DOM tree. A namespace declaration is
3240associated with an in-memory structure and all elements or attributes within
3241that namespace point to it. Hence testing the namespace is a simple and fast
3242equality operation at the user level.</p>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]3243
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +0000[diff] [blame]3244<p>I suggest that people using libxml use a namespace, and declare it in the
3245root element of their document as the default namespace. Then they don't need
3246to 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]3247refinement and merging of data from different sources. This doesn't increase
Daniel Veillardec70e912001-02-26 20:10:45 +0000[diff] [blame]3248the size of the XML output significantly, but significantly increases its
3249value in the long-term. Example:</p>
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]3250<pre>&lt;mydoc xmlns="http://mydoc.example.org/schemas/"&gt;
3251 &lt;elem1&gt;...&lt;/elem1&gt;
3252 &lt;elem2&gt;...&lt;/elem2&gt;
3253&lt;/mydoc&gt;</pre>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]3254
Daniel Veillardec70e912001-02-26 20:10:45 +0000[diff] [blame]3255<p>The namespace value has to be an absolute URL, but the URL doesn't have to
3256point to any existing resource on the Web. It will bind all the element and
3257atributes with that URL. I suggest to use an URL within a domain you control,
3258and that the URL should contain some kind of version information if possible.
3259For example, <code>"http://www.gnome.org/gnumeric/1.0/"</code> is a good
3260namespace scheme.</p>
Daniel Veillardec303412000-03-24 13:41:54 +0000[diff] [blame]3261
3262<p>Then when you load a file, make sure that a namespace carrying the
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]3263version-independent prefix is installed on the root element of your document,
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]3264and if the version information don't match something you know, warn the user
3265and 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]3266namespace checking on the prefix value. &lt;foo:text&gt; may be exactly the
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000[diff] [blame]3267same as &lt;bar:text&gt; in another document. What really matters is the URI
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]3268associated with the element or the attribute, not the prefix string (which is
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000[diff] [blame]3269just a shortcut for the full URI). In libxml, element and attributes have an
Daniel Veillardec303412000-03-24 13:41:54 +0000[diff] [blame]3270<code>ns</code> field pointing to an xmlNs structure detailing the namespace
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000[diff] [blame]3271prefix and its URI.</p>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]3272
3273<p>@@Interfaces@@</p>
3274
3275<p>@@Examples@@</p>
3276
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000[diff] [blame]3277<p>Usually people object to using namespaces together with validity checking.
3278I will try to make sure that using namespaces won't break validity checking,
3279so even if you plan to use or currently are using validation I strongly
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +0000[diff] [blame]3280suggest adding namespaces to your document. A default namespace scheme
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]3281<code>xmlns="http://...."</code> should not break validity even on less
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000[diff] [blame]3282flexible parsers. Using namespaces to mix and differentiate content coming
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame]3283from multiple DTDs will certainly break current validation schemes. I will
3284try to provide ways to do this, but this may not be portable or
3285standardized.</p>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]3286
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]3287<h2><a name="Upgrading">Upgrading 1.x code</a></h2>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]3288
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]3289<p>Incompatible changes:</p>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]3290
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]3291<p>Version 2 of libxml is the first version introducing serious backward
3292incompatible changes. The main goals were:</p>
3293<ul>
3294 <li>a general cleanup. A number of mistakes inherited from the very early
3295 versions couldn't be changed due to compatibility constraints. Example
3296 the "childs" element in the nodes.</li>
3297 <li>Uniformization of the various nodes, at least for their header and link
3298 parts (doc, parent, children, prev, next), the goal is a simpler
3299 programming model and simplifying the task of the DOM implementors.</li>
3300 <li>better conformances to the XML specification, for example version 1.x
3301 had an heuristic to try to detect ignorable white spaces. As a result the
3302 SAX event generated were ignorableWhitespace() while the spec requires
3303 character() in that case. This also mean that a number of DOM node
3304 containing blank text may populate the DOM tree which were not present
3305 before.</li>
3306</ul>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]3307
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]3308<h3>How to fix libxml-1.x code:</h3>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]3309
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]3310<p>So client code of libxml designed to run with version 1.x may have to be
3311changed to compile against version 2.x of libxml. Here is a list of changes
3312that I have collected, they may not be sufficient, so in case you find other
3313change which are required, <a href="mailto:Daniel.Ïeillardw3.org">drop me a
3314mail</a>:</p>
3315<ol>
3316 <li>The package name have changed from libxml to libxml2, the library name
3317 is now -lxml2 . There is a new xml2-config script which should be used to
3318 select the right parameters libxml2</li>
3319 <li>Node <strong>childs</strong> field has been renamed
3320 <strong>children</strong> so s/childs/children/g should be applied
3321 (probablility of having "childs" anywere else is close to 0+</li>
3322 <li>The document don't have anymore a <strong>root</strong> element it has
3323 been replaced by <strong>children</strong> and usually you will get a
3324 list of element here. For example a Dtd element for the internal subset
3325 and it's declaration may be found in that list, as well as processing
3326 instructions or comments found before or after the document root element.
3327 Use <strong>xmlDocGetRootElement(doc)</strong> to get the root element of
3328 a document. Alternatively if you are sure to not reference Dtds nor have
3329 PIs or comments before or after the root element
3330 s/-&gt;root/-&gt;children/g will probably do it.</li>
3331 <li>The white space issue, this one is more complex, unless special case of
3332 validating parsing, the line breaks and spaces usually used for indenting
3333 and formatting the document content becomes significant. So they are
3334 reported by SAX and if your using the DOM tree, corresponding nodes are
3335 generated. Too approach can be taken:
3336 <ol>
3337 <li>lazy one, use the compatibility call
3338 <strong>xmlKeepBlanksDefault(0)</strong> but be aware that you are
3339 relying on a special (and possibly broken) set of heuristics of
3340 libxml to detect ignorable blanks. Don't complain if it breaks or
3341 make your application not 100% clean w.r.t. to it's input.</li>
3342 <li>the Right Way: change you code to accept possibly unsignificant
3343 blanks characters, or have your tree populated with weird blank text
3344 nodes. You can spot them using the comodity function
3345 <strong>xmlIsBlankNode(node)</strong> returning 1 for such blank
3346 nodes.</li>
3347 </ol>
3348 <p>Note also that with the new default the output functions don't add any
3349 extra indentation when saving a tree in order to be able to round trip
3350 (read and save) without inflating the document with extra formatting
3351 chars.</p>
3352 </li>
3353 <li>The include path has changed to $prefix/libxml/ and the includes
3354 themselves uses this new prefix in includes instructions... If you are
3355 using (as expected) the
3356 <pre>xml2-config --cflags</pre>
3357 <p>output to generate you compile commands this will probably work out of
3358 the box</p>
3359 </li>
3360 <li>xmlDetectCharEncoding takes an extra argument indicating the lenght in
3361 byte of the head of the document available for character detection.</li>
3362</ol>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]3363
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]3364<h3>Ensuring both libxml-1.x and libxml-2.x compatibility</h3>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]3365
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]3366<p>Two new version of libxml (1.8.11) and libxml2 (2.3.4) have been released
3367to allow smoth upgrade of existing libxml v1code while retaining
3368compatibility. They offers the following:</p>
3369<ol>
3370 <li>similar include naming, one should use
3371 <strong>#include&lt;libxml/...&gt;</strong> in both cases.</li>
3372 <li>similar identifiers defined via macros for the child and root fields:
3373 respectively <strong>xmlChildrenNode</strong> and
3374 <strong>xmlRootNode</strong></li>
3375 <li>a new macro <strong>LIBXML_TEST_VERSION</strong> which should be
3376 inserted once in the client code</li>
3377</ol>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]3378
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]3379<p>So the roadmap to upgrade your existing libxml applications is the
3380following:</p>
3381<ol>
3382 <li>install the libxml-1.8.8 (and libxml-devel-1.8.8) packages</li>
3383 <li>find all occurences where the xmlDoc <strong>root</strong> field is
3384 used and change it to <strong>xmlRootNode</strong></li>
3385 <li>similary find all occurences where the xmlNode <strong>childs</strong>
3386 field is used and change it to <strong>xmlChildrenNode</strong></li>
3387 <li>add a <strong>LIBXML_TEST_VERSION</strong> macro somewhere in your
3388 <strong>main()</strong> or in the library init entry point</li>
3389 <li>Recompile, check compatibility, it should still work</li>
3390 <li>Change your configure script to look first for xml2-config and fallback
3391 using xml-config . Use the --cflags and --libs ouptut of the command as
3392 the Include and Linking parameters needed to use libxml.</li>
3393 <li>install libxml2-2.3.x and libxml2-devel-2.3.x (libxml-1.8.y and
3394 libxml-devel-1.8.y can be kept simultaneously)</li>
3395 <li>remove your config.cache, relaunch your configuration mechanism, and
3396 recompile, if steps 2 and 3 were done right it should compile as-is</li>
3397 <li>Test that your application is still running correctly, if not this may
3398 be due to extra empty nodes due to formating spaces being kept in libxml2
3399 contrary to libxml1, in that case insert xmlKeepBlanksDefault(1) in your
3400 code before calling the parser (next to
3401 <strong>LIBXML_TEST_VERSION</strong> is a fine place).</li>
3402</ol>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]3403
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]3404<p>Following those steps should work. It worked for some of my own code.</p>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]3405
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]3406<p>Let me put some emphasis on the fact that there is far more changes from
3407libxml 1.x to 2.x than the ones you may have to patch for. The overall code
3408has been considerably cleaned up and the conformance to the XML specification
3409has been drastically improved too. Don't take those changes as an excuse to
3410not upgrade, it may cost a lot on the long term ...</p>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]3411
Daniel Veillard52dcab32001-10-30 12:51:17 +0000[diff] [blame]3412<h2><a name="Thread">Thread safety</a></h2>
3413
3414<p>Starting with 2.4.7, libxml makes provisions to ensure that concurent
3415threads can safely work in parallel parsing different documents. There is
3416however a couple of things to do to ensure it:</p>
3417<ul>
3418 <li>configure the library accordingly using the --with-threads options</li>
3419 <li>call xmlInitParser() in the "main" thread before using any of the
3420 libxml API (except possibly selecting a different memory allocator)</li>
3421</ul>
3422
3423<p>Note that the thread safety cannot be ensured for multiple threads sharing
3424the same document, the locking must be done at the application level, libxml
3425exports a basic mutex and reentrant mutexes API in &lt;libxml/threads.h&gt;.
3426The parts of the library checked for thread safety are:</p>
3427<ul>
3428 <li>concurrent loading</li>
3429 <li>file access resolution</li>
3430 <li>catalog access</li>
3431 <li>catalog building</li>
3432 <li>entities lookup/accesses</li>
3433 <li>validation</li>
3434 <li>global variables per-thread override</li>
3435 <li>memory handling</li>
3436</ul>
3437
3438<p>XPath is supposed to be thread safe now, but this wasn't tested
3439seriously.</p>
3440
Daniel Veillard35008381999-10-25 13:15:52 +0000[diff] [blame]3441<h2><a name="DOM"></a><a name="Principles">DOM Principles</a></h2>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]3442
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame]3443<p><a href="http://www.w3.org/DOM/">DOM</a> stands for the <em>Document
3444Object Model</em>; this is an API for accessing XML or HTML structured
3445documents. Native support for DOM in Gnome is on the way (module gnome-dom),
3446and will be based on gnome-xml. This will be a far cleaner interface to
3447manipulate XML files within Gnome since it won't expose the internal
3448structure.</p>
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +0000[diff] [blame]3449
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]3450<p>The current DOM implementation on top of libxml is the <a
Daniel Veillarda47fb3d2001-03-25 17:23:49 +0000[diff] [blame]3451href="http://cvs.gnome.org/lxr/source/gdome2/">gdome2 Gnome module</a>, this
3452is a full DOM interface, thanks to Paolo Casarini, check the <a
3453href="http://www.cs.unibo.it/~casarini/gdome2/">Gdome2 homepage</a> for more
3454informations.</p>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]3455
Daniel Veillard35008381999-10-25 13:15:52 +0000[diff] [blame]3456<h2><a name="Example"></a><a name="real">A real example</a></h2>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]3457
3458<p>Here is a real size example, where the actual content of the application
3459data 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]3460a proposal to keep a database of jobs related to Gnome, with an XML based
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]3461storage structure. Here is an <a href="gjobs.xml">XML encoded jobs
3462base</a>:</p>
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]3463<pre>&lt;?xml version="1.0"?&gt;
3464&lt;gjob:Helping xmlns:gjob="http://www.gnome.org/some-location"&gt;
3465 &lt;gjob:Jobs&gt;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +0000[diff] [blame]3466
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]3467 &lt;gjob:Job&gt;
3468 &lt;gjob:Project ID="3"/&gt;
3469 &lt;gjob:Application&gt;GBackup&lt;/gjob:Application&gt;
3470 &lt;gjob:Category&gt;Development&lt;/gjob:Category&gt;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +0000[diff] [blame]3471
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]3472 &lt;gjob:Update&gt;
3473 &lt;gjob:Status&gt;Open&lt;/gjob:Status&gt;
3474 &lt;gjob:Modified&gt;Mon, 07 Jun 1999 20:27:45 -0400 MET DST&lt;/gjob:Modified&gt;
3475 &lt;gjob:Salary&gt;USD 0.00&lt;/gjob:Salary&gt;
3476 &lt;/gjob:Update&gt;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +0000[diff] [blame]3477
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]3478 &lt;gjob:Developers&gt;
3479 &lt;gjob:Developer&gt;
3480 &lt;/gjob:Developer&gt;
3481 &lt;/gjob:Developers&gt;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +0000[diff] [blame]3482
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]3483 &lt;gjob:Contact&gt;
3484 &lt;gjob:Person&gt;Nathan Clemons&lt;/gjob:Person&gt;
3485 &lt;gjob:Email&gt;nathan@windsofstorm.net&lt;/gjob:Email&gt;
3486 &lt;gjob:Company&gt;
3487 &lt;/gjob:Company&gt;
3488 &lt;gjob:Organisation&gt;
3489 &lt;/gjob:Organisation&gt;
3490 &lt;gjob:Webpage&gt;
3491 &lt;/gjob:Webpage&gt;
3492 &lt;gjob:Snailmail&gt;
3493 &lt;/gjob:Snailmail&gt;
3494 &lt;gjob:Phone&gt;
3495 &lt;/gjob:Phone&gt;
3496 &lt;/gjob:Contact&gt;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +0000[diff] [blame]3497
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]3498 &lt;gjob:Requirements&gt;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +0000[diff] [blame]3499 The program should be released as free software, under the GPL.
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]3500 &lt;/gjob:Requirements&gt;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +0000[diff] [blame]3501
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]3502 &lt;gjob:Skills&gt;
3503 &lt;/gjob:Skills&gt;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +0000[diff] [blame]3504
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]3505 &lt;gjob:Details&gt;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +0000[diff] [blame]3506 A GNOME based system that will allow a superuser to configure
3507 compressed and uncompressed files and/or file systems to be backed
3508 up with a supported media in the system. This should be able to
3509 perform via find commands generating a list of files that are passed
3510 to tar, dd, cpio, cp, gzip, etc., to be directed to the tape machine
3511 or via operations performed on the filesystem itself. Email
3512 notification and GUI status display very important.
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]3513 &lt;/gjob:Details&gt;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +0000[diff] [blame]3514
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]3515 &lt;/gjob:Job&gt;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +0000[diff] [blame]3516
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]3517 &lt;/gjob:Jobs&gt;
3518&lt;/gjob:Helping&gt;</pre>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]3519
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame]3520<p>While loading the XML file into an internal DOM tree is a matter of
3521calling only a couple of functions, browsing the tree to gather the ata and
3522generate the internal structures is harder, and more error prone.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]3523
3524<p>The suggested principle is to be tolerant with respect to the input
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame]3525structure. For example, the ordering of the attributes is not significant,
3526the 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]3527depend on the order of the children of a given node, unless it really makes
3528things harder. Here is some code to parse the information for a person:</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]3529<pre>/*
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +0000[diff] [blame]3530 * A person record
3531 */
3532typedef struct person {
3533 char *name;
3534 char *email;
3535 char *company;
3536 char *organisation;
3537 char *smail;
3538 char *webPage;
3539 char *phone;
3540} person, *personPtr;
3541
3542/*
3543 * And the code needed to parse it
3544 */
3545personPtr parsePerson(xmlDocPtr doc, xmlNsPtr ns, xmlNodePtr cur) {
3546 personPtr ret = NULL;
3547
3548DEBUG("parsePerson\n");
3549 /*
3550 * allocate the struct
3551 */
3552 ret = (personPtr) malloc(sizeof(person));
3553 if (ret == NULL) {
3554 fprintf(stderr,"out of memory\n");
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]3555 return(NULL);
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +0000[diff] [blame]3556 }
3557 memset(ret, 0, sizeof(person));
3558
3559 /* We don't care what the top level element name is */
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]3560 cur = cur-&gt;xmlChildrenNode;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +0000[diff] [blame]3561 while (cur != NULL) {
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]3562 if ((!strcmp(cur-&gt;name, "Person")) &amp;&amp; (cur-&gt;ns == ns))
3563 ret-&gt;name = xmlNodeListGetString(doc, cur-&gt;xmlChildrenNode, 1);
3564 if ((!strcmp(cur-&gt;name, "Email")) &amp;&amp; (cur-&gt;ns == ns))
3565 ret-&gt;email = xmlNodeListGetString(doc, cur-&gt;xmlChildrenNode, 1);
3566 cur = cur-&gt;next;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +0000[diff] [blame]3567 }
3568
3569 return(ret);
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]3570}</pre>
3571
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000[diff] [blame]3572<p>Here are a couple of things to notice:</p>
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +0000[diff] [blame]3573<ul>
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000[diff] [blame]3574 <li>Usually a recursive parsing style is the more convenient one: XML data
3575 is by nature subject to repetitive constructs and usually exibits highly
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]3576 stuctured patterns.</li>
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame]3577 <li>The two arguments of type <em>xmlDocPtr</em> and <em>xmlNsPtr</em>,
3578 i.e. the pointer to the global XML document and the namespace reserved to
3579 the application. Document wide information are needed for example to
3580 decode entities and it's a good coding practice to define a namespace for
3581 your application set of data and test that the element and attributes
3582 you're analyzing actually pertains to your application space. This is
3583 done by a simple equality test (cur-&gt;ns == ns).</li>
Daniel Veillardec70e912001-02-26 20:10:45 +0000[diff] [blame]3584 <li>To retrieve text and attributes value, you can use the function
3585 <em>xmlNodeListGetString</em> to gather all the text and entity reference
3586 nodes generated by the DOM output and produce an single text string.</li>
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +0000[diff] [blame]3587</ul>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]3588
3589<p>Here is another piece of code used to parse another level of the
3590structure:</p>
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]3591<pre>#include &lt;libxml/tree.h&gt;
Daniel Veillard361d8452000-04-03 19:48:13 +0000[diff] [blame]3592/*
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +0000[diff] [blame]3593 * a Description for a Job
3594 */
3595typedef struct job {
3596 char *projectID;
3597 char *application;
3598 char *category;
3599 personPtr contact;
3600 int nbDevelopers;
3601 personPtr developers[100]; /* using dynamic alloc is left as an exercise */
3602} job, *jobPtr;
3603
3604/*
3605 * And the code needed to parse it
3606 */
3607jobPtr parseJob(xmlDocPtr doc, xmlNsPtr ns, xmlNodePtr cur) {
3608 jobPtr ret = NULL;
3609
3610DEBUG("parseJob\n");
3611 /*
3612 * allocate the struct
3613 */
3614 ret = (jobPtr) malloc(sizeof(job));
3615 if (ret == NULL) {
3616 fprintf(stderr,"out of memory\n");
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]3617 return(NULL);
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +0000[diff] [blame]3618 }
3619 memset(ret, 0, sizeof(job));
3620
3621 /* We don't care what the top level element name is */
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]3622 cur = cur-&gt;xmlChildrenNode;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +0000[diff] [blame]3623 while (cur != NULL) {
3624
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]3625 if ((!strcmp(cur-&gt;name, "Project")) &amp;&amp; (cur-&gt;ns == ns)) {
3626 ret-&gt;projectID = xmlGetProp(cur, "ID");
3627 if (ret-&gt;projectID == NULL) {
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]3628 fprintf(stderr, "Project has no ID\n");
3629 }
3630 }
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]3631 if ((!strcmp(cur-&gt;name, "Application")) &amp;&amp; (cur-&gt;ns == ns))
3632 ret-&gt;application = xmlNodeListGetString(doc, cur-&gt;xmlChildrenNode, 1);
3633 if ((!strcmp(cur-&gt;name, "Category")) &amp;&amp; (cur-&gt;ns == ns))
3634 ret-&gt;category = xmlNodeListGetString(doc, cur-&gt;xmlChildrenNode, 1);
3635 if ((!strcmp(cur-&gt;name, "Contact")) &amp;&amp; (cur-&gt;ns == ns))
3636 ret-&gt;contact = parsePerson(doc, ns, cur);
3637 cur = cur-&gt;next;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +0000[diff] [blame]3638 }
3639
3640 return(ret);
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]3641}</pre>
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +0000[diff] [blame]3642
Daniel Veillardec70e912001-02-26 20:10:45 +0000[diff] [blame]3643<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]3644boring. Ultimately, it could be possble to write stubbers taking either C
3645data structure definitions, a set of XML examples or an XML DTD and produce
3646the code needed to import and export the content between C data and XML
3647storage. This is left as an exercise to the reader :-)</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]3648
Daniel Veillard6f0adb52000-07-03 11:41:26 +0000[diff] [blame]3649<p>Feel free to use <a href="example/gjobread.c">the code for the full C
3650parsing example</a> as a template, it is also available with Makefile in the
3651Gnome CVS base under gnome-xml/example</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]3652
Daniel Veillardc310d562000-06-23 18:32:15 +0000[diff] [blame]3653<h2><a name="Contributi">Contributions</a></h2>
3654<ul>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]3655 <li>Bjorn Reese, William Brack and Thomas Broyer have provided a number of
3656 patches, Gary Pennington worked on the validation API, threading support
3657 and Solaris port.</li>
3658 <li>John Fleck helps maintaining the documentation and man pages.</li>
Daniel Veillardc6271d22001-10-27 07:50:58 +0000[diff] [blame]3659 <li><a href="mailto:ari@lusis.org">Ari Johnson</a>
Daniel Veillard51095312001-10-28 18:51:57 +0000[diff] [blame]3660 provides a C++ wrapper for libxml:<br>
Daniel Veillardc6271d22001-10-27 07:50:58 +0000[diff] [blame]3661 Website: <a
3662 href="http://lusis.org/~ari/xml++/">http://lusis.org/~ari/xml++/</a><br>
3663 Download: <a
Daniel Veillard51095312001-10-28 18:51:57 +0000[diff] [blame]3664 href="http://lusis.org/~ari/xml++/libxml++.tar.gz">http://lusis.org/~ari/xml++/libxml++.tar.gz</a></li>
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame]3665 <li><a href="mailto:izlatkovic@daenet.de">Igor Zlatkovic</a>
3666 is now the maintainer of the Windows port, <a
Daniel Veillard95189532001-07-26 18:30:26 +0000[diff] [blame]3667 href="http://www.fh-frankfurt.de/~igor/projects/libxml/index.html">he
3668 provides binaries</a></li>
Daniel Veillardc9484202001-10-24 12:35:52 +0000[diff] [blame]3669 <li><a href="mailto:Gary.Pennington@sun.com">Gary Pennington</a>
Daniel Veillarddb9dfd92001-11-26 17:25:02 +0000[diff] [blame]3670 provides <a href="http://garypennington.net/libxml2/">Solaris
Daniel Veillard0a702dc2001-10-19 14:50:57 +0000[diff] [blame]3671 binaries</a></li>
Daniel Veillarde356c282001-03-10 12:32:04 +0000[diff] [blame]3672 <li><a
3673 href="http://mail.gnome.org/archives/xml/2001-March/msg00014.html">Matt
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame]3674 Sergeant</a>
3675 developped <a href="http://axkit.org/download/">XML::LibXSLT</a>, a perl
3676 wrapper for libxml2/libxslt as part of the <a
3677 href="http://axkit.com/">AxKit XML application server</a></li>
3678 <li><a href="mailto:fnatter@gmx.net">Felix Natter</a>
3679 and <a href="mailto:geertk@ai.rug.nl">Geert Kloosterman</a> provide <a
Daniel Veillardca989762001-06-23 17:39:29 +0000[diff] [blame]3680 href="libxml-doc.el">an emacs module</a> to lookup libxml(2) functions
Daniel Veillard3f6f7f62000-06-30 17:58:25 +0000[diff] [blame]3681 documentation</li>
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame]3682 <li><a href="mailto:sherwin@nlm.nih.gov">Ziying Sherwin</a>
3683 provided <a href="http://xmlsoft.org/messages/0488.html">man
3684 pages</a></li>
Daniel Veillard5168dbf2001-07-07 00:18:23 +0000[diff] [blame]3685 <li>there is a module for <a
3686 href="http://acs-misc.sourceforge.net/nsxml.html">libxml/libxslt support
3687 in OpenNSD/AOLServer</a></li>
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame]3688 <li><a href="mailto:dkuhlman@cutter.rexx.com">Dave Kuhlman</a>
3689 provides libxml/libxslt <a href="http://www.rexx.com/~dkuhlman">wrappers
3690 for Python</a></li>
Daniel Veillard1aadc442001-11-28 13:10:32 +0000[diff] [blame]3691 <li>Petr Kozelka provides <a
3692 href="http://sourceforge.net/projects/libxml2-pas">Pascal units to glue
3693 libxml2</a> with Kylix and Delphi and other Pascal compilers</li>
Daniel Veillardc310d562000-06-23 18:32:15 +0000[diff] [blame]3694</ul>
3695
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]3696<p></p>
Daniel Veillardccb09631998-10-27 06:21:04 +0000[diff] [blame]3697</body>
3698</html>