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4<head>
Daniel Veillardec78c0f2000-08-25 10:25:23 +00005 <title>The XML C library for Gnome</title>
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Daniel Veillardec78c0f2000-08-25 10:25:23 +000011<h1 align="center">The XML C library for Gnome</h1>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +000012
Daniel Veillard9c466822001-10-25 12:03:39 +000013<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 +000016<h1 style="text-align: center">libxml, a.k.a. gnome-xml</h1>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +000017
18<p></p>
Daniel Veillard9c466822001-10-25 12:03:39 +000019
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +000020<p>Libxml is the XML C library developed for the Gnome project. XML itself
Daniel Veillard9c466822001-10-25 12:03:39 +000021is a metalanguage to design markup languages, i.e. text language where
22semantic and structure are added to the content using extra "markup"
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +000023information enclosed between angle brackets. HTML is the most well-known
Daniel Veillard1eb24242002-03-18 11:33:03 +000024markup language. Though the library is written in C <a href="python.html">a
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +000025variety of language bindings</a> make it available in other environments.</p>
Daniel Veillard9c466822001-10-25 12:03:39 +000026
27<p>Libxml2 implements a number of existing standards related to markup
28languages:</p>
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +000029<ul>
Daniel Veillard9c466822001-10-25 12:03:39 +000030 <li>the XML standard: <a
31 href="http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml">http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml</a></li>
32 <li>Namespaces in XML: <a
33 href="http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml-names/">http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml-names/</a></li>
34 <li>XML Base: <a
35 href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xmlbase/">http://www.w3.org/TR/xmlbase/</a></li>
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +000036 <li><a href="http://www.cis.ohio-state.edu/rfc/rfc2396.txt">RFC 2396</a> :
37 Uniform Resource Identifiers <a
Daniel Veillard9c466822001-10-25 12:03:39 +000038 href="http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2396.txt">http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2396.txt</a></li>
39 <li>XML Path Language (XPath) 1.0: <a
40 href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xpath">http://www.w3.org/TR/xpath</a></li>
41 <li>HTML4 parser: <a
42 href="http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/">http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/</a></li>
43 <li>most of XML Pointer Language (XPointer) Version 1.0: <a
44 href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xptr">http://www.w3.org/TR/xptr</a></li>
45 <li>XML Inclusions (XInclude) Version 1.0: <a
46 href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xinclude/">http://www.w3.org/TR/xinclude/</a></li>
47 <li>[ISO-8859-1], <a
48 href="http://www.cis.ohio-state.edu/rfc/rfc2044.txt">rfc2044</a> [UTF-8]
49 and <a href="http://www.cis.ohio-state.edu/rfc/rfc2781.txt">rfc2781</a>
50 [UTF-16] core encodings</li>
51 <li>part of SGML Open Technical Resolution TR9401:1997</li>
52 <li>XML Catalogs Working Draft 06 August 2001: <a
53 href="http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/entity/spec-2001-08-06.html">http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/entity/spec-2001-08-06.html</a></li>
Daniel Veillard5c396542002-03-15 07:57:50 +000054 <li>Canonical XML Version 1.0: <a
55 href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xml-c14n">http://www.w3.org/TR/xml-c14n</a>
Daniel Veillard2d347fa2002-03-17 10:34:11 +000056 and the Exclusive XML Canonicalization CR draft <a
57 href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xml-exc-c14n">http://www.w3.org/TR/xml-exc-c14n</a></li>
Daniel Veillard96984452000-08-31 13:50:12 +000058</ul>
59
Daniel Veillard9c466822001-10-25 12:03:39 +000060<p>In most cases libxml tries to implement the specifications in a relatively
Daniel Veillard42766c02002-08-22 20:52:17 +000061strictly compliant way. As of release 2.4.16, libxml2 passes all 1800+ tests
62from the <a
Daniel Veillarda5393562002-02-20 11:40:49 +000063href="http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/xml-conformance/">OASIS XML Tests
64Suite</a>.</p>
Daniel Veillard5b16f582002-02-20 11:38:46 +000065
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +000066<p>To some extent libxml2 provides support for the following additional
67specifications but doesn't claim to implement them completely:</p>
Daniel Veillard9c466822001-10-25 12:03:39 +000068<ul>
69 <li>Document Object Model (DOM) <a
70 href="http://www.w3.org/TR/DOM-Level-2-Core/">http://www.w3.org/TR/DOM-Level-2-Core/</a>
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +000071 it doesn't implement the API itself, gdome2 does this on top of
Daniel Veillard9c466822001-10-25 12:03:39 +000072 libxml2</li>
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +000073 <li><a href="http://www.cis.ohio-state.edu/rfc/rfc959.txt">RFC 959</a> :
74 libxml implements a basic FTP client code</li>
75 <li><a href="http://www.cis.ohio-state.edu/rfc/rfc1945.txt">RFC 1945</a> :
76 HTTP/1.0, again a basic HTTP client code</li>
Daniel Veillard9c466822001-10-25 12:03:39 +000077 <li>SAX: a minimal SAX implementation compatible with early expat
78 versions</li>
79 <li>DocBook SGML v4: libxml2 includes a hackish parser to transition to
80 XML</li>
81</ul>
82
Daniel Veillarde6d8e202002-05-02 06:11:10 +000083<p>XML Schemas is being worked on but it would be far too early to make any
84conformance statement about it at the moment.</p>
85
Daniel Veillard2d347fa2002-03-17 10:34:11 +000086<p>Libxml2 is known to be very portable, the library should build and work
87without serious troubles on a variety of systems (Linux, Unix, Windows,
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +000088CygWin, MacOS, MacOS X, RISC Os, OS/2, VMS, QNX, MVS, ...)</p>
Daniel Veillard9c466822001-10-25 12:03:39 +000089
Daniel Veillard96984452000-08-31 13:50:12 +000090<p>Separate documents:</p>
91<ul>
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +000092 <li><a href="http://xmlsoft.org/XSLT/">the libxslt page</a> providing an
Daniel Veillard2d347fa2002-03-17 10:34:11 +000093 implementation of XSLT 1.0 and common extensions like EXSLT for
94 libxml2</li>
Daniel Veillardc6271d22001-10-27 07:50:58 +000095 <li><a href="http://www.cs.unibo.it/~casarini/gdome2/">the gdome2 page</a>
Daniel Veillard2d347fa2002-03-17 10:34:11 +000096 : a standard DOM2 implementation for libxml2</li>
97 <li><a href="http://www.aleksey.com/xmlsec/">the XMLSec page</a>: an
98 implementation of <a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xmldsig-core/">W3C XML
99 Digital Signature</a> for libxml2</li>
Daniel Veillarde6d8e202002-05-02 06:11:10 +0000100 <li>also check the related links section below for more related and active
101 projects.</li>
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000102</ul>
103
Daniel Veillarde1662542002-08-28 11:50:59 +0000104<p>Logo designed by <a href="mailto:liyanage@access.ch">Marc Liyanage</a>.</p>
105
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000106<h2><a name="Introducti">Introduction</a></h2>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000107
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +0000108<p>This document describes libxml, the <a
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000109href="http://www.w3.org/XML/">XML</a> C library developed for the <a
Daniel Veillardec78c0f2000-08-25 10:25:23 +0000110href="http://www.gnome.org/">Gnome</a> project. <a
111href="http://www.w3.org/XML/">XML is a standard</a> for building tag-based
112structured documents/data.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000113
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000114<p>Here are some key points about libxml:</p>
115<ul>
Daniel Veillard2d347fa2002-03-17 10:34:11 +0000116 <li>Libxml exports Push (progressive) and Pull (blocking) type parser
117 interfaces for both XML and HTML.</li>
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000118 <li>Libxml can do DTD validation at parse time, using a parsed document
119 instance, or with an arbitrary DTD.</li>
Daniel Veillard2d347fa2002-03-17 10:34:11 +0000120 <li>Libxml includes complete <a
Daniel Veillard8c2ecaf2001-07-10 17:53:07 +0000121 href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xpath">XPath</a>, <a
122 href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xptr">XPointer</a> and <a
123 href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xinclude">XInclude</a> implementations.</li>
Daniel Veillardec78c0f2000-08-25 10:25:23 +0000124 <li>It is written in plain C, making as few assumptions as possible, and
Daniel Veillard189446d2000-10-13 10:23:06 +0000125 sticking closely to ANSI C/POSIX for easy embedding. Works on
Daniel Veillardab8500d2000-10-15 21:06:19 +0000126 Linux/Unix/Windows, ported to a number of other platforms.</li>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000127 <li>Basic support for HTTP and FTP client allowing applications to fetch
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000128 remote resources.</li>
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000129 <li>The design is modular, most of the extensions can be compiled out.</li>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000130 <li>The internal document representation is as close as possible to the <a
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000131 href="http://www.w3.org/DOM/">DOM</a> interfaces.</li>
132 <li>Libxml also has a <a href="http://www.megginson.com/SAX/index.html">SAX
Daniel Veillard402e8c82000-02-29 22:57:47 +0000133 like interface</a>; the interface is designed to be compatible with <a
134 href="http://www.jclark.com/xml/expat.html">Expat</a>.</li>
Daniel Veillardc575b992002-02-08 13:28:40 +0000135 <li>This library is released under the <a
136 href="http://www.opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.html">MIT
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000137 License</a>. See the Copyright file in the distribution for the precise
Daniel Veillardc575b992002-02-08 13:28:40 +0000138 wording.</li>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000139</ul>
Daniel Veillardccb09631998-10-27 06:21:04 +0000140
Daniel Veillarde0c1d722001-03-21 10:28:36 +0000141<p>Warning: unless you are forced to because your application links with a
Daniel Veillard2d347fa2002-03-17 10:34:11 +0000142Gnome-1.X library requiring it, <strong><span
Daniel Veillarde0c1d722001-03-21 10:28:36 +0000143style="background-color: #FF0000">Do Not Use libxml1</span></strong>, use
144libxml2</p>
145
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000146<h2><a name="FAQ">FAQ</a></h2>
147
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000148<p>Table of Contents:</p>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000149<ul>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000150 <li><a href="FAQ.html#License">License(s)</a></li>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000151 <li><a href="FAQ.html#Installati">Installation</a></li>
152 <li><a href="FAQ.html#Compilatio">Compilation</a></li>
153 <li><a href="FAQ.html#Developer">Developer corner</a></li>
154</ul>
155
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000156<h3><a name="License">License</a>(s)</h3>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000157<ol>
158 <li><em>Licensing Terms for libxml</em>
Daniel Veillardc575b992002-02-08 13:28:40 +0000159 <p>libxml is released under the <a
160 href="http://www.opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.html">MIT
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000161 License</a>; see the file Copyright in the distribution for the precise
Daniel Veillardc575b992002-02-08 13:28:40 +0000162 wording</p>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000163 </li>
164 <li><em>Can I embed libxml in a proprietary application ?</em>
Daniel Veillard42766c02002-08-22 20:52:17 +0000165 <p>Yes. The MIT License allows you to keep proprietary the changes you
166 made to libxml, but it would be graceful to send-back bug fixes and
167 improvements as patches for possible incorporation in the main
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000168 development tree.</p>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000169 </li>
170</ol>
171
172<h3><a name="Installati">Installation</a></h3>
173<ol>
174 <li>Unless you are forced to because your application links with a Gnome
175 library requiring it, <strong><span style="background-color: #FF0000">Do
176 Not Use libxml1</span></strong>, use libxml2</li>
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +0000177 <li><em>Where can I get libxml</em> ?
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000178 <p>The original distribution comes from <a
179 href="ftp://rpmfind.net/pub/libxml/">rpmfind.net</a> or <a
MDT 2002 John Fleck30c70542002-09-24 14:24:54 +0000180 href="ftp://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/sources/libxml2/2.4/">gnome.org</a></p>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000181 <p>Most Linux and BSD distributions include libxml, this is probably the
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000182 safer way for end-users to use libxml.</p>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000183 <p>David Doolin provides precompiled Windows versions at <a
184 href="http://www.ce.berkeley.edu/~doolin/code/libxmlwin32/ ">http://www.ce.berkeley.edu/~doolin/code/libxmlwin32/</a></p>
185 </li>
186 <li><em>I see libxml and libxml2 releases, which one should I install ?</em>
187 <ul>
Daniel Veillard42766c02002-08-22 20:52:17 +0000188 <li>If you are not constrained by backward compatibility issues with
189 existing applications, install libxml2 only</li>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000190 <li>If you are not doing development, you can safely install both.
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000191 Usually the packages <a
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000192 href="http://rpmfind.net/linux/RPM/libxml.html">libxml</a> and <a
193 href="http://rpmfind.net/linux/RPM/libxml2.html">libxml2</a> are
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000194 compatible (this is not the case for development packages).</li>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000195 <li>If you are a developer and your system provides separate packaging
196 for shared libraries and the development components, it is possible
197 to install libxml and libxml2, and also <a
198 href="http://rpmfind.net/linux/RPM/libxml-devel.html">libxml-devel</a>
199 and <a
200 href="http://rpmfind.net/linux/RPM/libxml2-devel.html">libxml2-devel</a>
201 too for libxml2 &gt;= 2.3.0</li>
202 <li>If you are developing a new application, please develop against
203 libxml2(-devel)</li>
204 </ul>
205 </li>
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000206 <li><em>I can't install the libxml package, it conflicts with libxml0</em>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000207 <p>You probably have an old libxml0 package used to provide the shared
Daniel Veillard42766c02002-08-22 20:52:17 +0000208 library for libxml.so.0, you can probably safely remove it. The libxml
209 packages provided on <a
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000210 href="ftp://rpmfind.net/pub/libxml/">rpmfind.net</a> provide
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000211 libxml.so.0</p>
212 </li>
213 <li><em>I can't install the libxml(2) RPM package due to failed
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000214 dependencies</em>
215 <p>The most generic solution is to re-fetch the latest src.rpm , and
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000216 rebuild it locally with</p>
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000217 <p><code>rpm --rebuild libxml(2)-xxx.src.rpm</code>.</p>
Daniel Veillard42766c02002-08-22 20:52:17 +0000218 <p>If everything goes well it will generate two binary rpm packages (one
219 providing the shared libs and xmllint, and the other one, the -devel
220 package, providing includes, static libraries and scripts needed to build
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000221 applications with libxml(2)) that you can install locally.</p>
222 </li>
223</ol>
224
225<h3><a name="Compilatio">Compilation</a></h3>
226<ol>
227 <li><em>What is the process to compile libxml ?</em>
228 <p>As most UNIX libraries libxml follows the "standard":</p>
229 <p><code>gunzip -c xxx.tar.gz | tar xvf -</code></p>
230 <p><code>cd libxml-xxxx</code></p>
231 <p><code>./configure --help</code></p>
232 <p>to see the options, then the compilation/installation proper</p>
233 <p><code>./configure [possible options]</code></p>
234 <p><code>make</code></p>
235 <p><code>make install</code></p>
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000236 <p>At that point you may have to rerun ldconfig or a similar utility to
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000237 update your list of installed shared libs.</p>
238 </li>
239 <li><em>What other libraries are needed to compile/install libxml ?</em>
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000240 <p>Libxml does not require any other library, the normal C ANSI API
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000241 should be sufficient (please report any violation to this rule you may
242 find).</p>
243 <p>However if found at configuration time libxml will detect and use the
244 following libs:</p>
245 <ul>
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +0000246 <li><a href="http://www.info-zip.org/pub/infozip/zlib/">libz</a> : a
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000247 highly portable and available widely compression library.</li>
248 <li>iconv: a powerful character encoding conversion library. It is
249 included by default in recent glibc libraries, so it doesn't need to
250 be installed specifically on Linux. It now seems a <a
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000251 href="http://www.opennc.org/onlinepubs/7908799/xsh/iconv.html">part
252 of the official UNIX</a> specification. Here is one <a
Daniel Veillarddad3f682002-11-17 16:47:27 +0000253 href="http://www.gnu.org/software/libiconv/">implementation of the
254 library</a> which source can be found <a
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000255 href="ftp://ftp.ilog.fr/pub/Users/haible/gnu/">here</a>.</li>
256 </ul>
257 </li>
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000258 <li><em>Make check fails on some platforms</em>
Daniel Veillard42766c02002-08-22 20:52:17 +0000259 <p>Sometimes the regression tests' results don't completely match the
260 value produced by the parser, and the makefile uses diff to print the
261 delta. On some platforms the diff return breaks the compilation process;
262 if the diff is small this is probably not a serious problem.</p>
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000263 <p>Sometimes (especially on Solaris) make checks fail due to limitations
Daniel Veillarde46182c2002-02-12 14:29:11 +0000264 in make. Try using GNU-make instead.</p>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000265 </li>
266 <li><em>I use the CVS version and there is no configure script</em>
Daniel Veillard42766c02002-08-22 20:52:17 +0000267 <p>The configure script (and other Makefiles) are generated. Use the
268 autogen.sh script to regenerate the configure script and Makefiles,
269 like:</p>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000270 <p><code>./autogen.sh --prefix=/usr --disable-shared</code></p>
271 </li>
272 <li><em>I have troubles when running make tests with gcc-3.0</em>
273 <p>It seems the initial release of gcc-3.0 has a problem with the
274 optimizer which miscompiles the URI module. Please use another
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000275 compiler.</p>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000276 </li>
277</ol>
278
279<h3><a name="Developer">Developer</a> corner</h3>
280<ol>
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000281 <li><em>xmlDocDump() generates output on one line.</em>
282 <p>Libxml will not <strong>invent</strong> spaces in the content of a
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000283 document since <strong>all spaces in the content of a document are
284 significant</strong>. If you build a tree from the API and want
285 indentation:</p>
286 <ol>
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000287 <li>the correct way is to generate those yourself too.</li>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000288 <li>the dangerous way is to ask libxml to add those blanks to your
289 content <strong>modifying the content of your document in the
290 process</strong>. The result may not be what you expect. There is
291 <strong>NO</strong> way to guarantee that such a modification won't
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000292 affect other parts of the content of your document. See <a
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000293 href="http://xmlsoft.org/html/libxml-parser.html#XMLKEEPBLANKSDEFAULT">xmlKeepBlanksDefault
294 ()</a> and <a
295 href="http://xmlsoft.org/html/libxml-tree.html#XMLSAVEFORMATFILE">xmlSaveFormatFile
296 ()</a></li>
297 </ol>
298 </li>
299 <li>Extra nodes in the document:
300 <p><em>For a XML file as below:</em></p>
301 <pre>&lt;?xml version="1.0"?&gt;
302&lt;PLAN xmlns="http://www.argus.ca/autotest/1.0/"&gt;
303&lt;NODE CommFlag="0"/&gt;
304&lt;NODE CommFlag="1"/&gt;
305&lt;/PLAN&gt;</pre>
306 <p><em>after parsing it with the function
307 pxmlDoc=xmlParseFile(...);</em></p>
308 <p><em>I want to the get the content of the first node (node with the
309 CommFlag="0")</em></p>
310 <p><em>so I did it as following;</em></p>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000311 <pre>xmlNodePtr pnode;
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000312pnode=pxmlDoc-&gt;children-&gt;children;</pre>
313 <p><em>but it does not work. If I change it to</em></p>
314 <pre>pnode=pxmlDoc-&gt;children-&gt;children-&gt;next;</pre>
315 <p><em>then it works. Can someone explain it to me.</em></p>
316 <p></p>
317 <p>In XML all characters in the content of the document are significant
318 <strong>including blanks and formatting line breaks</strong>.</p>
319 <p>The extra nodes you are wondering about are just that, text nodes with
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000320 the formatting spaces which are part of the document but that people tend
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000321 to forget. There is a function <a
322 href="http://xmlsoft.org/html/libxml-parser.html">xmlKeepBlanksDefault
323 ()</a> to remove those at parse time, but that's an heuristic, and its
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000324 use should be limited to cases where you are certain there is no
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000325 mixed-content in the document.</p>
326 </li>
327 <li><em>I get compilation errors of existing code like when accessing
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000328 <strong>root</strong> or <strong>child fields</strong> of nodes.</em>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000329 <p>You are compiling code developed for libxml version 1 and using a
330 libxml2 development environment. Either switch back to libxml v1 devel or
331 even better fix the code to compile with libxml2 (or both) by <a
332 href="upgrade.html">following the instructions</a>.</p>
333 </li>
334 <li><em>I get compilation errors about non existing
335 <strong>xmlRootNode</strong> or <strong>xmlChildrenNode</strong>
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000336 fields.</em>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000337 <p>The source code you are using has been <a
338 href="upgrade.html">upgraded</a> to be able to compile with both libxml
339 and libxml2, but you need to install a more recent version:
340 libxml(-devel) &gt;= 1.8.8 or libxml2(-devel) &gt;= 2.1.0</p>
341 </li>
342 <li><em>XPath implementation looks seriously broken</em>
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000343 <p>XPath implementation prior to 2.3.0 was really incomplete. Upgrade to
344 a recent version, there are no known bugs in the current version.</p>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000345 </li>
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000346 <li><em>The example provided in the web page does not compile.</em>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000347 <p>It's hard to maintain the documentation in sync with the code
348 &lt;grin/&gt; ...</p>
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000349 <p>Check the previous points 1/ and 2/ raised before, and please send
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000350 patches.</p>
351 </li>
Daniel Veillard42766c02002-08-22 20:52:17 +0000352 <li><em>Where can I get more examples and information than privoded on the
353 web page?</em>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000354 <p>Ideally a libxml book would be nice. I have no such plan ... But you
355 can:</p>
356 <ul>
357 <li>check more deeply the <a href="html/libxml-lib.html">existing
358 generated doc</a></li>
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000359 <li>look for examples of use for libxml function using the Gnome code.
360 For example the following will query the full Gnome CVS base for the
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000361 use of the <strong>xmlAddChild()</strong> function:
362 <p><a
363 href="http://cvs.gnome.org/lxr/search?string=xmlAddChild">http://cvs.gnome.org/lxr/search?string=xmlAddChild</a></p>
364 <p>This may be slow, a large hardware donation to the gnome project
365 could cure this :-)</p>
366 </li>
367 <li><a
368 href="http://cvs.gnome.org/bonsai/rview.cgi?cvsroot=/cvs/gnome&amp;dir=gnome-xml">Browse
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +0000369 the libxml source</a> , I try to write code as clean and documented
Daniel Veillard42766c02002-08-22 20:52:17 +0000370 as possible, so looking at it may be helpful. In particular the code
371 of xmllint.c and of the various testXXX.c test programs should
372 provide good examples of how to do things with the library.</li>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000373 </ul>
374 </li>
375 <li>What about C++ ?
376 <p>libxml is written in pure C in order to allow easy reuse on a number
377 of platforms, including embedded systems. I don't intend to convert to
378 C++.</p>
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000379 <p>There are however a few C++ wrappers which may fulfill your needs:</p>
Daniel Veillard9b6fd302002-05-13 12:06:47 +0000380 <ul>
381 <li>by Ari Johnson &lt;ari@btigate.com&gt;:
382 <p>Website: <a
383 href="http://lusis.org/~ari/xml++/">http://lusis.org/~ari/xml++/</a></p>
384 <p>Download: <a
385 href="http://lusis.org/~ari/xml++/libxml++.tar.gz">http://lusis.org/~ari/xml++/libxml++.tar.gz</a></p>
386 </li>
387 <li>by Peter Jones &lt;pjones@pmade.org&gt;
388 <p>Website: <a
389 href="http://pmade.org/pjones/software/xmlwrapp/">http://pmade.org/pjones/software/xmlwrapp/</a></p>
390 </li>
391 </ul>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000392 </li>
393 <li>How to validate a document a posteriori ?
394 <p>It is possible to validate documents which had not been validated at
Daniel Veillard42766c02002-08-22 20:52:17 +0000395 initial parsing time or documents which have been built from scratch
396 using the API. Use the <a
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000397 href="http://xmlsoft.org/html/libxml-valid.html#XMLVALIDATEDTD">xmlValidateDtd()</a>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000398 function. It is also possible to simply add a DTD to an existing
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000399 document:</p>
400 <pre>xmlDocPtr doc; /* your existing document */
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000401xmlDtdPtr dtd = xmlParseDTD(NULL, filename_of_dtd); /* parse the DTD */
402
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000403 dtd-&gt;name = xmlStrDup((xmlChar*)"root_name"); /* use the given root */
404
405 doc-&gt;intSubset = dtd;
406 if (doc-&gt;children == NULL) xmlAddChild((xmlNodePtr)doc, (xmlNodePtr)dtd);
407 else xmlAddPrevSibling(doc-&gt;children, (xmlNodePtr)dtd);
408 </pre>
409 </li>
Daniel Veillarddad3f682002-11-17 16:47:27 +0000410 <li>So what is this funky "xmlChar" used all the time?
411 <p>It is a null terminated sequence of utf-8 characters. And only utf-8!
412 You need to convert strings encoded in different ways to utf-8 before
413 passing them to the API. This can be accomplished with the iconv library
414 for instance.</p>
John Fleck61f6fb62002-10-31 15:23:29 +0000415 </li>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000416 <li>etc ...</li>
417</ol>
418
419<p></p>
420
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000421<h2><a name="Documentat">Documentation</a></h2>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000422
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000423<p>There are several on-line resources related to using libxml:</p>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000424<ol>
Daniel Veillard321be0c2002-10-08 21:26:42 +0000425 <li>Use the <a href="search.php">search engine</a> to lookup
426 informations.</li>
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000427 <li>Check the <a href="FAQ.html">FAQ.</a></li>
Daniel Veillardc19fccc2000-07-03 11:52:01 +0000428 <li>Check the <a href="http://xmlsoft.org/html/libxml-lib.html">extensive
Daniel Veillard8c6d6af2000-08-25 17:14:13 +0000429 documentation</a> automatically extracted from code comments (using <a
430 href="http://cvs.gnome.org/bonsai/rview.cgi?cvsroot=/cvs/gnome&amp;dir=gtk-doc">gtk
431 doc</a>).</li>
Daniel Veillard8d869642000-07-14 12:12:59 +0000432 <li>Look at the documentation about <a href="encoding.html">libxml
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000433 internationalization support</a>.</li>
Daniel Veillardbc66f852002-01-14 09:49:20 +0000434 <li>This page provides a global overview and <a href="example.html">some
Daniel Veillard402e8c82000-02-29 22:57:47 +0000435 examples</a> on how to use libxml.</li>
Daniel Veillarddad3f682002-11-17 16:47:27 +0000436 <li>John Fleck's libxml tutorial: <a href="tutorial/index.html">html</a> or
437 <a href="tutorial/xmltutorial.pdf">pdf</a>.</li>
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +0000438 <li><a href="mailto:james@daa.com.au">James Henstridge</a> wrote <a
Daniel Veillard402e8c82000-02-29 22:57:47 +0000439 href="http://www.daa.com.au/~james/gnome/xml-sax/xml-sax.html">some nice
440 documentation</a> explaining how to use the libxml SAX interface.</li>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000441 <li>George Lebl wrote <a
442 href="http://www-4.ibm.com/software/developer/library/gnome3/">an article
Daniel Veillard402e8c82000-02-29 22:57:47 +0000443 for IBM developerWorks</a> about using libxml.</li>
Daniel Veillardec303412000-03-24 13:41:54 +0000444 <li>Check <a href="http://cvs.gnome.org/lxr/source/gnome-xml/TODO">the TODO
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000445 file</a>.</li>
Daniel Veillard42766c02002-08-22 20:52:17 +0000446 <li>Read the <a href="upgrade.html">1.x to 2.x upgrade path</a>
447 description. If you are starting a new project using libxml you should
448 really use the 2.x version.</li>
Daniel Veillard845cce42002-01-09 11:51:37 +0000449 <li>And don't forget to look at the <a
450 href="http://mail.gnome.org/archives/xml/">mailing-list archive</a>.</li>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000451</ol>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000452
Daniel Veillardd5f97f82000-09-17 16:38:14 +0000453<h2><a name="Reporting">Reporting bugs and getting help</a></h2>
Daniel Veillard4c3a2031999-11-19 17:46:26 +0000454
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000455<p>Well, bugs or missing features are always possible, and I will make a
456point of fixing them in a timely fashion. The best way to report a bug is to
457use the <a href="http://bugzilla.gnome.org/buglist.cgi?product=libxml">Gnome
Daniel Veillard42766c02002-08-22 20:52:17 +0000458bug tracking database</a> (make sure to use the "libxml2" module name). I
459look at reports there regularly and it's good to have a reminder when a bug
460is still open. Be sure to specify that the bug is for the package libxml2.</p>
Daniel Veillard4c3a2031999-11-19 17:46:26 +0000461
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000462<p>There is also a mailing-list <a
Daniel Veillard3197f162001-04-04 00:40:08 +0000463href="mailto:xml@gnome.org">xml@gnome.org</a> for libxml, with an <a
464href="http://mail.gnome.org/archives/xml/">on-line archive</a> (<a
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000465href="http://xmlsoft.org/messages">old</a>). To subscribe to this list,
466please visit the <a
467href="http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/xml">associated Web</a> page and
468follow the instructions. <strong>Do not send code, I won't debug it</strong>
469(but patches are really appreciated!).</p>
Daniel Veillard234547b2001-07-05 09:46:10 +0000470
Daniel Veillard008186f2001-09-13 14:24:44 +0000471<p>Check the following <strong><span style="color: #FF0000">before
472posting</span></strong>:</p>
Daniel Veillard234547b2001-07-05 09:46:10 +0000473<ul>
Daniel Veillard321be0c2002-10-08 21:26:42 +0000474 <li>Read the <a href="FAQ.html">FAQ</a> and <a href="search.php">use the
475 search engine</a> to get informations related to your problem.</li>
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000476 <li>Make sure you are <a href="ftp://xmlsoft.org/">using a recent
477 version</a>, and that the problem still shows up in a recent version.</li>
478 <li>Check the <a href="http://mail.gnome.org/archives/xml/">list
479 archives</a> to see if the problem was reported already. In this case
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000480 there is probably a fix available, similarly check the <a
Daniel Veillarde7ead2d2001-08-22 23:44:09 +0000481 href="http://bugzilla.gnome.org/buglist.cgi?product=libxml">registered
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000482 open bugs</a>.</li>
483 <li>Make sure you can reproduce the bug with xmllint or one of the test
484 programs found in source in the distribution.</li>
Daniel Veillard234547b2001-07-05 09:46:10 +0000485 <li>Please send the command showing the error as well as the input (as an
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000486 attachment)</li>
Daniel Veillard234547b2001-07-05 09:46:10 +0000487</ul>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000488
Daniel Veillarddadd0872001-09-15 09:21:44 +0000489<p>Then send the bug with associated informations to reproduce it to the <a
Daniel Veillard33a67802001-03-07 09:44:02 +0000490href="mailto:xml@gnome.org">xml@gnome.org</a> list; if it's really libxml
Daniel Veillard98d071d2003-01-10 09:22:44 +0000491related I will approve it. Please do not send mail to me directly, it makes
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000492things really hard to track and in some cases I am not the best person to
Daniel Veillard98d071d2003-01-10 09:22:44 +0000493answer a given question, ask on the list.</p>
494
495<p>To <span style="color: #E50000">be really clear about support</span>:</p>
496<ul>
497 <li>Support or help <span style="color: #E50000">request MUST be sent to
498 the list or on bugzilla</span> in case of problems, so that the Question
499 and Answers can be shared publicly. Failing to do so carries the implicit
500 message "I want free support but I don't want to share the benefits with
Daniel Veillard831e8fd2003-01-25 11:45:34 +0000501 others" and is not welcome. I will automatically Carbon-Copy the
502 xml@gnome.org mailing list for any technical reply made about libxml2 or
503 libxslt.</li>
Daniel Veillard98d071d2003-01-10 09:22:44 +0000504 <li>There is <span style="color: #E50000">no garantee for support</span>,
505 if your question remains unanswered after a week, repost it, making sure
506 you gave all the detail needed and the informations requested.</li>
507 <li>Failing to provide informations as requested or double checking first
508 for prior feedback also carries the implicit message "the time of the
509 library maintainers is less valuable than my time" and might not be
510 welcome.</li>
511</ul>
Daniel Veillard4c3a2031999-11-19 17:46:26 +0000512
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000513<p>Of course, bugs reported with a suggested patch for fixing them will
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000514probably be processed faster than those without.</p>
Daniel Veillardec303412000-03-24 13:41:54 +0000515
516<p>If you're looking for help, a quick look at <a
Daniel Veillardf7ed3362001-08-17 12:01:21 +0000517href="http://mail.gnome.org/archives/xml/">the list archive</a> may actually
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000518provide the answer. I usually send source samples when answering libxml usage
Daniel Veillard6f0adb52000-07-03 11:41:26 +0000519questions. The <a href="http://xmlsoft.org/html/book1.html">auto-generated
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000520documentation</a> is not as polished as I would like (i need to learn more
521about DocBook), but it's a good starting point.</p>
Daniel Veillardec303412000-03-24 13:41:54 +0000522
Daniel Veillardd5f97f82000-09-17 16:38:14 +0000523<h2><a name="help">How to help</a></h2>
524
525<p>You can help the project in various ways, the best thing to do first is to
526subscribe to the mailing-list as explained before, check the <a
Daniel Veillardf7ed3362001-08-17 12:01:21 +0000527href="http://mail.gnome.org/archives/xml/">archives </a>and the <a
528href="http://bugzilla.gnome.org/buglist.cgi?product=libxml">Gnome bug
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000529database</a>:</p>
Daniel Veillardd5f97f82000-09-17 16:38:14 +0000530<ol>
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000531 <li>Provide patches when you find problems.</li>
532 <li>Provide the diffs when you port libxml to a new platform. They may not
Daniel Veillardab8500d2000-10-15 21:06:19 +0000533 be integrated in all cases but help pinpointing portability problems
534 and</li>
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000535 <li>Provide documentation fixes (either as patches to the code comments or
Daniel Veillardd5f97f82000-09-17 16:38:14 +0000536 as HTML diffs).</li>
Daniel Veillard42766c02002-08-22 20:52:17 +0000537 <li>Provide new documentations pieces (translations, examples, etc
538 ...).</li>
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000539 <li>Check the TODO file and try to close one of the items.</li>
540 <li>Take one of the points raised in the archive or the bug database and
Daniel Veillarde7ead2d2001-08-22 23:44:09 +0000541 provide a fix. <a href="mailto:daniel@veillard.com">Get in touch with me
542 </a>before to avoid synchronization problems and check that the suggested
543 fix will fit in nicely :-)</li>
Daniel Veillardd5f97f82000-09-17 16:38:14 +0000544</ol>
545
Daniel Veillard10a2c651999-12-12 13:03:50 +0000546<h2><a name="Downloads">Downloads</a></h2>
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000547
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000548<p>The latest versions of libxml can be found on <a
Daniel Veillard20c8cf22001-06-26 22:47:36 +0000549href="ftp://xmlsoft.org/">xmlsoft.org</a> (<a
550href="ftp://speakeasy.rpmfind.net/pub/libxml/">Seattle</a>, <a
551href="ftp://fr.rpmfind.net/pub/libxml/">France</a>) or on the <a
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000552href="ftp://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/MIRRORS.html">Gnome FTP server</a> either
MDT 2002 John Fleck30c70542002-09-24 14:24:54 +0000553as a <a href="ftp://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/sources/libxml2/2.4/">source
554archive</a><!-- commenting this out because they seem to have disappeared or <a
Daniel Veillarda41123c2001-04-22 19:31:20 +0000555href="ftp://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/stable/redhat/i386/libxml/">RPM
Daniel Veillarde16b5742002-09-26 17:50:03 +0000556packages</a> -->
Daniel Veillard321be0c2002-10-08 21:26:42 +0000557 , Antonin Sprinzl also provide <a href="ftp://gd.tuwien.ac.at/pub/libxml/">a
Daniel Veillarde16b5742002-09-26 17:50:03 +0000558mirror in Austria</a>. (NOTE that you need both the <a
Daniel Veillardc19fccc2000-07-03 11:52:01 +0000559href="http://rpmfind.net/linux/RPM/libxml2.html">libxml(2)</a> and <a
560href="http://rpmfind.net/linux/RPM/libxml2-devel.html">libxml(2)-devel</a>
Daniel Veillard95189532001-07-26 18:30:26 +0000561packages installed to compile applications using libxml.) <a
Daniel Veillard7b4b2f92003-01-06 13:11:20 +0000562href="mailto:igor@zlatkovic.com">Igor Zlatkovic</a> is now the maintainer of
563the Windows port, <a
564href="http://www.zlatkovic.com/projects/libxml/index.html">he provides
565binaries</a>. <a href="mailto:Gary.Pennington@sun.com">Gary Pennington</a>
566provides <a href="http://garypennington.net/libxml2/">Solaris binaries</a>.
567<a href="mailto:Steve.Ball@zveno.com">Steve Ball</a> provides <a
568href="http://www.zveno.com/open_source/libxml2xslt.html">Mac Os X
Daniel Veillard42766c02002-08-22 20:52:17 +0000569binaries</a>.</p>
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000570
Daniel Veillard6c8b1172000-03-01 00:40:41 +0000571<p><a name="Snapshot">Snapshot:</a></p>
572<ul>
573 <li>Code from the W3C cvs base libxml <a
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000574 href="ftp://xmlsoft.org/cvs-snapshot.tar.gz">cvs-snapshot.tar.gz</a>.</li>
Daniel Veillard6c8b1172000-03-01 00:40:41 +0000575 <li>Docs, content of the web site, the list archive included <a
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000576 href="ftp://xmlsoft.org/libxml-docs.tar.gz">libxml-docs.tar.gz</a>.</li>
Daniel Veillard6c8b1172000-03-01 00:40:41 +0000577</ul>
578
Daniel Veillardc6271d22001-10-27 07:50:58 +0000579<p><a name="Contribs">Contributions:</a></p>
Daniel Veillard6c8b1172000-03-01 00:40:41 +0000580
581<p>I do accept external contributions, especially if compiling on another
Daniel Veillardc6271d22001-10-27 07:50:58 +0000582platform, get in touch with me to upload the package, wrappers for various
Daniel Veillard51095312001-10-28 18:51:57 +0000583languages have been provided, and can be found in the <a
584href="contribs.html">contrib section</a></p>
Daniel Veillard6c8b1172000-03-01 00:40:41 +0000585
Daniel Veillard82687162001-01-22 15:32:01 +0000586<p>Libxml is also available from CVS:</p>
Daniel Veillard10a2c651999-12-12 13:03:50 +0000587<ul>
Daniel Veillard10a2c651999-12-12 13:03:50 +0000588 <li><p>The <a
589 href="http://cvs.gnome.org/bonsai/rview.cgi?cvsroot=/cvs/gnome&amp;dir=gnome-xml">Gnome
Daniel Veillard402e8c82000-02-29 22:57:47 +0000590 CVS base</a>. Check the <a
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000591 href="http://developer.gnome.org/tools/cvs.html">Gnome CVS Tools</a>
592 page; the CVS module is <b>gnome-xml</b>.</p>
Daniel Veillard10a2c651999-12-12 13:03:50 +0000593 </li>
Daniel Veillard82687162001-01-22 15:32:01 +0000594 <li>The <strong>libxslt</strong> module is also present there</li>
Daniel Veillard10a2c651999-12-12 13:03:50 +0000595</ul>
596
597<h2><a name="News">News</a></h2>
598
Daniel Veillard944b5ff1999-12-15 19:08:24 +0000599<h3>CVS only : check the <a
600href="http://cvs.gnome.org/lxr/source/gnome-xml/ChangeLog">Changelog</a> file
Daniel Veillard189446d2000-10-13 10:23:06 +0000601for a really accurate description</h3>
Daniel Veillardab8500d2000-10-15 21:06:19 +0000602
Daniel Veillarde6d8e202002-05-02 06:11:10 +0000603<p>Items not finished and worked on, get in touch with the list if you want
604to test those</p>
Daniel Veillardab8500d2000-10-15 21:06:19 +0000605<ul>
Daniel Veillardcf27f7c2002-04-30 07:12:39 +0000606 <li>Finishing up <a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xmlschema-1/">XML
607 Schemas</a> and <a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xinclude">XInclude</a></li>
608</ul>
609
Daniel Veillarde2830f12003-01-08 17:47:49 +0000610<h3>2.5.1: Jan 8 2003</h3>
611<ul>
612 <li>Fixes a memory leak and configuration/compilation problems in 2.5.0</li>
613 <li>documentation updates (John)</li>
614 <li>a couple of XmlTextReader fixes</li>
615</ul>
616
Daniel Veillard7b4b2f92003-01-06 13:11:20 +0000617<h3>2.5.0: Jan 6 2003</h3>
618<ul>
619 <li>New <a href="xmlreader.html">XmltextReader interface</a> based on C#
620 API (with help of Stéphane Bidoul)</li>
621 <li>Windows: more exports, including the new API (Igor)</li>
622 <li>XInclude fallback fix</li>
623 <li>Python: bindings for the new API, packaging (Stéphane Bidoul),
624 drv_libxml2.py Python xml.sax driver (Stéphane Bidoul), fixes, speedup
625 and iterators for Python-2.2 (Hannu Krosing)</li>
626 <li>Tutorial fixes (john Fleck and Niraj Tolia) xmllint man update
627 (John)</li>
628 <li>Fix an XML parser bug raised by Vyacheslav Pindyura</li>
629 <li>Fix for VMS serialization (Nigel Hall) and config (Craig A. Berry)</li>
630 <li>Entities handling fixes</li>
631 <li>new API to optionally track node creation and deletion (Lukas
632 Schroeder)</li>
633 <li>Added documentation for the XmltextReader interface and some <a
634 href="guidelines.html">XML guidelines</a></li>
635</ul>
636
Daniel Veillardc1eed322002-12-12 11:01:32 +0000637<h3>2.4.30: Dec 12 2002</h3>
638<ul>
639 <li>2.4.29 broke the python bindings, rereleasing</li>
640 <li>Improvement/fixes of the XML API generator, and couple of minor code
641 fixes.</li>
642</ul>
643
Daniel Veillard9b4bb4d2002-12-11 19:28:47 +0000644<h3>2.4.29: Dec 11 2002</h3>
645<ul>
646 <li>Windows fixes (Igor): Windows CE port, pthread linking, python bindings
647 (Stéphane Bidoul), Mingw (Magnus Henoch), and export list updates</li>
648 <li>Fix for prev in python bindings (ERDI Gergo)</li>
649 <li>Fix for entities handling (Marcus Clarke)</li>
650 <li>Refactored the XML and HTML dumps to a single code path, fixed XHTML1
651 dump</li>
652 <li>Fix for URI parsing when handling URNs with fragment identifiers</li>
653 <li>Fix for HTTP URL escaping problem</li>
654 <li>added an TextXmlReader (C#) like API (work in progress)</li>
655 <li>Rewrote the API in XML generation script, includes a C parser and saves
656 more informations needed for C# bindings</li>
657</ul>
658
Daniel Veillardf9c4cad2002-11-22 15:57:07 +0000659<h3>2.4.28: Nov 22 2002</h3>
660<ul>
661 <li>a couple of python binding fixes</li>
662 <li>2 bug fixes in the XML push parser</li>
663 <li>potential memory leak removed (Martin Stoilov)</li>
664 <li>fix to the configure script for Unix (Dimitri Papadopoulos)</li>
665 <li>added encoding support for XInclude parse="text"</li>
666 <li>autodetection of XHTML1 and specific serialization rules added</li>
Daniel Veillard9b4bb4d2002-12-11 19:28:47 +0000667 <li>nasty threading bug fixed (William Brack)</li>
Daniel Veillardf9c4cad2002-11-22 15:57:07 +0000668</ul>
669
Daniel Veillarddad3f682002-11-17 16:47:27 +0000670<h3>2.4.27: Nov 17 2002</h3>
671<ul>
672 <li>fixes for the Python bindings</li>
673 <li>a number of bug fixes: SGML catalogs, xmlParseBalancedChunkMemory(),
674 HTML parser, Schemas (Charles Bozeman), document fragment support
675 (Christian Glahn), xmlReconciliateNs (Brian Stafford), XPointer,
676 xmlFreeNode(), xmlSAXParseMemory (Peter Jones), xmlGetNodePath (Petr
677 Pajas), entities processing</li>
678 <li>added grep to xmllint --shell</li>
679 <li>VMS update patch from Craig A. Berry</li>
680 <li>cleanup of the Windows build with support for more compilers (Igor),
681 better thread support on Windows</li>
682 <li>cleanup of Unix Makefiles and spec file</li>
683 <li>Improvements to the documentation (John Fleck)</li>
684</ul>
685
Daniel Veillard48267432002-10-18 11:21:38 +0000686<h3>2.4.26: Oct 18 2002</h3>
687<ul>
688 <li>Patches for Windows CE port, improvements on Windows paths handling</li>
689 <li>Fixes to the validation code (DTD and Schemas), xmlNodeGetPath() ,
690 HTML serialization, Namespace compliance, and a number of small
691 problems</li>
692</ul>
693
Daniel Veillarde16b5742002-09-26 17:50:03 +0000694<h3>2.4.25: Sep 26 2002</h3>
695<ul>
696 <li>A number of bug fixes: XPath, validation, Python bindings, DOM and
697 tree, xmlI/O, Html</li>
698 <li>Serious rewrite of XInclude</li>
699 <li>Made XML Schemas regexp part of the default build and APIs, small fix
700 and improvement of the regexp core</li>
701 <li>Changed the validation code to reuse XML Schemas regexp APIs</li>
702 <li>Better handling of Windows file paths, improvement of Makefiles (Igor,
703 Daniel Gehriger, Mark Vakoc)</li>
704 <li>Improved the python I/O bindings, the tests, added resolver and regexp
Daniel Veillard321be0c2002-10-08 21:26:42 +0000705 APIs</li>
Daniel Veillarde16b5742002-09-26 17:50:03 +0000706 <li>New logos from Marc Liyanage</li>
707 <li>Tutorial improvements: John Fleck, Christopher Harris</li>
708 <li>Makefile: Fixes for AMD x86_64 (Mandrake), DESTDIR (Christophe
709 Merlet)</li>
710 <li>removal of all stderr/perror use for error reporting</li>
711 <li>Better error reporting: XPath and DTD validation</li>
712 <li>update of the trio portability layer (Bjorn Reese)</li>
713</ul>
714
Daniel Veillard42766c02002-08-22 20:52:17 +0000715<p><strong>2.4.24: Aug 22 2002</strong></p>
716<ul>
717 <li>XPath fixes (William), xf:escape-uri() (Wesley Terpstra)</li>
718 <li>Python binding fixes: makefiles (William), generator, rpm build, x86-64
719 (fcrozat)</li>
720 <li>HTML &lt;style&gt; and boolean attributes serializer fixes</li>
721 <li>C14N improvements by Aleksey</li>
Daniel Veillarde1662542002-08-28 11:50:59 +0000722 <li>doc cleanups: Rick Jones</li>
Daniel Veillard42766c02002-08-22 20:52:17 +0000723 <li>Windows compiler makefile updates: Igor and Elizabeth Barham</li>
724 <li>XInclude: implementation of fallback and xml:base fixup added</li>
725</ul>
726
Daniel Veillard782afda2002-07-08 15:12:49 +0000727<h3>2.4.23: July 6 2002</h3>
728<ul>
729 <li>performances patches: Peter Jacobi</li>
730 <li>c14n fixes, testsuite and performances: Aleksey Sanin</li>
731 <li>added xmlDocFormatDump: Chema Celorio</li>
732 <li>new tutorial: John Fleck</li>
733 <li>new hash functions and performances: Sander Vesik, portability fix from
734 Peter Jacobi</li>
735 <li>a number of bug fixes: XPath (William Brack, Richard Jinks), XML and
736 HTML parsers, ID lookup function</li>
737 <li>removal of all remaining sprintf: Aleksey Sanin</li>
738</ul>
739
Daniel Veillardc0801af2002-05-28 16:28:42 +0000740<h3>2.4.22: May 27 2002</h3>
741<ul>
742 <li>a number of bug fixes: configure scripts, base handling, parser, memory
743 usage, HTML parser, XPath, documentation (Christian Cornelssen),
Daniel Veillard21473672002-06-17 07:29:22 +0000744 indentation, URI parsing</li>
Daniel Veillardc0801af2002-05-28 16:28:42 +0000745 <li>Optimizations for XMLSec, fixing and making public some of the network
746 protocol handlers (Aleksey)</li>
747 <li>performance patch from Gary Pennington</li>
748 <li>Charles Bozeman provided date and time support for XML Schemas
749 datatypes</li>
750</ul>
751
Daniel Veillardcf27f7c2002-04-30 07:12:39 +0000752<h3>2.4.21: Apr 29 2002</h3>
753
754<p>This release is both a bug fix release and also contains the early XML
755Schemas <a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xmlschema-1/">structures</a> and <a
756href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xmlschema-2/">datatypes</a> code, beware, all
757interfaces are likely to change, there is huge holes, it is clearly a work in
758progress and don't even think of putting this code in a production system,
Daniel Veillarde6d8e202002-05-02 06:11:10 +0000759it's actually not compiled in by default. The real fixes are:</p>
Daniel Veillardcf27f7c2002-04-30 07:12:39 +0000760<ul>
761 <li>a couple of bugs or limitations introduced in 2.4.20</li>
762 <li>patches for Borland C++ and MSC by Igor</li>
763 <li>some fixes on XPath strings and conformance patches by Richard
764 Jinks</li>
765 <li>patch from Aleksey for the ExcC14N specification</li>
766 <li>OSF/1 bug fix by Bjorn</li>
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +0000767</ul>
768
Daniel Veillarda7084cd2002-04-15 17:12:47 +0000769<h3>2.4.20: Apr 15 2002</h3>
770<ul>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000771 <li>bug fixes: file descriptor leak, XPath, HTML output, DTD validation</li>
Daniel Veillarda7084cd2002-04-15 17:12:47 +0000772 <li>XPath conformance testing by Richard Jinks</li>
773 <li>Portability fixes: Solaris, MPE/iX, Windows, OSF/1, python bindings,
774 libxml.m4</li>
775</ul>
776
Daniel Veillard19274092002-03-25 16:48:03 +0000777<h3>2.4.19: Mar 25 2002</h3>
778<ul>
779 <li>bug fixes: half a dozen XPath bugs, Validation, ISO-Latin to UTF8
780 encoder</li>
781 <li>portability fixes in the HTTP code</li>
Daniel Veillardb2fb8ed2002-04-01 09:33:12 +0000782 <li>memory allocation checks using valgrind, and profiling tests</li>
Daniel Veillard19274092002-03-25 16:48:03 +0000783 <li>revamp of the Windows build and Makefiles</li>
784</ul>
785
Daniel Veillard34ce8be2002-03-18 19:37:11 +0000786<h3>2.4.18: Mar 18 2002</h3>
787<ul>
788 <li>bug fixes: tree, SAX, canonicalization, validation, portability,
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000789 XPath</li>
Daniel Veillard34ce8be2002-03-18 19:37:11 +0000790 <li>removed the --with-buffer option it was becoming unmaintainable</li>
791 <li>serious cleanup of the Python makefiles</li>
792 <li>speedup patch to XPath very effective for DocBook stylesheets</li>
793 <li>Fixes for Windows build, cleanup of the documentation</li>
794</ul>
795
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +0000796<h3>2.4.17: Mar 8 2002</h3>
797<ul>
798 <li>a lot of bug fixes, including "namespace nodes have no parents in
799 XPath"</li>
800 <li>fixed/improved the Python wrappers, added more examples and more
801 regression tests, XPath extension functions can now return node-sets</li>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000802 <li>added the XML Canonicalization support from Aleksey Sanin</li>
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000803</ul>
804
Daniel Veillard5f4b5992002-02-20 10:22:49 +0000805<h3>2.4.16: Feb 20 2002</h3>
806<ul>
807 <li>a lot of bug fixes, most of them were triggered by the XML Testsuite
808 from OASIS and W3C. Compliance has been significantly improved.</li>
809 <li>a couple of portability fixes too.</li>
810</ul>
811
Daniel Veillard397ff112002-02-11 18:27:20 +0000812<h3>2.4.15: Feb 11 2002</h3>
813<ul>
814 <li>Fixed the Makefiles, especially the python module ones</li>
815 <li>A few bug fixes and cleanup</li>
816 <li>Includes cleanup</li>
817</ul>
818
Daniel Veillardb6c1e2f2002-02-08 14:52:52 +0000819<h3>2.4.14: Feb 8 2002</h3>
820<ul>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000821 <li>Change of License to the <a
Daniel Veillardb6c1e2f2002-02-08 14:52:52 +0000822 href="http://www.opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.html">MIT
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000823 License</a> basically for integration in XFree86 codebase, and removing
824 confusion around the previous dual-licensing</li>
Daniel Veillardb6c1e2f2002-02-08 14:52:52 +0000825 <li>added Python bindings, beta software but should already be quite
826 complete</li>
827 <li>a large number of fixes and cleanups, especially for all tree
828 manipulations</li>
829 <li>cleanup of the headers, generation of a reference API definition in
830 XML</li>
831</ul>
832
833<h3>2.4.13: Jan 14 2002</h3>
Daniel Veillard744683d2002-01-14 17:30:20 +0000834<ul>
835 <li>update of the documentation: John Fleck and Charlie Bozeman</li>
836 <li>cleanup of timing code from Justin Fletcher</li>
837 <li>fixes for Windows and initial thread support on Win32: Igor and Serguei
838 Narojnyi</li>
839 <li>Cygwin patch from Robert Collins</li>
840 <li>added xmlSetEntityReferenceFunc() for Keith Isdale work on xsldbg</li>
841</ul>
842
Daniel Veillardef90ba72001-12-07 14:24:22 +0000843<h3>2.4.12: Dec 7 2001</h3>
844<ul>
845 <li>a few bug fixes: thread (Gary Pennington), xmllint (Geert Kloosterman),
846 XML parser (Robin Berjon), XPointer (Danny Jamshy), I/O cleanups
847 (robert)</li>
848 <li>Eric Lavigne contributed project files for MacOS</li>
849 <li>some makefiles cleanups</li>
850</ul>
851
Daniel Veillarda4871052001-11-26 13:19:48 +0000852<h3>2.4.11: Nov 26 2001</h3>
853<ul>
854 <li>fixed a couple of errors in the includes, fixed a few bugs, some code
855 cleanups</li>
856 <li>xmllint man pages improvement by Heiko Rupp</li>
857 <li>updated VMS build instructions from John A Fotheringham</li>
858 <li>Windows Makefiles updates from Igor</li>
859</ul>
860
Daniel Veillard43d3f612001-11-10 11:57:23 +0000861<h3>2.4.10: Nov 10 2001</h3>
862<ul>
863 <li>URI escaping fix (Joel Young)</li>
864 <li>added xmlGetNodePath() (for paths or XPointers generation)</li>
865 <li>Fixes namespace handling problems when using DTD and validation</li>
866 <li>improvements on xmllint: Morus Walter patches for --format and
867 --encode, Stefan Kost and Heiko Rupp improvements on the --shell</li>
868 <li>fixes for xmlcatalog linking pointed by Weiqi Gao</li>
869 <li>fixes to the HTML parser</li>
870</ul>
871
872<h3>2.4.9: Nov 6 2001</h3>
873<ul>
874 <li>fixes more catalog bugs</li>
875 <li>avoid a compilation problem, improve xmlGetLineNo()</li>
876</ul>
877
Daniel Veillarded421aa2001-11-04 21:22:45 +0000878<h3>2.4.8: Nov 4 2001</h3>
879<ul>
880 <li>fixed SGML catalogs broken in previous release, updated xmlcatalog
881 tool</li>
882 <li>fixed a compile errors and some includes troubles.</li>
883</ul>
884
Daniel Veillard52dcab32001-10-30 12:51:17 +0000885<h3>2.4.7: Oct 30 2001</h3>
886<ul>
887 <li>exported some debugging interfaces</li>
888 <li>serious rewrite of the catalog code</li>
889 <li>integrated Gary Pennington thread safety patch, added configure option
890 and regression tests</li>
891 <li>removed an HTML parser bug</li>
892 <li>fixed a couple of potentially serious validation bugs</li>
893 <li>integrated the SGML DocBook support in xmllint</li>
894 <li>changed the nanoftp anonymous login passwd</li>
895 <li>some I/O cleanup and a couple of interfaces for Perl wrapper</li>
896 <li>general bug fixes</li>
897 <li>updated xmllint man page by John Fleck</li>
898 <li>some VMS and Windows updates</li>
899</ul>
900
Daniel Veillard60087f32001-10-10 09:45:09 +0000901<h3>2.4.6: Oct 10 2001</h3>
902<ul>
Daniel Veillard52dcab32001-10-30 12:51:17 +0000903 <li>added an updated man pages by John Fleck</li>
Daniel Veillard60087f32001-10-10 09:45:09 +0000904 <li>portability and configure fixes</li>
905 <li>an infinite loop on the HTML parser was removed (William)</li>
906 <li>Windows makefile patches from Igor</li>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000907 <li>fixed half a dozen bugs reported for libxml or libxslt</li>
Daniel Veillard60087f32001-10-10 09:45:09 +0000908 <li>updated xmlcatalog to be able to modify SGML super catalogs</li>
909</ul>
910
Daniel Veillarddadd0872001-09-15 09:21:44 +0000911<h3>2.4.5: Sep 14 2001</h3>
912<ul>
913 <li>Remove a few annoying bugs in 2.4.4</li>
914 <li>forces the HTML serializer to output decimal charrefs since some
915 version of Netscape can't handle hexadecimal ones</li>
916</ul>
917
918<h3>1.8.16: Sep 14 2001</h3>
919<ul>
920 <li>maintenance release of the old libxml1 branch, couple of bug and
921 portability fixes</li>
922</ul>
923
Daniel Veillard04382ae2001-09-12 18:51:30 +0000924<h3>2.4.4: Sep 12 2001</h3>
925<ul>
926 <li>added --convert to xmlcatalog, bug fixes and cleanups of XML
927 Catalog</li>
928 <li>a few bug fixes and some portability changes</li>
929 <li>some documentation cleanups</li>
930</ul>
931
Daniel Veillard39936902001-08-24 00:49:01 +0000932<h3>2.4.3: Aug 23 2001</h3>
933<ul>
934 <li>XML Catalog support see the doc</li>
935 <li>New NaN/Infinity floating point code</li>
936 <li>A few bug fixes</li>
937</ul>
938
939<h3>2.4.2: Aug 15 2001</h3>
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000940<ul>
941 <li>adds xmlLineNumbersDefault() to control line number generation</li>
942 <li>lot of bug fixes</li>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000943 <li>the Microsoft MSC projects files should now be up to date</li>
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000944 <li>inheritance of namespaces from DTD defaulted attributes</li>
945 <li>fixes a serious potential security bug</li>
946 <li>added a --format option to xmllint</li>
947</ul>
948
949<h3>2.4.1: July 24 2001</h3>
950<ul>
951 <li>possibility to keep line numbers in the tree</li>
952 <li>some computation NaN fixes</li>
953 <li>extension of the XPath API</li>
954 <li>cleanup for alpha and ia64 targets</li>
955 <li>patch to allow saving through HTTP PUT or POST</li>
Daniel Veillard09ab7e12001-07-10 15:49:44 +0000956</ul>
957
958<h3>2.4.0: July 10 2001</h3>
959<ul>
960 <li>Fixed a few bugs in XPath, validation, and tree handling.</li>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000961 <li>Fixed XML Base implementation, added a couple of examples to the
Daniel Veillard09ab7e12001-07-10 15:49:44 +0000962 regression tests</li>
963 <li>A bit of cleanup</li>
Daniel Veillardab8500d2000-10-15 21:06:19 +0000964</ul>
965
Daniel Veillard5b43fde2001-07-05 23:31:40 +0000966<h3>2.3.14: July 5 2001</h3>
967<ul>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000968 <li>fixed some entities problems and reduce memory requirement when
969 substituting them</li>
Daniel Veillard5b43fde2001-07-05 23:31:40 +0000970 <li>lots of improvements in the XPath queries interpreter can be
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000971 substantially faster</li>
Daniel Veillard5b43fde2001-07-05 23:31:40 +0000972 <li>Makefiles and configure cleanups</li>
973 <li>Fixes to XPath variable eval, and compare on empty node set</li>
974 <li>HTML tag closing bug fixed</li>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000975 <li>Fixed an URI reference computation problem when validating</li>
Daniel Veillard5b43fde2001-07-05 23:31:40 +0000976</ul>
977
Daniel Veillard2adbb512001-06-28 16:20:36 +0000978<h3>2.3.13: June 28 2001</h3>
979<ul>
980 <li>2.3.12 configure.in was broken as well as the push mode XML parser</li>
981 <li>a few more fixes for compilation on Windows MSC by Yon Derek</li>
982</ul>
983
984<h3>1.8.14: June 28 2001</h3>
985<ul>
986 <li>Zbigniew Chyla gave a patch to use the old XML parser in push mode</li>
987 <li>Small Makefile fix</li>
988</ul>
989
Daniel Veillard11648102001-06-26 16:08:24 +0000990<h3>2.3.12: June 26 2001</h3>
991<ul>
992 <li>lots of cleanup</li>
993 <li>a couple of validation fix</li>
994 <li>fixed line number counting</li>
995 <li>fixed serious problems in the XInclude processing</li>
996 <li>added support for UTF8 BOM at beginning of entities</li>
997 <li>fixed a strange gcc optimizer bugs in xpath handling of float, gcc-3.0
998 miscompile uri.c (William), Thomas Leitner provided a fix for the
999 optimizer on Tru64</li>
1000 <li>incorporated Yon Derek and Igor Zlatkovic fixes and improvements for
1001 compilation on Windows MSC</li>
1002 <li>update of libxml-doc.el (Felix Natter)</li>
1003 <li>fixed 2 bugs in URI normalization code</li>
1004</ul>
1005
Daniel Veillarde3c81b52001-06-17 14:50:34 +00001006<h3>2.3.11: June 17 2001</h3>
1007<ul>
1008 <li>updates to trio, Makefiles and configure should fix some portability
1009 problems (alpha)</li>
1010 <li>fixed some HTML serialization problems (pre, script, and block/inline
1011 handling), added encoding aware APIs, cleanup of this code</li>
1012 <li>added xmlHasNsProp()</li>
1013 <li>implemented a specific PI for encoding support in the DocBook SGML
1014 parser</li>
1015 <li>some XPath fixes (-Infinity, / as a function parameter and namespaces
1016 node selection)</li>
1017 <li>fixed a performance problem and an error in the validation code</li>
1018 <li>fixed XInclude routine to implement the recursive behaviour</li>
1019 <li>fixed xmlFreeNode problem when libxml is included statically twice</li>
1020 <li>added --version to xmllint for bug reports</li>
1021</ul>
1022
Daniel Veillard2e4f1882001-06-01 10:11:57 +00001023<h3>2.3.10: June 1 2001</h3>
1024<ul>
1025 <li>fixed the SGML catalog support</li>
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +00001026 <li>a number of reported bugs got fixed, in XPath, iconv detection,
1027 XInclude processing</li>
Daniel Veillard2e4f1882001-06-01 10:11:57 +00001028 <li>XPath string function should now handle unicode correctly</li>
1029</ul>
1030
Daniel Veillard4623acd2001-05-19 15:13:15 +00001031<h3>2.3.9: May 19 2001</h3>
1032
1033<p>Lots of bugfixes, and added a basic SGML catalog support:</p>
1034<ul>
1035 <li>HTML push bugfix #54891 and another patch from Jonas Borgström</li>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00001036 <li>some serious speed optimization again</li>
Daniel Veillard4623acd2001-05-19 15:13:15 +00001037 <li>some documentation cleanups</li>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00001038 <li>trying to get better linking on Solaris (-R)</li>
Daniel Veillard4623acd2001-05-19 15:13:15 +00001039 <li>XPath API cleanup from Thomas Broyer</li>
1040 <li>Validation bug fixed #54631, added a patch from Gary Pennington, fixed
1041 xmlValidGetValidElements()</li>
1042 <li>Added an INSTALL file</li>
1043 <li>Attribute removal added to API: #54433</li>
1044 <li>added a basic support for SGML catalogs</li>
1045 <li>fixed xmlKeepBlanksDefault(0) API</li>
1046 <li>bugfix in xmlNodeGetLang()</li>
1047 <li>fixed a small configure portability problem</li>
1048 <li>fixed an inversion of SYSTEM and PUBLIC identifier in HTML document</li>
1049</ul>
1050
Daniel Veillarda265af72001-05-14 11:13:58 +00001051<h3>1.8.13: May 14 2001</h3>
1052<ul>
1053 <li>bugfixes release of the old libxml1 branch used by Gnome</li>
1054</ul>
1055
Daniel Veillard3bbbe6f2001-05-03 11:15:37 +00001056<h3>2.3.8: May 3 2001</h3>
1057<ul>
1058 <li>Integrated an SGML DocBook parser for the Gnome project</li>
1059 <li>Fixed a few things in the HTML parser</li>
1060 <li>Fixed some XPath bugs raised by XSLT use, tried to fix the floating
1061 point portability issue</li>
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +00001062 <li>Speed improvement (8M/s for SAX, 3M/s for DOM, 1.5M/s for
1063 DOM+validation using the XML REC as input and a 700MHz celeron).</li>
Daniel Veillard3bbbe6f2001-05-03 11:15:37 +00001064 <li>incorporated more Windows cleanup</li>
1065 <li>added xmlSaveFormatFile()</li>
1066 <li>fixed problems in copying nodes with entities references (gdome)</li>
1067 <li>removed some troubles surrounding the new validation module</li>
1068</ul>
1069
Daniel Veillarda41123c2001-04-22 19:31:20 +00001070<h3>2.3.7: April 22 2001</h3>
1071<ul>
1072 <li>lots of small bug fixes, corrected XPointer</li>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00001073 <li>Non deterministic content model validation support</li>
Daniel Veillarda41123c2001-04-22 19:31:20 +00001074 <li>added xmlDocCopyNode for gdome2</li>
1075 <li>revamped the way the HTML parser handles end of tags</li>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00001076 <li>XPath: corrections of namespaces support and number formatting</li>
Daniel Veillarda41123c2001-04-22 19:31:20 +00001077 <li>Windows: Igor Zlatkovic patches for MSC compilation</li>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00001078 <li>HTML output fixes from P C Chow and William M. Brack</li>
Daniel Veillarda41123c2001-04-22 19:31:20 +00001079 <li>Improved validation speed sensible for DocBook</li>
1080 <li>fixed a big bug with ID declared in external parsed entities</li>
1081 <li>portability fixes, update of Trio from Bjorn Reese</li>
1082</ul>
1083
Daniel Veillardafc73112001-04-11 11:51:41 +00001084<h3>2.3.6: April 8 2001</h3>
1085<ul>
1086 <li>Code cleanup using extreme gcc compiler warning options, found and
1087 cleared half a dozen potential problem</li>
1088 <li>the Eazel team found an XML parser bug</li>
1089 <li>cleaned up the user of some of the string formatting function. used the
1090 trio library code to provide the one needed when the platform is missing
1091 them</li>
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +00001092 <li>xpath: removed a memory leak and fixed the predicate evaluation
1093 problem, extended the testsuite and cleaned up the result. XPointer seems
1094 broken ...</li>
Daniel Veillardafc73112001-04-11 11:51:41 +00001095</ul>
1096
Daniel Veillard56a4cb82001-03-24 17:00:36 +00001097<h3>2.3.5: Mar 23 2001</h3>
1098<ul>
1099 <li>Biggest change is separate parsing and evaluation of XPath expressions,
1100 there is some new APIs for this too</li>
1101 <li>included a number of bug fixes(XML push parser, 51876, notations,
1102 52299)</li>
1103 <li>Fixed some portability issues</li>
1104</ul>
1105
Daniel Veillarde356c282001-03-10 12:32:04 +00001106<h3>2.3.4: Mar 10 2001</h3>
1107<ul>
1108 <li>Fixed bugs #51860 and #51861</li>
1109 <li>Added a global variable xmlDefaultBufferSize to allow default buffer
1110 size to be application tunable.</li>
1111 <li>Some cleanup in the validation code, still a bug left and this part
1112 should probably be rewritten to support ambiguous content model :-\</li>
1113 <li>Fix a couple of serious bugs introduced or raised by changes in 2.3.3
1114 parser</li>
1115 <li>Fixed another bug in xmlNodeGetContent()</li>
1116 <li>Bjorn fixed XPath node collection and Number formatting</li>
1117 <li>Fixed a loop reported in the HTML parsing</li>
1118 <li>blank space are reported even if the Dtd content model proves that they
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00001119 are formatting spaces, this is for XML conformance</li>
Daniel Veillarde356c282001-03-10 12:32:04 +00001120</ul>
1121
Daniel Veillardb402c072001-03-01 17:28:58 +00001122<h3>2.3.3: Mar 1 2001</h3>
1123<ul>
1124 <li>small change in XPath for XSLT</li>
1125 <li>documentation cleanups</li>
1126 <li>fix in validation by Gary Pennington</li>
1127 <li>serious parsing performances improvements</li>
1128</ul>
1129
Daniel Veillardec70e912001-02-26 20:10:45 +00001130<h3>2.3.2: Feb 24 2001</h3>
Daniel Veillard71681102001-02-24 17:48:53 +00001131<ul>
1132 <li>chasing XPath bugs, found a bunch, completed some TODO</li>
1133 <li>fixed a Dtd parsing bug</li>
1134 <li>fixed a bug in xmlNodeGetContent</li>
1135 <li>ID/IDREF support partly rewritten by Gary Pennington</li>
1136</ul>
1137
Daniel Veillardec70e912001-02-26 20:10:45 +00001138<h3>2.3.1: Feb 15 2001</h3>
Daniel Veillard6e6a6cc2001-02-15 15:55:44 +00001139<ul>
1140 <li>some XPath and HTML bug fixes for XSLT</li>
1141 <li>small extension of the hash table interfaces for DOM gdome2
1142 implementation</li>
1143 <li>A few bug fixes</li>
1144</ul>
1145
Daniel Veillardec70e912001-02-26 20:10:45 +00001146<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 +00001147<ul>
1148 <li>Lots of XPath bug fixes</li>
1149 <li>Add a mode with Dtd lookup but without validation error reporting for
1150 XSLT</li>
1151 <li>Add support for text node without escaping (XSLT)</li>
1152 <li>bug fixes for xmlCheckFilename</li>
1153 <li>validation code bug fixes from Gary Pennington</li>
1154 <li>Patch from Paul D. Smith correcting URI path normalization</li>
1155 <li>Patch to allow simultaneous install of libxml-devel and
1156 libxml2-devel</li>
1157 <li>the example Makefile is now fixed</li>
1158 <li>added HTML to the RPM packages</li>
1159 <li>tree copying bugfixes</li>
1160 <li>updates to Windows makefiles</li>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00001161 <li>optimization patch from Bjorn Reese</li>
Daniel Veillard6e6a6cc2001-02-15 15:55:44 +00001162</ul>
1163
Daniel Veillardec70e912001-02-26 20:10:45 +00001164<h3>2.2.11: Jan 4 2001</h3>
Daniel Veillard503b8932001-01-05 06:36:31 +00001165<ul>
1166 <li>bunch of bug fixes (memory I/O, xpath, ftp/http, ...)</li>
1167 <li>added htmlHandleOmittedElem()</li>
1168 <li>Applied Bjorn Reese's IPV6 first patch</li>
1169 <li>Applied Paul D. Smith patches for validation of XInclude results</li>
Daniel Veillard82687162001-01-22 15:32:01 +00001170 <li>added XPointer xmlns() new scheme support</li>
Daniel Veillard503b8932001-01-05 06:36:31 +00001171</ul>
1172
Daniel Veillard2ddd23d2000-11-25 10:42:19 +00001173<h3>2.2.10: Nov 25 2000</h3>
Daniel Veillard9d343c42000-11-25 10:12:43 +00001174<ul>
1175 <li>Fix the Windows problems of 2.2.8</li>
1176 <li>integrate OpenVMS patches</li>
1177 <li>better handling of some nasty HTML input</li>
1178 <li>Improved the XPointer implementation</li>
1179 <li>integrate a number of provided patches</li>
1180</ul>
1181
Daniel Veillard2ddd23d2000-11-25 10:42:19 +00001182<h3>2.2.9: Nov 25 2000</h3>
1183<ul>
1184 <li>erroneous release :-(</li>
1185</ul>
1186
Daniel Veillard28929b22000-11-13 18:22:49 +00001187<h3>2.2.8: Nov 13 2000</h3>
1188<ul>
1189 <li>First version of <a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xinclude">XInclude</a>
1190 support</li>
1191 <li>Patch in conditional section handling</li>
1192 <li>updated MS compiler project</li>
1193 <li>fixed some XPath problems</li>
1194 <li>added an URI escaping function</li>
1195 <li>some other bug fixes</li>
1196</ul>
1197
1198<h3>2.2.7: Oct 31 2000</h3>
1199<ul>
1200 <li>added message redirection</li>
1201 <li>XPath improvements (thanks TOM !)</li>
1202 <li>xmlIOParseDTD() added</li>
1203 <li>various small fixes in the HTML, URI, HTTP and XPointer support</li>
1204 <li>some cleanup of the Makefile, autoconf and the distribution content</li>
1205</ul>
1206
Daniel Veillard29a11cc2000-10-25 13:32:39 +00001207<h3>2.2.6: Oct 25 2000:</h3>
1208<ul>
1209 <li>Added an hash table module, migrated a number of internal structure to
1210 those</li>
1211 <li>Fixed a posteriori validation problems</li>
1212 <li>HTTP module cleanups</li>
1213 <li>HTML parser improvements (tag errors, script/style handling, attribute
1214 normalization)</li>
1215 <li>coalescing of adjacent text nodes</li>
1216 <li>couple of XPath bug fixes, exported the internal API</li>
1217</ul>
1218
Daniel Veillardab8500d2000-10-15 21:06:19 +00001219<h3>2.2.5: Oct 15 2000:</h3>
Daniel Veillard4c3a2031999-11-19 17:46:26 +00001220<ul>
Daniel Veillard189446d2000-10-13 10:23:06 +00001221 <li>XPointer implementation and testsuite</li>
1222 <li>Lot of XPath fixes, added variable and functions registration, more
1223 tests</li>
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +00001224 <li>Portability fixes, lots of enhancements toward an easy Windows build
1225 and release</li>
Daniel Veillard189446d2000-10-13 10:23:06 +00001226 <li>Late validation fixes</li>
1227 <li>Integrated a lot of contributed patches</li>
1228 <li>added memory management docs</li>
Daniel Veillardab8500d2000-10-15 21:06:19 +00001229 <li>a performance problem when using large buffer seems fixed</li>
Daniel Veillard189446d2000-10-13 10:23:06 +00001230</ul>
1231
1232<h3>2.2.4: Oct 1 2000:</h3>
1233<ul>
1234 <li>main XPath problem fixed</li>
1235 <li>Integrated portability patches for Windows</li>
1236 <li>Serious bug fixes on the URI and HTML code</li>
Daniel Veillard361d8452000-04-03 19:48:13 +00001237</ul>
1238
Daniel Veillardd5f97f82000-09-17 16:38:14 +00001239<h3>2.2.3: Sep 17 2000</h3>
1240<ul>
1241 <li>bug fixes</li>
1242 <li>cleanup of entity handling code</li>
1243 <li>overall review of all loops in the parsers, all sprintf usage has been
1244 checked too</li>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00001245 <li>Far better handling of larges Dtd. Validating against DocBook XML Dtd
Daniel Veillardd5f97f82000-09-17 16:38:14 +00001246 works smoothly now.</li>
1247</ul>
1248
1249<h3>1.8.10: Sep 6 2000</h3>
1250<ul>
1251 <li>bug fix release for some Gnome projects</li>
1252</ul>
1253
1254<h3>2.2.2: August 12 2000</h3>
Daniel Veillard786d7c82000-08-12 23:38:57 +00001255<ul>
1256 <li>mostly bug fixes</li>
Daniel Veillardec78c0f2000-08-25 10:25:23 +00001257 <li>started adding routines to access xml parser context options</li>
Daniel Veillard786d7c82000-08-12 23:38:57 +00001258</ul>
1259
Daniel Veillardd5f97f82000-09-17 16:38:14 +00001260<h3>2.2.1: July 21 2000</h3>
Daniel Veillarda2679fa2000-07-22 02:38:15 +00001261<ul>
1262 <li>a purely bug fixes release</li>
1263 <li>fixed an encoding support problem when parsing from a memory block</li>
1264 <li>fixed a DOCTYPE parsing problem</li>
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +00001265 <li>removed a bug in the function allowing to override the memory
1266 allocation routines</li>
Daniel Veillarda2679fa2000-07-22 02:38:15 +00001267</ul>
1268
Daniel Veillardd5f97f82000-09-17 16:38:14 +00001269<h3>2.2.0: July 14 2000</h3>
Daniel Veillard94e90602000-07-17 14:38:19 +00001270<ul>
1271 <li>applied a lot of portability fixes</li>
1272 <li>better encoding support/cleanup and saving (content is now always
1273 encoded in UTF-8)</li>
1274 <li>the HTML parser now correctly handles encodings</li>
1275 <li>added xmlHasProp()</li>
1276 <li>fixed a serious problem with &amp;#38;</li>
1277 <li>propagated the fix to FTP client</li>
1278 <li>cleanup, bugfixes, etc ...</li>
1279 <li>Added a page about <a href="encoding.html">libxml Internationalization
1280 support</a></li>
1281</ul>
1282
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00001283<h3>1.8.9: July 9 2000</h3>
1284<ul>
1285 <li>fixed the spec the RPMs should be better</li>
1286 <li>fixed a serious bug in the FTP implementation, released 1.8.9 to solve
1287 rpmfind users problem</li>
1288</ul>
1289
Daniel Veillard6388e172000-07-03 16:07:19 +00001290<h3>2.1.1: July 1 2000</h3>
1291<ul>
1292 <li>fixes a couple of bugs in the 2.1.0 packaging</li>
1293 <li>improvements on the HTML parser</li>
1294</ul>
1295
Daniel Veillard3f6f7f62000-06-30 17:58:25 +00001296<h3>2.1.0 and 1.8.8: June 29 2000</h3>
1297<ul>
Daniel Veillardc0801af2002-05-28 16:28:42 +00001298 <li>1.8.8 is mostly a commodity package for upgrading to libxml2 according
1299 to <a href="upgrade.html">new instructions</a>. It fixes a nasty problem
Daniel Veillard3f6f7f62000-06-30 17:58:25 +00001300 about &amp;#38; charref parsing</li>
1301 <li>2.1.0 also ease the upgrade from libxml v1 to the recent version. it
1302 also contains numerous fixes and enhancements:
1303 <ul>
1304 <li>added xmlStopParser() to stop parsing</li>
1305 <li>improved a lot parsing speed when there is large CDATA blocs</li>
1306 <li>includes XPath patches provided by Picdar Technology</li>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00001307 <li>tried to fix as much as possible DTD validation and namespace
Daniel Veillard3f6f7f62000-06-30 17:58:25 +00001308 related problems</li>
1309 <li>output to a given encoding has been added/tested</li>
1310 <li>lot of various fixes</li>
1311 </ul>
1312 </li>
1313</ul>
1314
Daniel Veillarde0aed302000-04-16 08:52:20 +00001315<h3>2.0.0: Apr 12 2000</h3>
Daniel Veillard361d8452000-04-03 19:48:13 +00001316<ul>
1317 <li>First public release of libxml2. If you are using libxml, it's a good
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00001318 idea to check the 1.x to 2.x upgrade instructions. NOTE: while initially
1319 scheduled for Apr 3 the release occurred only on Apr 12 due to massive
Daniel Veillarde0aed302000-04-16 08:52:20 +00001320 workload.</li>
Daniel Veillard361d8452000-04-03 19:48:13 +00001321 <li>The include are now located under $prefix/include/libxml (instead of
Daniel Veillarde0aed302000-04-16 08:52:20 +00001322 $prefix/include/gnome-xml), they also are referenced by
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00001323 <pre>#include &lt;libxml/xxx.h&gt;</pre>
Daniel Veillarde0aed302000-04-16 08:52:20 +00001324 <p>instead of</p>
Daniel Veillard361d8452000-04-03 19:48:13 +00001325 <pre>#include "xxx.h"</pre>
1326 </li>
Daniel Veillard8f621982000-03-20 13:07:15 +00001327 <li>a new URI module for parsing URIs and following strictly RFC 2396</li>
1328 <li>the memory allocation routines used by libxml can now be overloaded
1329 dynamically by using xmlMemSetup()</li>
Daniel Veillard361d8452000-04-03 19:48:13 +00001330 <li>The previously CVS only tool tester has been renamed
1331 <strong>xmllint</strong> and is now installed as part of the libxml2
1332 package</li>
Daniel Veillarde0aed302000-04-16 08:52:20 +00001333 <li>The I/O interface has been revamped. There is now ways to plug in
1334 specific I/O modules, either at the URI scheme detection level using
1335 xmlRegisterInputCallbacks() or by passing I/O functions when creating a
1336 parser context using xmlCreateIOParserCtxt()</li>
1337 <li>there is a C preprocessor macro LIBXML_VERSION providing the version
1338 number of the libxml module in use</li>
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +00001339 <li>a number of optional features of libxml can now be excluded at
1340 configure time (FTP/HTTP/HTML/XPath/Debug)</li>
Daniel Veillardedfb29b2000-03-14 19:59:05 +00001341</ul>
1342
1343<h3>2.0.0beta: Mar 14 2000</h3>
1344<ul>
1345 <li>This is a first Beta release of libxml version 2</li>
Daniel Veillarde356c282001-03-10 12:32:04 +00001346 <li>It's available only from<a href="ftp://xmlsoft.org/">xmlsoft.org
1347 FTP</a>, it's packaged as libxml2-2.0.0beta and available as tar and
1348 RPMs</li>
Daniel Veillardedfb29b2000-03-14 19:59:05 +00001349 <li>This version is now the head in the Gnome CVS base, the old one is
1350 available under the tag LIB_XML_1_X</li>
Daniel Veillardc0801af2002-05-28 16:28:42 +00001351 <li>This includes a very large set of changes. From a programmatic point
1352 of view applications should not have to be modified too much, check the
1353 <a href="upgrade.html">upgrade page</a></li>
Daniel Veillardedfb29b2000-03-14 19:59:05 +00001354 <li>Some interfaces may changes (especially a bit about encoding).</li>
1355 <li>the updates includes:
Daniel Veillard6c8b1172000-03-01 00:40:41 +00001356 <ul>
Daniel Veillardedfb29b2000-03-14 19:59:05 +00001357 <li>fix I18N support. ISO-Latin-x/UTF-8/UTF-16 (nearly) seems correctly
1358 handled now</li>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00001359 <li>Better handling of entities, especially well-formedness checking
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +00001360 and proper PEref extensions in external subsets</li>
Daniel Veillard6c8b1172000-03-01 00:40:41 +00001361 <li>DTD conditional sections</li>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00001362 <li>Validation now correctly handle entities content</li>
Daniel Veillard6c8b1172000-03-01 00:40:41 +00001363 <li><a href="http://rpmfind.net/tools/gdome/messages/0039.html">change
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00001364 structures to accommodate DOM</a></li>
Daniel Veillard6c8b1172000-03-01 00:40:41 +00001365 </ul>
1366 </li>
Daniel Veillardedfb29b2000-03-14 19:59:05 +00001367 <li>Serious progress were made toward compliance, <a
1368 href="conf/result.html">here are the result of the test</a> against the
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00001369 OASIS testsuite (except the Japanese tests since I don't support that
Daniel Veillardedfb29b2000-03-14 19:59:05 +00001370 encoding yet). This URL is rebuilt every couple of hours using the CVS
1371 head version.</li>
Daniel Veillarde41f2b72000-01-30 20:00:07 +00001372</ul>
1373
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +00001374<h3>1.8.7: Mar 6 2000</h3>
1375<ul>
1376 <li>This is a bug fix release:</li>
1377 <li>It is possible to disable the ignorable blanks heuristic used by
1378 libxml-1.x, a new function xmlKeepBlanksDefault(0) will allow this. Note
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +00001379 that for adherence to XML spec, this behaviour will be disabled by
1380 default in 2.x . The same function will allow to keep compatibility for
1381 old code.</li>
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00001382 <li>Blanks in &lt;a&gt; &lt;/a&gt; constructs are not ignored anymore,
1383 avoiding heuristic is really the Right Way :-\</li>
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +00001384 <li>The unchecked use of snprintf which was breaking libxml-1.8.6
1385 compilation on some platforms has been fixed</li>
1386 <li>nanoftp.c nanohttp.c: Fixed '#' and '?' stripping when processing
1387 URIs</li>
1388</ul>
1389
Daniel Veillarde41f2b72000-01-30 20:00:07 +00001390<h3>1.8.6: Jan 31 2000</h3>
1391<ul>
1392 <li>added a nanoFTP transport module, debugged until the new version of <a
1393 href="http://rpmfind.net/linux/rpm2html/rpmfind.html">rpmfind</a> can use
1394 it without troubles</li>
Daniel Veillardda07c342000-01-25 18:31:22 +00001395</ul>
1396
1397<h3>1.8.5: Jan 21 2000</h3>
1398<ul>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +00001399 <li>adding APIs to parse a well balanced chunk of XML (production <a
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +00001400 href="http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml#NT-content">[43] content</a> of the
1401 XML spec)</li>
Daniel Veillard461a66c2000-01-18 18:01:01 +00001402 <li>fixed a hideous bug in xmlGetProp pointed by Rune.Djurhuus@fast.no</li>
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00001403 <li>Jody Goldberg &lt;jgoldberg@home.com&gt; provided another patch trying
1404 to solve the zlib checks problems</li>
Daniel Veillard461a66c2000-01-18 18:01:01 +00001405 <li>The current state in gnome CVS base is expected to ship as 1.8.5 with
1406 gnumeric soon</li>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +00001407</ul>
1408
1409<h3>1.8.4: Jan 13 2000</h3>
1410<ul>
1411 <li>bug fixes, reintroduced xmlNewGlobalNs(), fixed xmlNewNs()</li>
1412 <li>all exit() call should have been removed from libxml</li>
1413 <li>fixed a problem with INCLUDE_WINSOCK on WIN32 platform</li>
1414 <li>added newDocFragment()</li>
Daniel Veillardf84f71f2000-01-05 19:54:23 +00001415</ul>
1416
1417<h3>1.8.3: Jan 5 2000</h3>
1418<ul>
1419 <li>a Push interface for the XML and HTML parsers</li>
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +00001420 <li>a shell-like interface to the document tree (try tester --shell :-)</li>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00001421 <li>lots of bug fixes and improvement added over XMas holidays</li>
Daniel Veillard437b87b2000-01-03 17:30:46 +00001422 <li>fixed the DTD parsing code to work with the xhtml DTD</li>
Daniel Veillardf84f71f2000-01-05 19:54:23 +00001423 <li>added xmlRemoveProp(), xmlRemoveID() and xmlRemoveRef()</li>
1424 <li>Fixed bugs in xmlNewNs()</li>
Daniel Veillard437b87b2000-01-03 17:30:46 +00001425 <li>External entity loading code has been revamped, now it uses
Daniel Veillardf84f71f2000-01-05 19:54:23 +00001426 xmlLoadExternalEntity(), some fix on entities processing were added</li>
Daniel Veillard437b87b2000-01-03 17:30:46 +00001427 <li>cleaned up WIN32 includes of socket stuff</li>
Daniel Veillard5cb5ab81999-12-21 15:35:29 +00001428</ul>
1429
1430<h3>1.8.2: Dec 21 1999</h3>
1431<ul>
Daniel Veillardb24054a1999-12-18 15:32:46 +00001432 <li>I got another problem with includes and C++, I hope this issue is fixed
1433 for good this time</li>
Daniel Veillard5cb5ab81999-12-21 15:35:29 +00001434 <li>Added a few tree modification functions: xmlReplaceNode,
1435 xmlAddPrevSibling, xmlAddNextSibling, xmlNodeSetName and
1436 xmlDocSetRootElement</li>
1437 <li>Tried to improve the HTML output with help from <a
1438 href="mailto:clahey@umich.edu">Chris Lahey</a></li>
Daniel Veillarde4e51311999-12-18 15:32:46 +00001439</ul>
Daniel Veillardb24054a1999-12-18 15:32:46 +00001440
Daniel Veillarde4e51311999-12-18 15:32:46 +00001441<h3>1.8.1: Dec 18 1999</h3>
1442<ul>
1443 <li>various patches to avoid troubles when using libxml with C++ compilers
1444 the "namespace" keyword and C escaping in include files</li>
1445 <li>a problem in one of the core macros IS_CHAR was corrected</li>
1446 <li>fixed a bug introduced in 1.8.0 breaking default namespace processing,
1447 and more specifically the Dia application</li>
Daniel Veillard944b5ff1999-12-15 19:08:24 +00001448 <li>fixed a posteriori validation (validation after parsing, or by using a
1449 Dtd not specified in the original document)</li>
Daniel Veillardb24054a1999-12-18 15:32:46 +00001450 <li>fixed a bug in</li>
Daniel Veillard10a2c651999-12-12 13:03:50 +00001451</ul>
1452
1453<h3>1.8.0: Dec 12 1999</h3>
1454<ul>
1455 <li>cleanup, especially memory wise</li>
1456 <li>the parser should be more reliable, especially the HTML one, it should
1457 not crash, whatever the input !</li>
1458 <li>Integrated various patches, especially a speedup improvement for large
1459 dataset from <a href="mailto:cnygard@bellatlantic.net">Carl Nygard</a>,
1460 configure with --with-buffers to enable them.</li>
1461 <li>attribute normalization, oops should have been added long ago !</li>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00001462 <li>attributes defaulted from DTDs should be available, xmlSetProp() now
1463 does entities escaping by default.</li>
Daniel Veillard4c3a2031999-11-19 17:46:26 +00001464</ul>
Daniel Veillard35008381999-10-25 13:15:52 +00001465
1466<h3>1.7.4: Oct 25 1999</h3>
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +00001467<ul>
Daniel Veillard35008381999-10-25 13:15:52 +00001468 <li>Lots of HTML improvement</li>
1469 <li>Fixed some errors when saving both XML and HTML</li>
1470 <li>More examples, the regression tests should now look clean</li>
1471 <li>Fixed a bug with contiguous charref</li>
1472</ul>
1473
1474<h3>1.7.3: Sep 29 1999</h3>
1475<ul>
1476 <li>portability problems fixed</li>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00001477 <li>snprintf was used unconditionally, leading to link problems on system
Daniel Veillard35008381999-10-25 13:15:52 +00001478 were it's not available, fixed</li>
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +00001479</ul>
1480
1481<h3>1.7.1: Sep 24 1999</h3>
1482<ul>
1483 <li>The basic type for strings manipulated by libxml has been renamed in
1484 1.7.1 from <strong>CHAR</strong> to <strong>xmlChar</strong>. The reason
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +00001485 is that CHAR was conflicting with a predefined type on Windows. However
1486 on non WIN32 environment, compatibility is provided by the way of a
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +00001487 <strong>#define </strong>.</li>
1488 <li>Changed another error : the use of a structure field called errno, and
1489 leading to troubles on platforms where it's a macro</li>
1490</ul>
1491
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00001492<h3>1.7.0: Sep 23 1999</h3>
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +00001493<ul>
1494 <li>Added the ability to fetch remote DTD or parsed entities, see the <a
Daniel Veillard9cb5ff42001-01-29 08:22:21 +00001495 href="html/libxml-nanohttp.html">nanohttp</a> module.</li>
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +00001496 <li>Added an errno to report errors by another mean than a simple printf
1497 like callback</li>
1498 <li>Finished ID/IDREF support and checking when validation</li>
1499 <li>Serious memory leaks fixed (there is now a <a
Daniel Veillard9cb5ff42001-01-29 08:22:21 +00001500 href="html/libxml-xmlmemory.html">memory wrapper</a> module)</li>
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +00001501 <li>Improvement of <a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xpath">XPath</a>
1502 implementation</li>
1503 <li>Added an HTML parser front-end</li>
1504</ul>
1505
1506<h2><a name="XML">XML</a></h2>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00001507
Daniel Veillard402e8c82000-02-29 22:57:47 +00001508<p><a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml">XML is a standard</a> for
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +00001509markup-based structured documents. Here is <a name="example">an example XML
1510document</a>:</p>
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00001511<pre>&lt;?xml version="1.0"?&gt;
1512&lt;EXAMPLE prop1="gnome is great" prop2="&amp;amp; linux too"&gt;
1513 &lt;head&gt;
1514 &lt;title&gt;Welcome to Gnome&lt;/title&gt;
1515 &lt;/head&gt;
1516 &lt;chapter&gt;
1517 &lt;title&gt;The Linux adventure&lt;/title&gt;
1518 &lt;p&gt;bla bla bla ...&lt;/p&gt;
1519 &lt;image href="linus.gif"/&gt;
1520 &lt;p&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;
1521 &lt;/chapter&gt;
1522&lt;/EXAMPLE&gt;</pre>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00001523
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +00001524<p>The first line specifies that it is an XML document and gives useful
Daniel Veillard42766c02002-08-22 20:52:17 +00001525information about its encoding. Then the rest of the document is a text
1526format whose structure is specified by tags between brackets. <strong>Each
1527tag opened has to be closed</strong>. XML is pedantic about this. However, if
1528a tag is empty (no content), a single tag can serve as both the opening and
1529closing tag if it ends with <code>/&gt;</code> rather than with
1530<code>&gt;</code>. Note that, for example, the image tag has no content (just
1531an attribute) and is closed by ending the tag with <code>/&gt;</code>.</p>
Daniel Veillardccb09631998-10-27 06:21:04 +00001532
Daniel Veillard42766c02002-08-22 20:52:17 +00001533<p>XML can be applied successfully to a wide range of tasks, ranging from
1534long term structured document maintenance (where it follows the steps of
1535SGML) to simple data encoding mechanisms like configuration file formatting
1536(glade), spreadsheets (gnumeric), or even shorter lived documents such as
1537WebDAV where it is used to encode remote calls between a client and a
1538server.</p>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00001539
Daniel Veillard82687162001-01-22 15:32:01 +00001540<h2><a name="XSLT">XSLT</a></h2>
1541
Daniel Veillard6e6a6cc2001-02-15 15:55:44 +00001542<p>Check <a href="http://xmlsoft.org/XSLT">the separate libxslt page</a></p>
1543
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +00001544<p><a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xslt">XSL Transformations</a>, is a
1545language for transforming XML documents into other XML documents (or
1546HTML/textual output).</p>
Daniel Veillard82687162001-01-22 15:32:01 +00001547
Daniel Veillard42766c02002-08-22 20:52:17 +00001548<p>A separate library called libxslt is being developed on top of libxml2.
1549This module "libxslt" too can be found in the Gnome CVS base.</p>
Daniel Veillard82687162001-01-22 15:32:01 +00001550
Daniel Veillard383b1472001-01-23 11:39:52 +00001551<p>You can check the <a
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +00001552href="http://cvs.gnome.org/lxr/source/libxslt/FEATURES">features</a>
1553supported and the progresses on the <a
Daniel Veillard6dbcaf82002-02-20 14:37:47 +00001554href="http://cvs.gnome.org/lxr/source/libxslt/ChangeLog"
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +00001555name="Changelog">Changelog</a>.</p>
Daniel Veillard6dbcaf82002-02-20 14:37:47 +00001556
1557<h2><a name="Python">Python and bindings</a></h2>
1558
Daniel Veillard42766c02002-08-22 20:52:17 +00001559<p>There are a number of language bindings and wrappers available for
1560libxml2, the list below is not exhaustive. Please contact the <a
Daniel Veillard6dbcaf82002-02-20 14:37:47 +00001561href="http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/xml-bindings">xml-bindings@gnome.org</a>
1562(<a href="http://mail.gnome.org/archives/xml-bindings/">archives</a>) in
1563order to get updates to this list or to discuss the specific topic of libxml2
1564or libxslt wrappers or bindings:</p>
1565<ul>
Daniel Veillardc14401e2002-11-20 14:28:17 +00001566 <li><a href="http://libxmlplusplus.sourceforge.net/">Libxml++</a> seems the
1567 most up-to-date C++ bindings for libxml2, check the <a
1568 href="http://libxmlplusplus.sourceforge.net/reference/html/hierarchy.html">documentation</a>
1569 and the <a
1570 href="http://cvs.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/libxmlplusplus/libxml%2b%2b/examples/">examples</a>.</li>
Daniel Veillard6dbcaf82002-02-20 14:37:47 +00001571 <li>There is another <a href="http://libgdome-cpp.berlios.de/">C++ wrapper
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +00001572 based on the gdome2 bindings</a> maintained by Tobias Peters.</li>
Daniel Veillard9b6fd302002-05-13 12:06:47 +00001573 <li>and a third C++ wrapper by Peter Jones &lt;pjones@pmade.org&gt;
1574 <p>Website: <a
1575 href="http://pmade.org/pjones/software/xmlwrapp/">http://pmade.org/pjones/software/xmlwrapp/</a></p>
1576 </li>
Daniel Veillard6dbcaf82002-02-20 14:37:47 +00001577 <li><a
1578 href="http://mail.gnome.org/archives/xml/2001-March/msg00014.html">Matt
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00001579 Sergeant</a> developed <a
1580 href="http://axkit.org/download/">XML::LibXSLT</a>, a Perl wrapper for
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +00001581 libxml2/libxslt as part of the <a href="http://axkit.com/">AxKit XML
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +00001582 application server</a>.</li>
Daniel Veillard21473672002-06-17 07:29:22 +00001583 <li><a href="mailto:dkuhlman@cutter.rexx.com">Dave Kuhlman</a> provides an
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +00001584 earlier version of the libxml/libxslt <a
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +00001585 href="http://www.rexx.com/~dkuhlman">wrappers for Python</a>.</li>
Daniel Veillard21473672002-06-17 07:29:22 +00001586 <li>Gopal.V and Peter Minten develop <a
1587 href="http://savannah.gnu.org/projects/libxmlsharp">libxml#</a>, a set of
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +00001588 C# libxml2 bindings.</li>
Daniel Veillard6dbcaf82002-02-20 14:37:47 +00001589 <li>Petr Kozelka provides <a
1590 href="http://sourceforge.net/projects/libxml2-pas">Pascal units to glue
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +00001591 libxml2</a> with Kylix, Delphi and other Pascal compilers.</li>
Daniel Veillardb2fb8ed2002-04-01 09:33:12 +00001592 <li>Uwe Fechner also provides <a
1593 href="http://sourceforge.net/projects/idom2-pas/">idom2</a>, a DOM2
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +00001594 implementation for Kylix2/D5/D6 from Borland.</li>
Daniel Veillard6dbcaf82002-02-20 14:37:47 +00001595 <li>Wai-Sun "Squidster" Chia provides <a
1596 href="http://www.rubycolor.org/arc/redist/">bindings for Ruby</a> and
1597 libxml2 bindings are also available in Ruby through the <a
1598 href="http://libgdome-ruby.berlios.de/">libgdome-ruby</a> module
1599 maintained by Tobias Peters.</li>
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +00001600 <li>Steve Ball and contributors maintains <a
1601 href="http://tclxml.sourceforge.net/">libxml2 and libxslt bindings for
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +00001602 Tcl</a>.</li>
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +00001603 <li>There is support for libxml2 in the DOM module of PHP.</li>
Daniel Veillard6dbcaf82002-02-20 14:37:47 +00001604</ul>
1605
Daniel Veillardc0801af2002-05-28 16:28:42 +00001606<p>The distribution includes a set of Python bindings, which are guaranteed
1607to be maintained as part of the library in the future, though the Python
Daniel Veillard0b79dfe2002-02-23 13:02:31 +00001608interface have not yet reached the maturity of the C API.</p>
Daniel Veillard7b4b2f92003-01-06 13:11:20 +00001609
Daniel Veillard27907c72002-12-16 16:05:58 +00001610<p><a href="mailto:stephane.bidoul@softwareag.com">Stéphane Bidoul</a>
Daniel Veillard7b4b2f92003-01-06 13:11:20 +00001611maintains <a href="http://users.skynet.be/sbi/libxml-python/">a Windows port
1612of the Python bindings</a>.</p>
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +00001613
Daniel Veillard7ef0fcb2002-12-14 10:38:55 +00001614<p>Note to people interested in building bindings, the API is formalized as
1615<a href="libxml2-api.xml">an XML API description file</a> which allows to
1616automate a large part of the Python bindings, this includes function
Daniel Veillard7b4b2f92003-01-06 13:11:20 +00001617descriptions, enums, structures, typedefs, etc... The Python script used to
1618build the bindings is python/generator.py in the source distribution.</p>
Daniel Veillard7ef0fcb2002-12-14 10:38:55 +00001619
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +00001620<p>To install the Python bindings there are 2 options:</p>
Daniel Veillard0b79dfe2002-02-23 13:02:31 +00001621<ul>
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +00001622 <li>If you use an RPM based distribution, simply install the <a
1623 href="http://rpmfind.net/linux/rpm2html/search.php?query=libxml2-python">libxml2-python
1624 RPM</a> (and if needed the <a
1625 href="http://rpmfind.net/linux/rpm2html/search.php?query=libxslt-python">libxslt-python
1626 RPM</a>).</li>
1627 <li>Otherwise use the <a href="ftp://xmlsoft.org/python/">libxml2-python
1628 module distribution</a> corresponding to your installed version of
1629 libxml2 and libxslt. Note that to install it you will need both libxml2
1630 and libxslt installed and run "python setup.py build install" in the
1631 module tree.</li>
Daniel Veillard0b79dfe2002-02-23 13:02:31 +00001632</ul>
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +00001633
1634<p>The distribution includes a set of examples and regression tests for the
1635python bindings in the <code>python/tests</code> directory. Here are some
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +00001636excerpts from those tests:</p>
Daniel Veillard6dbcaf82002-02-20 14:37:47 +00001637
1638<h3>tst.py:</h3>
1639
1640<p>This is a basic test of the file interface and DOM navigation:</p>
1641<pre>import libxml2
1642
1643doc = libxml2.parseFile("tst.xml")
1644if doc.name != "tst.xml":
1645 print "doc.name failed"
1646 sys.exit(1)
1647root = doc.children
1648if root.name != "doc":
1649 print "root.name failed"
1650 sys.exit(1)
1651child = root.children
1652if child.name != "foo":
1653 print "child.name failed"
1654 sys.exit(1)
1655doc.freeDoc()</pre>
1656
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +00001657<p>The Python module is called libxml2; parseFile is the equivalent of
Daniel Veillard6dbcaf82002-02-20 14:37:47 +00001658xmlParseFile (most of the bindings are automatically generated, and the xml
1659prefix is removed and the casing convention are kept). All node seen at the
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00001660binding level share the same subset of accessors:</p>
Daniel Veillard6dbcaf82002-02-20 14:37:47 +00001661<ul>
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +00001662 <li><code>name</code> : returns the node name</li>
Daniel Veillardc0801af2002-05-28 16:28:42 +00001663 <li><code>type</code> : returns a string indicating the node type</li>
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +00001664 <li><code>content</code> : returns the content of the node, it is based on
1665 xmlNodeGetContent() and hence is recursive.</li>
1666 <li><code>parent</code> , <code>children</code>, <code>last</code>,
1667 <code>next</code>, <code>prev</code>, <code>doc</code>,
1668 <code>properties</code>: pointing to the associated element in the tree,
1669 those may return None in case no such link exists.</li>
Daniel Veillard6dbcaf82002-02-20 14:37:47 +00001670</ul>
1671
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00001672<p>Also note the need to explicitly deallocate documents with freeDoc() .
Daniel Veillard6dbcaf82002-02-20 14:37:47 +00001673Reference counting for libxml2 trees would need quite a lot of work to
1674function properly, and rather than risk memory leaks if not implemented
1675correctly it sounds safer to have an explicit function to free a tree. The
1676wrapper python objects like doc, root or child are them automatically garbage
1677collected.</p>
1678
1679<h3>validate.py:</h3>
1680
1681<p>This test check the validation interfaces and redirection of error
1682messages:</p>
1683<pre>import libxml2
1684
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00001685#deactivate error messages from the validation
Daniel Veillard6dbcaf82002-02-20 14:37:47 +00001686def noerr(ctx, str):
1687 pass
1688
1689libxml2.registerErrorHandler(noerr, None)
1690
1691ctxt = libxml2.createFileParserCtxt("invalid.xml")
1692ctxt.validate(1)
1693ctxt.parseDocument()
1694doc = ctxt.doc()
1695valid = ctxt.isValid()
1696doc.freeDoc()
1697if valid != 0:
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00001698 print "validity check failed"</pre>
Daniel Veillard6dbcaf82002-02-20 14:37:47 +00001699
1700<p>The first thing to notice is the call to registerErrorHandler(), it
1701defines a new error handler global to the library. It is used to avoid seeing
1702the error messages when trying to validate the invalid document.</p>
1703
1704<p>The main interest of that test is the creation of a parser context with
1705createFileParserCtxt() and how the behaviour can be changed before calling
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00001706parseDocument() . Similarly the informations resulting from the parsing phase
Daniel Veillard6dbcaf82002-02-20 14:37:47 +00001707are also available using context methods.</p>
1708
1709<p>Contexts like nodes are defined as class and the libxml2 wrappers maps the
1710C function interfaces in terms of objects method as much as possible. The
1711best to get a complete view of what methods are supported is to look at the
1712libxml2.py module containing all the wrappers.</p>
1713
1714<h3>push.py:</h3>
1715
1716<p>This test show how to activate the push parser interface:</p>
1717<pre>import libxml2
1718
1719ctxt = libxml2.createPushParser(None, "&lt;foo", 4, "test.xml")
1720ctxt.parseChunk("/&gt;", 2, 1)
1721doc = ctxt.doc()
1722
1723doc.freeDoc()</pre>
1724
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00001725<p>The context is created with a special call based on the
Daniel Veillard6dbcaf82002-02-20 14:37:47 +00001726xmlCreatePushParser() from the C library. The first argument is an optional
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00001727SAX callback object, then the initial set of data, the length and the name of
Daniel Veillard6dbcaf82002-02-20 14:37:47 +00001728the resource in case URI-References need to be computed by the parser.</p>
1729
1730<p>Then the data are pushed using the parseChunk() method, the last call
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00001731setting the third argument terminate to 1.</p>
Daniel Veillard6dbcaf82002-02-20 14:37:47 +00001732
1733<h3>pushSAX.py:</h3>
1734
1735<p>this test show the use of the event based parsing interfaces. In this case
1736the parser does not build a document, but provides callback information as
1737the parser makes progresses analyzing the data being provided:</p>
1738<pre>import libxml2
1739log = ""
1740
1741class callback:
1742 def startDocument(self):
1743 global log
1744 log = log + "startDocument:"
1745
1746 def endDocument(self):
1747 global log
1748 log = log + "endDocument:"
1749
1750 def startElement(self, tag, attrs):
1751 global log
1752 log = log + "startElement %s %s:" % (tag, attrs)
1753
1754 def endElement(self, tag):
1755 global log
1756 log = log + "endElement %s:" % (tag)
1757
1758 def characters(self, data):
1759 global log
1760 log = log + "characters: %s:" % (data)
1761
1762 def warning(self, msg):
1763 global log
1764 log = log + "warning: %s:" % (msg)
1765
1766 def error(self, msg):
1767 global log
1768 log = log + "error: %s:" % (msg)
1769
1770 def fatalError(self, msg):
1771 global log
1772 log = log + "fatalError: %s:" % (msg)
1773
1774handler = callback()
1775
1776ctxt = libxml2.createPushParser(handler, "&lt;foo", 4, "test.xml")
1777chunk = " url='tst'&gt;b"
1778ctxt.parseChunk(chunk, len(chunk), 0)
1779chunk = "ar&lt;/foo&gt;"
1780ctxt.parseChunk(chunk, len(chunk), 1)
1781
Daniel Veillardfcbfa2d2002-02-21 17:54:27 +00001782reference = "startDocument:startElement foo {'url': 'tst'}:" + \
1783 "characters: bar:endElement foo:endDocument:"
Daniel Veillard6dbcaf82002-02-20 14:37:47 +00001784if log != reference:
1785 print "Error got: %s" % log
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00001786 print "Expected: %s" % reference</pre>
Daniel Veillard6dbcaf82002-02-20 14:37:47 +00001787
1788<p>The key object in that test is the handler, it provides a number of entry
1789points which can be called by the parser as it makes progresses to indicate
1790the information set obtained. The full set of callback is larger than what
1791the callback class in that specific example implements (see the SAX
1792definition for a complete list). The wrapper will only call those supplied by
1793the object when activated. The startElement receives the names of the element
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00001794and a dictionary containing the attributes carried by this element.</p>
Daniel Veillard6dbcaf82002-02-20 14:37:47 +00001795
1796<p>Also note that the reference string generated from the callback shows a
1797single character call even though the string "bar" is passed to the parser
1798from 2 different call to parseChunk()</p>
1799
1800<h3>xpath.py:</h3>
1801
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00001802<p>This is a basic test of XPath wrappers support</p>
Daniel Veillard6dbcaf82002-02-20 14:37:47 +00001803<pre>import libxml2
1804
1805doc = libxml2.parseFile("tst.xml")
1806ctxt = doc.xpathNewContext()
1807res = ctxt.xpathEval("//*")
1808if len(res) != 2:
1809 print "xpath query: wrong node set size"
1810 sys.exit(1)
1811if res[0].name != "doc" or res[1].name != "foo":
1812 print "xpath query: wrong node set value"
1813 sys.exit(1)
1814doc.freeDoc()
1815ctxt.xpathFreeContext()</pre>
1816
1817<p>This test parses a file, then create an XPath context to evaluate XPath
1818expression on it. The xpathEval() method execute an XPath query and returns
1819the result mapped in a Python way. String and numbers are natively converted,
1820and node sets are returned as a tuple of libxml2 Python nodes wrappers. Like
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00001821the document, the XPath context need to be freed explicitly, also not that
Daniel Veillard6dbcaf82002-02-20 14:37:47 +00001822the result of the XPath query may point back to the document tree and hence
1823the document must be freed after the result of the query is used.</p>
1824
1825<h3>xpathext.py:</h3>
1826
1827<p>This test shows how to extend the XPath engine with functions written in
1828python:</p>
1829<pre>import libxml2
1830
1831def foo(ctx, x):
1832 return x + 1
1833
1834doc = libxml2.parseFile("tst.xml")
1835ctxt = doc.xpathNewContext()
1836libxml2.registerXPathFunction(ctxt._o, "foo", None, foo)
1837res = ctxt.xpathEval("foo(1)")
1838if res != 2:
1839 print "xpath extension failure"
1840doc.freeDoc()
1841ctxt.xpathFreeContext()</pre>
1842
1843<p>Note how the extension function is registered with the context (but that
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00001844part is not yet finalized, this may change slightly in the future).</p>
Daniel Veillard6dbcaf82002-02-20 14:37:47 +00001845
1846<h3>tstxpath.py:</h3>
1847
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00001848<p>This test is similar to the previous one but shows how the extension
Daniel Veillard6dbcaf82002-02-20 14:37:47 +00001849function can access the XPath evaluation context:</p>
1850<pre>def foo(ctx, x):
1851 global called
1852
1853 #
1854 # test that access to the XPath evaluation contexts
1855 #
1856 pctxt = libxml2.xpathParserContext(_obj=ctx)
1857 ctxt = pctxt.context()
1858 called = ctxt.function()
1859 return x + 1</pre>
1860
1861<p>All the interfaces around the XPath parser(or rather evaluation) context
1862are not finalized, but it should be sufficient to do contextual work at the
1863evaluation point.</p>
1864
1865<h3>Memory debugging:</h3>
1866
1867<p>last but not least, all tests starts with the following prologue:</p>
1868<pre>#memory debug specific
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +00001869libxml2.debugMemory(1)</pre>
Daniel Veillard6dbcaf82002-02-20 14:37:47 +00001870
1871<p>and ends with the following epilogue:</p>
1872<pre>#memory debug specific
1873libxml2.cleanupParser()
1874if libxml2.debugMemory(1) == 0:
1875 print "OK"
1876else:
1877 print "Memory leak %d bytes" % (libxml2.debugMemory(1))
1878 libxml2.dumpMemory()</pre>
1879
1880<p>Those activate the memory debugging interface of libxml2 where all
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00001881allocated block in the library are tracked. The prologue then cleans up the
Daniel Veillard6dbcaf82002-02-20 14:37:47 +00001882library state and checks that all allocated memory has been freed. If not it
1883calls dumpMemory() which saves that list in a <code>.memdump</code> file.</p>
Daniel Veillard82687162001-01-22 15:32:01 +00001884
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00001885<h2><a name="architecture">libxml architecture</a></h2>
Daniel Veillard4540be42000-08-19 16:40:28 +00001886
Daniel Veillardec70e912001-02-26 20:10:45 +00001887<p>Libxml is made of multiple components; some of them are optional, and most
1888of the block interfaces are public. The main components are:</p>
Daniel Veillard4540be42000-08-19 16:40:28 +00001889<ul>
1890 <li>an Input/Output layer</li>
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +00001891 <li>FTP and HTTP client layers (optional)</li>
Daniel Veillard4540be42000-08-19 16:40:28 +00001892 <li>an Internationalization layer managing the encodings support</li>
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +00001893 <li>a URI module</li>
Daniel Veillard4540be42000-08-19 16:40:28 +00001894 <li>the XML parser and its basic SAX interface</li>
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +00001895 <li>an HTML parser using the same SAX interface (optional)</li>
Daniel Veillard4540be42000-08-19 16:40:28 +00001896 <li>a SAX tree module to build an in-memory DOM representation</li>
1897 <li>a tree module to manipulate the DOM representation</li>
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +00001898 <li>a validation module using the DOM representation (optional)</li>
Daniel Veillard4540be42000-08-19 16:40:28 +00001899 <li>an XPath module for global lookup in a DOM representation
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +00001900 (optional)</li>
1901 <li>a debug module (optional)</li>
Daniel Veillard4540be42000-08-19 16:40:28 +00001902</ul>
1903
1904<p>Graphically this gives the following:</p>
1905
1906<p><img src="libxml.gif" alt="a graphical view of the various"></p>
1907
1908<p></p>
1909
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +00001910<h2><a name="tree">The tree output</a></h2>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00001911
1912<p>The parser returns a tree built during the document analysis. The value
Daniel Veillard402e8c82000-02-29 22:57:47 +00001913returned is an <strong>xmlDocPtr</strong> (i.e., a pointer to an
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +00001914<strong>xmlDoc</strong> structure). This structure contains information such
Daniel Veillard306be992000-07-03 12:38:45 +00001915as the file name, the document type, and a <strong>children</strong> pointer
1916which is the root of the document (or more exactly the first child under the
1917root which is the document). The tree is made of <strong>xmlNode</strong>s,
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +00001918chained in double-linked lists of siblings and with a children&lt;-&gt;parent
Daniel Veillard306be992000-07-03 12:38:45 +00001919relationship. An xmlNode can also carry properties (a chain of xmlAttr
1920structures). An attribute may have a value which is a list of TEXT or
1921ENTITY_REF nodes.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00001922
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00001923<p>Here is an example (erroneous with respect to the XML spec since there
1924should be only one ELEMENT under the root):</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00001925
1926<p><img src="structure.gif" alt=" structure.gif "></p>
1927
1928<p>In the source package there is a small program (not installed by default)
Daniel Veillard361d8452000-04-03 19:48:13 +00001929called <strong>xmllint</strong> which parses XML files given as argument and
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +00001930prints them back as parsed. This is useful for detecting errors both in XML
1931code and in the XML parser itself. It has an option <strong>--debug</strong>
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +00001932which prints the actual in-memory structure of the document; here is the
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +00001933result with the <a href="#example">example</a> given before:</p>
Daniel Veillard10c6a8f1998-10-28 01:00:12 +00001934<pre>DOCUMENT
1935version=1.0
1936standalone=true
1937 ELEMENT EXAMPLE
1938 ATTRIBUTE prop1
1939 TEXT
1940 content=gnome is great
1941 ATTRIBUTE prop2
1942 ENTITY_REF
1943 TEXT
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +00001944 content= linux too
Daniel Veillard402e8c82000-02-29 22:57:47 +00001945 ELEMENT head
Daniel Veillard10c6a8f1998-10-28 01:00:12 +00001946 ELEMENT title
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +00001947 TEXT
1948 content=Welcome to Gnome
Daniel Veillard10c6a8f1998-10-28 01:00:12 +00001949 ELEMENT chapter
1950 ELEMENT title
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +00001951 TEXT
1952 content=The Linux adventure
Daniel Veillard10c6a8f1998-10-28 01:00:12 +00001953 ELEMENT p
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +00001954 TEXT
1955 content=bla bla bla ...
Daniel Veillard10c6a8f1998-10-28 01:00:12 +00001956 ELEMENT image
1957 ATTRIBUTE href
1958 TEXT
1959 content=linus.gif
1960 ELEMENT p
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +00001961 TEXT
1962 content=...</pre>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00001963
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00001964<p>This should be useful for learning the internal representation model.</p>
Daniel Veillardccb09631998-10-27 06:21:04 +00001965
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +00001966<h2><a name="interface">The SAX interface</a></h2>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00001967
Daniel Veillard402e8c82000-02-29 22:57:47 +00001968<p>Sometimes the DOM tree output is just too large to fit reasonably into
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00001969memory. In that case (and if you don't expect to save back the XML document
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +00001970loaded using libxml), it's better to use the SAX interface of libxml. SAX is
1971a <strong>callback-based interface</strong> to the parser. Before parsing,
1972the application layer registers a customized set of callbacks which are
1973called by the library as it progresses through the XML input.</p>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00001974
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00001975<p>To get more detailed step-by-step guidance on using the SAX interface of
Daniel Veillard4540be42000-08-19 16:40:28 +00001976libxml, see the <a
1977href="http://www.daa.com.au/~james/gnome/xml-sax/xml-sax.html">nice
1978documentation</a>.written by <a href="mailto:james@daa.com.au">James
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00001979Henstridge</a>.</p>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00001980
1981<p>You can debug the SAX behaviour by using the <strong>testSAX</strong>
1982program located in the gnome-xml module (it's usually not shipped in the
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00001983binary packages of libxml, but you can find it in the tar source
Daniel Veillard402e8c82000-02-29 22:57:47 +00001984distribution). Here is the sequence of callbacks that would be reported by
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00001985testSAX when parsing the example XML document shown earlier:</p>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00001986<pre>SAX.setDocumentLocator()
1987SAX.startDocument()
1988SAX.getEntity(amp)
1989SAX.startElement(EXAMPLE, prop1='gnome is great', prop2='&amp;amp; linux too')
1990SAX.characters( , 3)
1991SAX.startElement(head)
1992SAX.characters( , 4)
1993SAX.startElement(title)
1994SAX.characters(Welcome to Gnome, 16)
1995SAX.endElement(title)
1996SAX.characters( , 3)
1997SAX.endElement(head)
1998SAX.characters( , 3)
1999SAX.startElement(chapter)
2000SAX.characters( , 4)
2001SAX.startElement(title)
2002SAX.characters(The Linux adventure, 19)
2003SAX.endElement(title)
2004SAX.characters( , 4)
2005SAX.startElement(p)
2006SAX.characters(bla bla bla ..., 15)
2007SAX.endElement(p)
2008SAX.characters( , 4)
2009SAX.startElement(image, href='linus.gif')
2010SAX.endElement(image)
2011SAX.characters( , 4)
2012SAX.startElement(p)
2013SAX.characters(..., 3)
2014SAX.endElement(p)
2015SAX.characters( , 3)
2016SAX.endElement(chapter)
2017SAX.characters( , 1)
2018SAX.endElement(EXAMPLE)
2019SAX.endDocument()</pre>
2020
Daniel Veillardec70e912001-02-26 20:10:45 +00002021<p>Most of the other interfaces of libxml are based on the DOM tree-building
2022facility, so nearly everything up to the end of this document presupposes the
2023use of the standard DOM tree build. Note that the DOM tree itself is built by
2024a set of registered default callbacks, without internal specific
2025interface.</p>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00002026
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002027<h2><a name="Validation">Validation &amp; DTDs</a></h2>
2028
2029<p>Table of Content:</p>
2030<ol>
2031 <li><a href="#General5">General overview</a></li>
2032 <li><a href="#definition">The definition</a></li>
2033 <li><a href="#Simple">Simple rules</a>
2034 <ol>
Daniel Veillard9c466822001-10-25 12:03:39 +00002035 <li><a href="#reference">How to reference a DTD from a document</a></li>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002036 <li><a href="#Declaring">Declaring elements</a></li>
2037 <li><a href="#Declaring1">Declaring attributes</a></li>
2038 </ol>
2039 </li>
2040 <li><a href="#Some">Some examples</a></li>
2041 <li><a href="#validate">How to validate</a></li>
2042 <li><a href="#Other">Other resources</a></li>
2043</ol>
2044
2045<h3><a name="General5">General overview</a></h3>
2046
2047<p>Well what is validation and what is a DTD ?</p>
2048
2049<p>DTD is the acronym for Document Type Definition. This is a description of
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00002050the content for a family of XML files. This is part of the XML 1.0
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +00002051specification, and allows one to describe and verify that a given document
2052instance conforms to the set of rules detailing its structure and content.</p>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002053
2054<p>Validation is the process of checking a document against a DTD (more
2055generally against a set of construction rules).</p>
2056
2057<p>The validation process and building DTDs are the two most difficult parts
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +00002058of the XML life cycle. Briefly a DTD defines all the possible elements to be
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002059found within your document, what is the formal shape of your document tree
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +00002060(by defining the allowed content of an element; either text, a regular
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002061expression for the allowed list of children, or mixed content i.e. both text
Daniel Veillard42766c02002-08-22 20:52:17 +00002062and children). The DTD also defines the valid attributes for all elements and
2063the types of those attributes.</p>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002064
2065<h3><a name="definition1">The definition</a></h3>
2066
2067<p>The <a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml">W3C XML Recommendation</a> (<a
2068href="http://www.xml.com/axml/axml.html">Tim Bray's annotated version of
2069Rev1</a>):</p>
2070<ul>
2071 <li><a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml#elemdecls">Declaring
2072 elements</a></li>
2073 <li><a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml#attdecls">Declaring
2074 attributes</a></li>
2075</ul>
2076
2077<p>(unfortunately) all this is inherited from the SGML world, the syntax is
2078ancient...</p>
2079
2080<h3><a name="Simple1">Simple rules</a></h3>
2081
Daniel Veillard42766c02002-08-22 20:52:17 +00002082<p>Writing DTDs can be done in many ways. The rules to build them if you need
2083something permanent or something which can evolve over time can be radically
2084different. Really complex DTDs like DocBook ones are flexible but quite
2085harder to design. I will just focus on DTDs for a formats with a fixed simple
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002086structure. It is just a set of basic rules, and definitely not exhaustive nor
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00002087usable for complex DTD design.</p>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002088
2089<h4><a name="reference1">How to reference a DTD from a document</a>:</h4>
2090
2091<p>Assuming the top element of the document is <code>spec</code> and the dtd
2092is placed in the file <code>mydtd</code> in the subdirectory
2093<code>dtds</code> of the directory from where the document were loaded:</p>
2094
2095<p><code>&lt;!DOCTYPE spec SYSTEM "dtds/mydtd"&gt;</code></p>
2096
2097<p>Notes:</p>
2098<ul>
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +00002099 <li>The system string is actually an URI-Reference (as defined in <a
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002100 href="http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2396.txt">RFC 2396</a>) so you can use a
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +00002101 full URL string indicating the location of your DTD on the Web. This is a
2102 really good thing to do if you want others to validate your document.</li>
2103 <li>It is also possible to associate a <code>PUBLIC</code> identifier (a
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00002104 magic string) so that the DTD is looked up in catalogs on the client side
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +00002105 without having to locate it on the web.</li>
2106 <li>A DTD contains a set of element and attribute declarations, but they
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00002107 don't define what the root of the document should be. This is explicitly
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002108 told to the parser/validator as the first element of the
2109 <code>DOCTYPE</code> declaration.</li>
2110</ul>
2111
2112<h4><a name="Declaring2">Declaring elements</a>:</h4>
2113
2114<p>The following declares an element <code>spec</code>:</p>
2115
2116<p><code>&lt;!ELEMENT spec (front, body, back?)&gt;</code></p>
2117
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +00002118<p>It also expresses that the spec element contains one <code>front</code>,
Daniel Veillardc0801af2002-05-28 16:28:42 +00002119one <code>body</code> and one optional <code>back</code> children elements in
2120this order. The declaration of one element of the structure and its content
2121are done in a single declaration. Similarly the following declares
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002122<code>div1</code> elements:</p>
2123
Daniel Veillard51737272002-01-23 23:10:38 +00002124<p><code>&lt;!ELEMENT div1 (head, (p | list | note)*, div2?)&gt;</code></p>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002125
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +00002126<p>which means div1 contains one <code>head</code> then a series of optional
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002127<code>p</code>, <code>list</code>s and <code>note</code>s and then an
2128optional <code>div2</code>. And last but not least an element can contain
2129text:</p>
2130
2131<p><code>&lt;!ELEMENT b (#PCDATA)&gt;</code></p>
2132
2133<p><code>b</code> contains text or being of mixed content (text and elements
2134in no particular order):</p>
2135
2136<p><code>&lt;!ELEMENT p (#PCDATA|a|ul|b|i|em)*&gt;</code></p>
2137
2138<p><code>p </code>can contain text or <code>a</code>, <code>ul</code>,
2139<code>b</code>, <code>i </code>or <code>em</code> elements in no particular
2140order.</p>
2141
2142<h4><a name="Declaring1">Declaring attributes</a>:</h4>
2143
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +00002144<p>Again the attributes declaration includes their content definition:</p>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002145
2146<p><code>&lt;!ATTLIST termdef name CDATA #IMPLIED&gt;</code></p>
2147
2148<p>means that the element <code>termdef</code> can have a <code>name</code>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00002149attribute containing text (<code>CDATA</code>) and which is optional
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002150(<code>#IMPLIED</code>). The attribute value can also be defined within a
2151set:</p>
2152
2153<p><code>&lt;!ATTLIST list type (bullets|ordered|glossary)
2154"ordered"&gt;</code></p>
2155
2156<p>means <code>list</code> element have a <code>type</code> attribute with 3
2157allowed values "bullets", "ordered" or "glossary" and which default to
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00002158"ordered" if the attribute is not explicitly specified.</p>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002159
2160<p>The content type of an attribute can be text (<code>CDATA</code>),
2161anchor/reference/references
2162(<code>ID</code>/<code>IDREF</code>/<code>IDREFS</code>), entity(ies)
2163(<code>ENTITY</code>/<code>ENTITIES</code>) or name(s)
2164(<code>NMTOKEN</code>/<code>NMTOKENS</code>). The following defines that a
2165<code>chapter</code> element can have an optional <code>id</code> attribute
2166of type <code>ID</code>, usable for reference from attribute of type
2167IDREF:</p>
2168
2169<p><code>&lt;!ATTLIST chapter id ID #IMPLIED&gt;</code></p>
2170
2171<p>The last value of an attribute definition can be <code>#REQUIRED
2172</code>meaning that the attribute has to be given, <code>#IMPLIED</code>
2173meaning that it is optional, or the default value (possibly prefixed by
2174<code>#FIXED</code> if it is the only allowed).</p>
2175
2176<p>Notes:</p>
2177<ul>
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +00002178 <li>Usually the attributes pertaining to a given element are declared in a
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002179 single expression, but it is just a convention adopted by a lot of DTD
2180 writers:
2181 <pre>&lt;!ATTLIST termdef
2182 id ID #REQUIRED
2183 name CDATA #IMPLIED&gt;</pre>
2184 <p>The previous construct defines both <code>id</code> and
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +00002185 <code>name</code> attributes for the element <code>termdef</code>.</p>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002186 </li>
2187</ul>
2188
2189<h3><a name="Some1">Some examples</a></h3>
2190
2191<p>The directory <code>test/valid/dtds/</code> in the libxml distribution
Daniel Veillard42766c02002-08-22 20:52:17 +00002192contains some complex DTD examples. The example in the file
2193<code>test/valid/dia.xml</code> shows an XML file where the simple DTD is
2194directly included within the document.</p>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002195
2196<h3><a name="validate1">How to validate</a></h3>
2197
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +00002198<p>The simplest way is to use the xmllint program included with libxml. The
2199<code>--valid</code> option turns-on validation of the files given as input.
2200For example the following validates a copy of the first revision of the XML
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +000022011.0 specification:</p>
2202
2203<p><code>xmllint --valid --noout test/valid/REC-xml-19980210.xml</code></p>
2204
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +00002205<p>the -- noout is used to disable output of the resulting tree.</p>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002206
Daniel Veillard42766c02002-08-22 20:52:17 +00002207<p>The <code>--dtdvalid dtd</code> allows validation of the document(s)
2208against a given DTD.</p>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002209
2210<p>Libxml exports an API to handle DTDs and validation, check the <a
2211href="http://xmlsoft.org/html/libxml-valid.html">associated
2212description</a>.</p>
2213
2214<h3><a name="Other1">Other resources</a></h3>
2215
2216<p>DTDs are as old as SGML. So there may be a number of examples on-line, I
2217will just list one for now, others pointers welcome:</p>
2218<ul>
2219 <li><a href="http://www.xml101.com:8081/dtd/">XML-101 DTD</a></li>
2220</ul>
2221
2222<p>I suggest looking at the examples found under test/valid/dtd and any of
2223the large number of books available on XML. The dia example in test/valid
2224should be both simple and complete enough to allow you to build your own.</p>
2225
2226<p></p>
2227
2228<h2><a name="Memory">Memory Management</a></h2>
2229
2230<p>Table of Content:</p>
2231<ol>
2232 <li><a href="#General3">General overview</a></li>
Daniel Veillard9c466822001-10-25 12:03:39 +00002233 <li><a href="#setting">Setting libxml set of memory routines</a></li>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002234 <li><a href="#cleanup">Cleaning up after parsing</a></li>
2235 <li><a href="#Debugging">Debugging routines</a></li>
2236 <li><a href="#General4">General memory requirements</a></li>
2237</ol>
2238
2239<h3><a name="General3">General overview</a></h3>
2240
2241<p>The module <code><a
2242href="http://xmlsoft.org/html/libxml-xmlmemory.html">xmlmemory.h</a></code>
2243provides the interfaces to the libxml memory system:</p>
2244<ul>
2245 <li>libxml does not use the libc memory allocator directly but xmlFree(),
2246 xmlMalloc() and xmlRealloc()</li>
2247 <li>those routines can be reallocated to a specific set of routine, by
2248 default the libc ones i.e. free(), malloc() and realloc()</li>
2249 <li>the xmlmemory.c module includes a set of debugging routine</li>
2250</ul>
2251
2252<h3><a name="setting">Setting libxml set of memory routines</a></h3>
2253
2254<p>It is sometimes useful to not use the default memory allocator, either for
2255debugging, analysis or to implement a specific behaviour on memory management
2256(like on embedded systems). Two function calls are available to do so:</p>
2257<ul>
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +00002258 <li><a href="http://xmlsoft.org/html/libxml-xmlmemory.html">xmlMemGet
2259 ()</a> which return the current set of functions in use by the parser</li>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002260 <li><a
2261 href="http://xmlsoft.org/html/libxml-xmlmemory.html">xmlMemSetup()</a>
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +00002262 which allow to set up a new set of memory allocation functions</li>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002263</ul>
2264
2265<p>Of course a call to xmlMemSetup() should probably be done before calling
2266any other libxml routines (unless you are sure your allocations routines are
2267compatibles).</p>
2268
2269<h3><a name="cleanup">Cleaning up after parsing</a></h3>
2270
2271<p>Libxml is not stateless, there is a few set of memory structures needing
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00002272allocation before the parser is fully functional (some encoding structures
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002273for example). This also mean that once parsing is finished there is a tiny
2274amount of memory (a few hundred bytes) which can be recollected if you don't
2275reuse the parser immediately:</p>
2276<ul>
2277 <li><a href="http://xmlsoft.org/html/libxml-parser.html">xmlCleanupParser
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +00002278 ()</a> is a centralized routine to free the parsing states. Note that it
2279 won't deallocate any produced tree if any (use the xmlFreeDoc() and
2280 related routines for this).</li>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002281 <li><a href="http://xmlsoft.org/html/libxml-parser.html">xmlInitParser
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +00002282 ()</a> is the dual routine allowing to preallocate the parsing state
2283 which can be useful for example to avoid initialization reentrancy
2284 problems when using libxml in multithreaded applications</li>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002285</ul>
2286
2287<p>Generally xmlCleanupParser() is safe, if needed the state will be rebuild
2288at the next invocation of parser routines, but be careful of the consequences
2289in multithreaded applications.</p>
2290
2291<h3><a name="Debugging">Debugging routines</a></h3>
2292
2293<p>When configured using --with-mem-debug flag (off by default), libxml uses
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00002294a set of memory allocation debugging routines keeping track of all allocated
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002295blocks and the location in the code where the routine was called. A couple of
2296other debugging routines allow to dump the memory allocated infos to a file
2297or call a specific routine when a given block number is allocated:</p>
2298<ul>
2299 <li><a
2300 href="http://xmlsoft.org/html/libxml-xmlmemory.html">xmlMallocLoc()</a>
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +00002301 <a
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002302 href="http://xmlsoft.org/html/libxml-xmlmemory.html">xmlReallocLoc()</a>
2303 and <a
2304 href="http://xmlsoft.org/html/libxml-xmlmemory.html">xmlMemStrdupLoc()</a>
2305 are the memory debugging replacement allocation routines</li>
2306 <li><a href="http://xmlsoft.org/html/libxml-xmlmemory.html">xmlMemoryDump
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +00002307 ()</a> dumps all the informations about the allocated memory block lefts
2308 in the <code>.memdump</code> file</li>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002309</ul>
2310
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00002311<p>When developing libxml memory debug is enabled, the tests programs call
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002312xmlMemoryDump () and the "make test" regression tests will check for any
2313memory leak during the full regression test sequence, this helps a lot
2314ensuring that libxml does not leak memory and bullet proof memory
2315allocations use (some libc implementations are known to be far too permissive
2316resulting in major portability problems!).</p>
2317
2318<p>If the .memdump reports a leak, it displays the allocation function and
2319also tries to give some informations about the content and structure of the
2320allocated blocks left. This is sufficient in most cases to find the culprit,
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00002321but not always. Assuming the allocation problem is reproducible, it is
2322possible to find more easily:</p>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002323<ol>
2324 <li>write down the block number xxxx not allocated</li>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00002325 <li>export the environment variable XML_MEM_BREAKPOINT=xxxx , the easiest
Daniel Veillard75794822002-04-11 16:24:32 +00002326 when using GDB is to simply give the command
2327 <p><code>set environment XML_MEM_BREAKPOINT xxxx</code></p>
2328 <p>before running the program.</p>
2329 </li>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002330 <li>run the program under a debugger and set a breakpoint on
2331 xmlMallocBreakpoint() a specific function called when this precise block
2332 is allocated</li>
2333 <li>when the breakpoint is reached you can then do a fine analysis of the
2334 allocation an step to see the condition resulting in the missing
2335 deallocation.</li>
2336</ol>
2337
2338<p>I used to use a commercial tool to debug libxml memory problems but after
2339noticing that it was not detecting memory leaks that simple mechanism was
Daniel Veillard75794822002-04-11 16:24:32 +00002340used and proved extremely efficient until now. Lately I have also used <a
2341href="http://developer.kde.org/~sewardj/">valgrind</a> with quite some
2342success, it is tied to the i386 architecture since it works by emulating the
2343processor and instruction set, it is slow but extremely efficient, i.e. it
2344spot memory usage errors in a very precise way.</p>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002345
2346<h3><a name="General4">General memory requirements</a></h3>
2347
2348<p>How much libxml memory require ? It's hard to tell in average it depends
2349of a number of things:</p>
2350<ul>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00002351 <li>the parser itself should work in a fixed amount of memory, except for
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002352 information maintained about the stacks of names and entities locations.
2353 The I/O and encoding handlers will probably account for a few KBytes.
2354 This is true for both the XML and HTML parser (though the HTML parser
2355 need more state).</li>
2356 <li>If you are generating the DOM tree then memory requirements will grow
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00002357 nearly linear with the size of the data. In general for a balanced
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002358 textual document the internal memory requirement is about 4 times the
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00002359 size of the UTF8 serialization of this document (example the XML-1.0
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002360 recommendation is a bit more of 150KBytes and takes 650KBytes of main
2361 memory when parsed). Validation will add a amount of memory required for
2362 maintaining the external Dtd state which should be linear with the
2363 complexity of the content model defined by the Dtd</li>
2364 <li>If you don't care about the advanced features of libxml like
2365 validation, DOM, XPath or XPointer, but really need to work fixed memory
2366 requirements, then the SAX interface should be used.</li>
2367</ul>
2368
2369<p></p>
2370
2371<h2><a name="Encodings">Encodings support</a></h2>
2372
2373<p>Table of Content:</p>
2374<ol>
2375 <li><a href="encoding.html#What">What does internationalization support
2376 mean ?</a></li>
2377 <li><a href="encoding.html#internal">The internal encoding, how and
2378 why</a></li>
2379 <li><a href="encoding.html#implemente">How is it implemented ?</a></li>
2380 <li><a href="encoding.html#Default">Default supported encodings</a></li>
2381 <li><a href="encoding.html#extend">How to extend the existing
2382 support</a></li>
2383</ol>
2384
2385<h3><a name="What">What does internationalization support mean ?</a></h3>
2386
2387<p>XML was designed from the start to allow the support of any character set
2388by using Unicode. Any conformant XML parser has to support the UTF-8 and
2389UTF-16 default encodings which can both express the full unicode ranges. UTF8
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00002390is a variable length encoding whose greatest points are to reuse the same
2391encoding for ASCII and to save space for Western encodings, but it is a bit
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002392more complex to handle in practice. UTF-16 use 2 bytes per characters (and
2393sometimes combines two pairs), it makes implementation easier, but looks a
2394bit overkill for Western languages encoding. Moreover the XML specification
2395allows document to be encoded in other encodings at the condition that they
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00002396are clearly labeled as such. For example the following is a wellformed XML
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002397document encoded in ISO-8859 1 and using accentuated letter that we French
2398likes for both markup and content:</p>
2399<pre>&lt;?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?&gt;
2400&lt;très&gt;là&lt;/très&gt;</pre>
2401
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00002402<p>Having internationalization support in libxml means the following:</p>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002403<ul>
2404 <li>the document is properly parsed</li>
2405 <li>informations about it's encoding are saved</li>
2406 <li>it can be modified</li>
2407 <li>it can be saved in its original encoding</li>
2408 <li>it can also be saved in another encoding supported by libxml (for
2409 example straight UTF8 or even an ASCII form)</li>
2410</ul>
2411
2412<p>Another very important point is that the whole libxml API, with the
2413exception of a few routines to read with a specific encoding or save to a
2414specific encoding, is completely agnostic about the original encoding of the
2415document.</p>
2416
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00002417<p>It should be noted too that the HTML parser embedded in libxml now obey
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002418the same rules too, the following document will be (as of 2.2.2) handled in
2419an internationalized fashion by libxml too:</p>
2420<pre>&lt;!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN"
2421 "http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd"&gt;
2422&lt;html lang="fr"&gt;
2423&lt;head&gt;
2424 &lt;META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Type" CONTENT="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1"&gt;
2425&lt;/head&gt;
2426&lt;body&gt;
2427&lt;p&gt;W3C crée des standards pour le Web.&lt;/body&gt;
2428&lt;/html&gt;</pre>
2429
2430<h3><a name="internal">The internal encoding, how and why</a></h3>
2431
2432<p>One of the core decision was to force all documents to be converted to a
2433default internal encoding, and that encoding to be UTF-8, here are the
2434rationale for those choices:</p>
2435<ul>
2436 <li>keeping the native encoding in the internal form would force the libxml
2437 users (or the code associated) to be fully aware of the encoding of the
2438 original document, for examples when adding a text node to a document,
2439 the content would have to be provided in the document encoding, i.e. the
2440 client code would have to check it before hand, make sure it's conformant
2441 to the encoding, etc ... Very hard in practice, though in some specific
2442 cases this may make sense.</li>
2443 <li>the second decision was which encoding. From the XML spec only UTF8 and
2444 UTF16 really makes sense as being the two only encodings for which there
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00002445 is mandatory support. UCS-4 (32 bits fixed size encoding) could be
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002446 considered an intelligent choice too since it's a direct Unicode mapping
2447 support. I selected UTF-8 on the basis of efficiency and compatibility
2448 with surrounding software:
2449 <ul>
2450 <li>UTF-8 while a bit more complex to convert from/to (i.e. slightly
2451 more costly to import and export CPU wise) is also far more compact
2452 than UTF-16 (and UCS-4) for a majority of the documents I see it used
2453 for right now (RPM RDF catalogs, advogato data, various configuration
2454 file formats, etc.) and the key point for today's computer
2455 architecture is efficient uses of caches. If one nearly double the
2456 memory requirement to store the same amount of data, this will trash
2457 caches (main memory/external caches/internal caches) and my take is
2458 that this harms the system far more than the CPU requirements needed
2459 for the conversion to UTF-8</li>
2460 <li>Most of libxml version 1 users were using it with straight ASCII
2461 most of the time, doing the conversion with an internal encoding
2462 requiring all their code to be rewritten was a serious show-stopper
2463 for using UTF-16 or UCS-4.</li>
2464 <li>UTF-8 is being used as the de-facto internal encoding standard for
2465 related code like the <a href="http://www.pango.org/">pango</a>
2466 upcoming Gnome text widget, and a lot of Unix code (yep another place
2467 where Unix programmer base takes a different approach from Microsoft
2468 - they are using UTF-16)</li>
2469 </ul>
2470 </li>
2471</ul>
2472
2473<p>What does this mean in practice for the libxml user:</p>
2474<ul>
2475 <li>xmlChar, the libxml data type is a byte, those bytes must be assembled
2476 as UTF-8 valid strings. The proper way to terminate an xmlChar * string
2477 is simply to append 0 byte, as usual.</li>
2478 <li>One just need to make sure that when using chars outside the ASCII set,
2479 the values has been properly converted to UTF-8</li>
2480</ul>
2481
2482<h3><a name="implemente">How is it implemented ?</a></h3>
2483
2484<p>Let's describe how all this works within libxml, basically the I18N
2485(internationalization) support get triggered only during I/O operation, i.e.
2486when reading a document or saving one. Let's look first at the reading
2487sequence:</p>
2488<ol>
2489 <li>when a document is processed, we usually don't know the encoding, a
2490 simple heuristic allows to detect UTF-18 and UCS-4 from whose where the
2491 ASCII range (0-0x7F) maps with ASCII</li>
2492 <li>the xml declaration if available is parsed, including the encoding
2493 declaration. At that point, if the autodetected encoding is different
2494 from the one declared a call to xmlSwitchEncoding() is issued.</li>
2495 <li>If there is no encoding declaration, then the input has to be in either
2496 UTF-8 or UTF-16, if it is not then at some point when processing the
2497 input, the converter/checker of UTF-8 form will raise an encoding error.
2498 You may end-up with a garbled document, or no document at all ! Example:
2499 <pre>~/XML -&gt; ./xmllint err.xml
2500err.xml:1: error: Input is not proper UTF-8, indicate encoding !
2501&lt;très&gt;là&lt;/très&gt;
2502 ^
2503err.xml:1: error: Bytes: 0xE8 0x73 0x3E 0x6C
2504&lt;très&gt;là&lt;/très&gt;
2505 ^</pre>
2506 </li>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00002507 <li>xmlSwitchEncoding() does an encoding name lookup, canonicalize it, and
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002508 then search the default registered encoding converters for that encoding.
2509 If it's not within the default set and iconv() support has been compiled
2510 it, it will ask iconv for such an encoder. If this fails then the parser
2511 will report an error and stops processing:
2512 <pre>~/XML -&gt; ./xmllint err2.xml
2513err2.xml:1: error: Unsupported encoding UnsupportedEnc
2514&lt;?xml version="1.0" encoding="UnsupportedEnc"?&gt;
2515 ^</pre>
2516 </li>
Daniel Veillard46c5c1d2002-05-20 07:15:54 +00002517 <li>From that point the encoder processes progressively the input (it is
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002518 plugged as a front-end to the I/O module) for that entity. It captures
2519 and convert on-the-fly the document to be parsed to UTF-8. The parser
2520 itself just does UTF-8 checking of this input and process it
2521 transparently. The only difference is that the encoding information has
2522 been added to the parsing context (more precisely to the input
2523 corresponding to this entity).</li>
2524 <li>The result (when using DOM) is an internal form completely in UTF-8
2525 with just an encoding information on the document node.</li>
2526</ol>
2527
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00002528<p>Ok then what happens when saving the document (assuming you
2529collected/built an xmlDoc DOM like structure) ? It depends on the function
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002530called, xmlSaveFile() will just try to save in the original encoding, while
2531xmlSaveFileTo() and xmlSaveFileEnc() can optionally save to a given
2532encoding:</p>
2533<ol>
2534 <li>if no encoding is given, libxml will look for an encoding value
2535 associated to the document and if it exists will try to save to that
2536 encoding,
2537 <p>otherwise everything is written in the internal form, i.e. UTF-8</p>
2538 </li>
2539 <li>so if an encoding was specified, either at the API level or on the
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00002540 document, libxml will again canonicalize the encoding name, lookup for a
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002541 converter in the registered set or through iconv. If not found the
2542 function will return an error code</li>
2543 <li>the converter is placed before the I/O buffer layer, as another kind of
2544 buffer, then libxml will simply push the UTF-8 serialization to through
2545 that buffer, which will then progressively be converted and pushed onto
2546 the I/O layer.</li>
2547 <li>It is possible that the converter code fails on some input, for example
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00002548 trying to push an UTF-8 encoded Chinese character through the UTF-8 to
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002549 ISO-8859-1 converter won't work. Since the encoders are progressive they
2550 will just report the error and the number of bytes converted, at that
2551 point libxml will decode the offending character, remove it from the
2552 buffer and replace it with the associated charRef encoding &amp;#123; and
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00002553 resume the conversion. This guarantees that any document will be saved
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002554 without losses (except for markup names where this is not legal, this is
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00002555 a problem in the current version, in practice avoid using non-ascii
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002556 characters for tags or attributes names @@). A special "ascii" encoding
2557 name is used to save documents to a pure ascii form can be used when
2558 portability is really crucial</li>
2559</ol>
2560
2561<p>Here is a few examples based on the same test document:</p>
2562<pre>~/XML -&gt; ./xmllint isolat1
2563&lt;?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?&gt;
2564&lt;très&gt;là&lt;/très&gt;
2565~/XML -&gt; ./xmllint --encode UTF-8 isolat1
2566&lt;?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?&gt;
2567&lt;très&gt;là  &lt;/très&gt;
2568~/XML -&gt; </pre>
2569
2570<p>The same processing is applied (and reuse most of the code) for HTML I18N
2571processing. Looking up and modifying the content encoding is a bit more
2572difficult since it is located in a &lt;meta&gt; tag under the &lt;head&gt;,
2573so a couple of functions htmlGetMetaEncoding() and htmlSetMetaEncoding() have
2574been provided. The parser also attempts to switch encoding on the fly when
2575detecting such a tag on input. Except for that the processing is the same
2576(and again reuses the same code).</p>
2577
2578<h3><a name="Default">Default supported encodings</a></h3>
2579
2580<p>libxml has a set of default converters for the following encodings
2581(located in encoding.c):</p>
2582<ol>
2583 <li>UTF-8 is supported by default (null handlers)</li>
2584 <li>UTF-16, both little and big endian</li>
2585 <li>ISO-Latin-1 (ISO-8859-1) covering most western languages</li>
2586 <li>ASCII, useful mostly for saving</li>
2587 <li>HTML, a specific handler for the conversion of UTF-8 to ASCII with HTML
2588 predefined entities like &amp;copy; for the Copyright sign.</li>
2589</ol>
2590
Daniel Veillardc0801af2002-05-28 16:28:42 +00002591<p>More over when compiled on an Unix platform with iconv support the full
2592set of encodings supported by iconv can be instantly be used by libxml. On a
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002593linux machine with glibc-2.1 the list of supported encodings and aliases fill
25943 full pages, and include UCS-4, the full set of ISO-Latin encodings, and the
2595various Japanese ones.</p>
2596
2597<h4>Encoding aliases</h4>
2598
2599<p>From 2.2.3, libxml has support to register encoding names aliases. The
2600goal is to be able to parse document whose encoding is supported but where
2601the name differs (for example from the default set of names accepted by
2602iconv). The following functions allow to register and handle new aliases for
2603existing encodings. Once registered libxml will automatically lookup the
2604aliases when handling a document:</p>
2605<ul>
2606 <li>int xmlAddEncodingAlias(const char *name, const char *alias);</li>
2607 <li>int xmlDelEncodingAlias(const char *alias);</li>
2608 <li>const char * xmlGetEncodingAlias(const char *alias);</li>
2609 <li>void xmlCleanupEncodingAliases(void);</li>
2610</ul>
2611
2612<h3><a name="extend">How to extend the existing support</a></h3>
2613
2614<p>Well adding support for new encoding, or overriding one of the encoders
2615(assuming it is buggy) should not be hard, just write an input and output
2616conversion routines to/from UTF-8, and register them using
2617xmlNewCharEncodingHandler(name, xxxToUTF8, UTF8Toxxx), and they will be
2618called automatically if the parser(s) encounter such an encoding name
2619(register it uppercase, this will help). The description of the encoders,
2620their arguments and expected return values are described in the encoding.h
2621header.</p>
2622
2623<p>A quick note on the topic of subverting the parser to use a different
2624internal encoding than UTF-8, in some case people will absolutely want to
2625keep the internal encoding different, I think it's still possible (but the
2626encoding must be compliant with ASCII on the same subrange) though I didn't
2627tried it. The key is to override the default conversion routines (by
2628registering null encoders/decoders for your charsets), and bypass the UTF-8
2629checking of the parser by setting the parser context charset
2630(ctxt-&gt;charset) to something different than XML_CHAR_ENCODING_UTF8, but
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00002631there is no guarantee that this will work. You may also have some troubles
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002632saving back.</p>
2633
2634<p>Basically proper I18N support is important, this requires at least
2635libxml-2.0.0, but a lot of features and corrections are really available only
2636starting 2.2.</p>
2637
2638<h2><a name="IO">I/O Interfaces</a></h2>
2639
2640<p>Table of Content:</p>
2641<ol>
2642 <li><a href="#General1">General overview</a></li>
2643 <li><a href="#basic">The basic buffer type</a></li>
2644 <li><a href="#Input">Input I/O handlers</a></li>
2645 <li><a href="#Output">Output I/O handlers</a></li>
2646 <li><a href="#entities">The entities loader</a></li>
2647 <li><a href="#Example2">Example of customized I/O</a></li>
2648</ol>
2649
2650<h3><a name="General1">General overview</a></h3>
2651
2652<p>The module <code><a
2653href="http://xmlsoft.org/html/libxml-xmlio.html">xmlIO.h</a></code> provides
2654the interfaces to the libxml I/O system. This consists of 4 main parts:</p>
2655<ul>
2656 <li>Entities loader, this is a routine which tries to fetch the entities
2657 (files) based on their PUBLIC and SYSTEM identifiers. The default loader
2658 don't look at the public identifier since libxml do not maintain a
2659 catalog. You can redefine you own entity loader by using
2660 <code>xmlGetExternalEntityLoader()</code> and
Daniel Veillard9c466822001-10-25 12:03:39 +00002661 <code>xmlSetExternalEntityLoader()</code>. <a href="#entities">Check the
2662 example</a>.</li>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002663 <li>Input I/O buffers which are a commodity structure used by the parser(s)
2664 input layer to handle fetching the informations to feed the parser. This
2665 provides buffering and is also a placeholder where the encoding
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00002666 converters to UTF8 are piggy-backed.</li>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002667 <li>Output I/O buffers are similar to the Input ones and fulfill similar
2668 task but when generating a serialization from a tree.</li>
2669 <li>A mechanism to register sets of I/O callbacks and associate them with
2670 specific naming schemes like the protocol part of the URIs.
2671 <p>This affect the default I/O operations and allows to use specific I/O
2672 handlers for certain names.</p>
2673 </li>
2674</ul>
2675
2676<p>The general mechanism used when loading http://rpmfind.net/xml.html for
2677example in the HTML parser is the following:</p>
2678<ol>
2679 <li>The default entity loader calls <code>xmlNewInputFromFile()</code> with
2680 the parsing context and the URI string.</li>
2681 <li>the URI string is checked against the existing registered handlers
2682 using their match() callback function, if the HTTP module was compiled
2683 in, it is registered and its match() function will succeeds</li>
2684 <li>the open() function of the handler is called and if successful will
2685 return an I/O Input buffer</li>
2686 <li>the parser will the start reading from this buffer and progressively
2687 fetch information from the resource, calling the read() function of the
2688 handler until the resource is exhausted</li>
2689 <li>if an encoding change is detected it will be installed on the input
2690 buffer, providing buffering and efficient use of the conversion
2691 routines</li>
2692 <li>once the parser has finished, the close() function of the handler is
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00002693 called once and the Input buffer and associated resources are
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002694 deallocated.</li>
2695</ol>
2696
2697<p>The user defined callbacks are checked first to allow overriding of the
2698default libxml I/O routines.</p>
2699
2700<h3><a name="basic">The basic buffer type</a></h3>
2701
2702<p>All the buffer manipulation handling is done using the
2703<code>xmlBuffer</code> type define in <code><a
2704href="http://xmlsoft.org/html/libxml-tree.html">tree.h</a> </code>which is a
2705resizable memory buffer. The buffer allocation strategy can be selected to be
2706either best-fit or use an exponential doubling one (CPU vs. memory use
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00002707trade-off). The values are <code>XML_BUFFER_ALLOC_EXACT</code> and
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002708<code>XML_BUFFER_ALLOC_DOUBLEIT</code>, and can be set individually or on a
2709system wide basis using <code>xmlBufferSetAllocationScheme()</code>. A number
2710of functions allows to manipulate buffers with names starting with the
2711<code>xmlBuffer...</code> prefix.</p>
2712
2713<h3><a name="Input">Input I/O handlers</a></h3>
2714
2715<p>An Input I/O handler is a simple structure
2716<code>xmlParserInputBuffer</code> containing a context associated to the
2717resource (file descriptor, or pointer to a protocol handler), the read() and
2718close() callbacks to use and an xmlBuffer. And extra xmlBuffer and a charset
2719encoding handler are also present to support charset conversion when
2720needed.</p>
2721
2722<h3><a name="Output">Output I/O handlers</a></h3>
2723
2724<p>An Output handler <code>xmlOutputBuffer</code> is completely similar to an
2725Input one except the callbacks are write() and close().</p>
2726
2727<h3><a name="entities">The entities loader</a></h3>
2728
2729<p>The entity loader resolves requests for new entities and create inputs for
2730the parser. Creating an input from a filename or an URI string is done
2731through the xmlNewInputFromFile() routine. The default entity loader do not
2732handle the PUBLIC identifier associated with an entity (if any). So it just
2733calls xmlNewInputFromFile() with the SYSTEM identifier (which is mandatory in
2734XML).</p>
2735
2736<p>If you want to hook up a catalog mechanism then you simply need to
2737override the default entity loader, here is an example:</p>
2738<pre>#include &lt;libxml/xmlIO.h&gt;
2739
2740xmlExternalEntityLoader defaultLoader = NULL;
2741
2742xmlParserInputPtr
2743xmlMyExternalEntityLoader(const char *URL, const char *ID,
2744 xmlParserCtxtPtr ctxt) {
2745 xmlParserInputPtr ret;
2746 const char *fileID = NULL;
2747 /* lookup for the fileID depending on ID */
2748
2749 ret = xmlNewInputFromFile(ctxt, fileID);
2750 if (ret != NULL)
2751 return(ret);
2752 if (defaultLoader != NULL)
2753 ret = defaultLoader(URL, ID, ctxt);
2754 return(ret);
2755}
2756
2757int main(..) {
2758 ...
2759
2760 /*
2761 * Install our own entity loader
2762 */
2763 defaultLoader = xmlGetExternalEntityLoader();
2764 xmlSetExternalEntityLoader(xmlMyExternalEntityLoader);
2765
2766 ...
2767}</pre>
2768
2769<h3><a name="Example2">Example of customized I/O</a></h3>
2770
2771<p>This example come from <a href="http://xmlsoft.org/messages/0708.html">a
2772real use case</a>, xmlDocDump() closes the FILE * passed by the application
2773and this was a problem. The <a
2774href="http://xmlsoft.org/messages/0711.html">solution</a> was to redefine a
2775new output handler with the closing call deactivated:</p>
2776<ol>
Daniel Veillardc0801af2002-05-28 16:28:42 +00002777 <li>First define a new I/O output allocator where the output don't close
2778 the file:
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002779 <pre>xmlOutputBufferPtr
2780xmlOutputBufferCreateOwn(FILE *file, xmlCharEncodingHandlerPtr encoder) {
2781    xmlOutputBufferPtr ret;
2782    
2783    if (xmlOutputCallbackInitialized == 0)
2784        xmlRegisterDefaultOutputCallbacks();
2785
2786    if (file == NULL) return(NULL);
2787    ret = xmlAllocOutputBuffer(encoder);
2788    if (ret != NULL) {
2789        ret-&gt;context = file;
2790        ret-&gt;writecallback = xmlFileWrite;
2791        ret-&gt;closecallback = NULL; /* No close callback */
2792    }
2793    return(ret); <br>
Daniel Veillard1eb24242002-03-18 11:33:03 +00002794
Daniel Veillard34ce8be2002-03-18 19:37:11 +00002795
2796
Daniel Veillard19274092002-03-25 16:48:03 +00002797
Daniel Veillardb2fb8ed2002-04-01 09:33:12 +00002798
Daniel Veillard75794822002-04-11 16:24:32 +00002799
Daniel Veillarda7084cd2002-04-15 17:12:47 +00002800
Daniel Veillard0bfbb422002-04-26 09:21:45 +00002801
Daniel Veillard93d3a472002-04-26 14:04:55 +00002802
Daniel Veillardcf27f7c2002-04-30 07:12:39 +00002803
Daniel Veillarde6d8e202002-05-02 06:11:10 +00002804
Daniel Veillard9b6fd302002-05-13 12:06:47 +00002805
Daniel Veillardc0801af2002-05-28 16:28:42 +00002806
Daniel Veillard21473672002-06-17 07:29:22 +00002807
Daniel Veillard782afda2002-07-08 15:12:49 +00002808
Daniel Veillard42766c02002-08-22 20:52:17 +00002809
Daniel Veillarde1662542002-08-28 11:50:59 +00002810
Daniel Veillarde16b5742002-09-26 17:50:03 +00002811
Daniel Veillard321be0c2002-10-08 21:26:42 +00002812
Daniel Veillard48267432002-10-18 11:21:38 +00002813
Daniel Veillarddad3f682002-11-17 16:47:27 +00002814
Daniel Veillardc14401e2002-11-20 14:28:17 +00002815
Daniel Veillardf9c4cad2002-11-22 15:57:07 +00002816
Daniel Veillard9b4bb4d2002-12-11 19:28:47 +00002817
Daniel Veillardc1eed322002-12-12 11:01:32 +00002818
Daniel Veillard7ef0fcb2002-12-14 10:38:55 +00002819
Daniel Veillard7b4b2f92003-01-06 13:11:20 +00002820
2821
Daniel Veillarde2830f12003-01-08 17:47:49 +00002822
Daniel Veillard98d071d2003-01-10 09:22:44 +00002823
2824
Daniel Veillard831e8fd2003-01-25 11:45:34 +00002825
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002826} </pre>
2827 </li>
2828 <li>And then use it to save the document:
2829 <pre>FILE *f;
2830xmlOutputBufferPtr output;
2831xmlDocPtr doc;
2832int res;
2833
2834f = ...
2835doc = ....
2836
2837output = xmlOutputBufferCreateOwn(f, NULL);
2838res = xmlSaveFileTo(output, doc, NULL);
2839 </pre>
2840 </li>
2841</ol>
2842
2843<h2><a name="Catalog">Catalog support</a></h2>
2844
2845<p>Table of Content:</p>
2846<ol>
2847 <li><a href="General2">General overview</a></li>
2848 <li><a href="#definition">The definition</a></li>
2849 <li><a href="#Simple">Using catalogs</a></li>
2850 <li><a href="#Some">Some examples</a></li>
2851 <li><a href="#reference">How to tune catalog usage</a></li>
2852 <li><a href="#validate">How to debug catalog processing</a></li>
2853 <li><a href="#Declaring">How to create and maintain catalogs</a></li>
2854 <li><a href="#implemento">The implementor corner quick review of the
2855 API</a></li>
2856 <li><a href="#Other">Other resources</a></li>
2857</ol>
2858
2859<h3><a name="General2">General overview</a></h3>
2860
2861<p>What is a catalog? Basically it's a lookup mechanism used when an entity
2862(a file or a remote resource) references another entity. The catalog lookup
2863is inserted between the moment the reference is recognized by the software
2864(XML parser, stylesheet processing, or even images referenced for inclusion
2865in a rendering) and the time where loading that resource is actually
2866started.</p>
2867
2868<p>It is basically used for 3 things:</p>
2869<ul>
2870 <li>mapping from "logical" names, the public identifiers and a more
2871 concrete name usable for download (and URI). For example it can associate
2872 the logical name
2873 <p>"-//OASIS//DTD DocBook XML V4.1.2//EN"</p>
2874 <p>of the DocBook 4.1.2 XML DTD with the actual URL where it can be
2875 downloaded</p>
2876 <p>http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/xml/4.1.2/docbookx.dtd</p>
2877 </li>
2878 <li>remapping from a given URL to another one, like an HTTP indirection
2879 saying that
2880 <p>"http://www.oasis-open.org/committes/tr.xsl"</p>
2881 <p>should really be looked at</p>
2882 <p>"http://www.oasis-open.org/committes/entity/stylesheets/base/tr.xsl"</p>
2883 </li>
2884 <li>providing a local cache mechanism allowing to load the entities
2885 associated to public identifiers or remote resources, this is a really
2886 important feature for any significant deployment of XML or SGML since it
2887 allows to avoid the aleas and delays associated to fetching remote
2888 resources.</li>
2889</ul>
2890
2891<h3><a name="definition">The definitions</a></h3>
2892
2893<p>Libxml, as of 2.4.3 implements 2 kind of catalogs:</p>
2894<ul>
2895 <li>the older SGML catalogs, the official spec is SGML Open Technical
2896 Resolution TR9401:1997, but is better understood by reading <a
2897 href="http://www.jclark.com/sp/catalog.htm">the SP Catalog page</a> from
2898 James Clark. This is relatively old and not the preferred mode of
2899 operation of libxml.</li>
2900 <li><a href="http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/entity/spec.html">XML
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +00002901 Catalogs</a> is far more flexible, more recent, uses an XML syntax and
2902 should scale quite better. This is the default option of libxml.</li>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002903</ul>
2904
2905<p></p>
2906
2907<h3><a name="Simple">Using catalog</a></h3>
2908
2909<p>In a normal environment libxml will by default check the presence of a
2910catalog in /etc/xml/catalog, and assuming it has been correctly populated,
2911the processing is completely transparent to the document user. To take a
2912concrete example, suppose you are authoring a DocBook document, this one
2913starts with the following DOCTYPE definition:</p>
2914<pre>&lt;?xml version='1.0'?&gt;
2915&lt;!DOCTYPE book PUBLIC "-//Norman Walsh//DTD DocBk XML V3.1.4//EN"
2916 "http://nwalsh.com/docbook/xml/3.1.4/db3xml.dtd"&gt;</pre>
2917
2918<p>When validating the document with libxml, the catalog will be
2919automatically consulted to lookup the public identifier "-//Norman Walsh//DTD
2920DocBk XML V3.1.4//EN" and the system identifier
2921"http://nwalsh.com/docbook/xml/3.1.4/db3xml.dtd", and if these entities have
2922been installed on your system and the catalogs actually point to them, libxml
2923will fetch them from the local disk.</p>
2924
2925<p style="font-size: 10pt"><strong>Note</strong>: Really don't use this
2926DOCTYPE example it's a really old version, but is fine as an example.</p>
2927
2928<p>Libxml will check the catalog each time that it is requested to load an
2929entity, this includes DTD, external parsed entities, stylesheets, etc ... If
2930your system is correctly configured all the authoring phase and processing
2931should use only local files, even if your document stays portable because it
2932uses the canonical public and system ID, referencing the remote document.</p>
2933
2934<h3><a name="Some">Some examples:</a></h3>
2935
2936<p>Here is a couple of fragments from XML Catalogs used in libxml early
2937regression tests in <code>test/catalogs</code> :</p>
2938<pre>&lt;?xml version="1.0"?&gt;
2939&lt;!DOCTYPE catalog PUBLIC
2940 "-//OASIS//DTD Entity Resolution XML Catalog V1.0//EN"
2941 "http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/entity/release/1.0/catalog.dtd"&gt;
2942&lt;catalog xmlns="urn:oasis:names:tc:entity:xmlns:xml:catalog"&gt;
2943 &lt;public publicId="-//OASIS//DTD DocBook XML V4.1.2//EN"
2944 uri="http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/xml/4.1.2/docbookx.dtd"/&gt;
2945...</pre>
2946
2947<p>This is the beginning of a catalog for DocBook 4.1.2, XML Catalogs are
2948written in XML, there is a specific namespace for catalog elements
2949"urn:oasis:names:tc:entity:xmlns:xml:catalog". The first entry in this
2950catalog is a <code>public</code> mapping it allows to associate a Public
2951Identifier with an URI.</p>
2952<pre>...
2953 &lt;rewriteSystem systemIdStartString="http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/"
2954 rewritePrefix="file:///usr/share/xml/docbook/"/&gt;
2955...</pre>
2956
2957<p>A <code>rewriteSystem</code> is a very powerful instruction, it says that
2958any URI starting with a given prefix should be looked at another URI
2959constructed by replacing the prefix with an new one. In effect this acts like
2960a cache system for a full area of the Web. In practice it is extremely useful
2961with a file prefix if you have installed a copy of those resources on your
2962local system.</p>
2963<pre>...
2964&lt;delegatePublic publicIdStartString="-//OASIS//DTD XML Catalog //"
2965 catalog="file:///usr/share/xml/docbook.xml"/&gt;
2966&lt;delegatePublic publicIdStartString="-//OASIS//ENTITIES DocBook XML"
2967 catalog="file:///usr/share/xml/docbook.xml"/&gt;
2968&lt;delegatePublic publicIdStartString="-//OASIS//DTD DocBook XML"
2969 catalog="file:///usr/share/xml/docbook.xml"/&gt;
2970&lt;delegateSystem systemIdStartString="http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/"
2971 catalog="file:///usr/share/xml/docbook.xml"/&gt;
2972&lt;delegateURI uriStartString="http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/"
2973 catalog="file:///usr/share/xml/docbook.xml"/&gt;
2974...</pre>
2975
2976<p>Delegation is the core features which allows to build a tree of catalogs,
2977easier to maintain than a single catalog, based on Public Identifier, System
2978Identifier or URI prefixes it instructs the catalog software to look up
2979entries in another resource. This feature allow to build hierarchies of
2980catalogs, the set of entries presented should be sufficient to redirect the
2981resolution of all DocBook references to the specific catalog in
2982<code>/usr/share/xml/docbook.xml</code> this one in turn could delegate all
2983references for DocBook 4.2.1 to a specific catalog installed at the same time
2984as the DocBook resources on the local machine.</p>
2985
2986<h3><a name="reference">How to tune catalog usage:</a></h3>
2987
2988<p>The user can change the default catalog behaviour by redirecting queries
2989to its own set of catalogs, this can be done by setting the
2990<code>XML_CATALOG_FILES</code> environment variable to a list of catalogs, an
2991empty one should deactivate loading the default <code>/etc/xml/catalog</code>
2992default catalog</p>
2993
2994<h3><a name="validate">How to debug catalog processing:</a></h3>
2995
2996<p>Setting up the <code>XML_DEBUG_CATALOG</code> environment variable will
2997make libxml output debugging informations for each catalog operations, for
2998example:</p>
2999<pre>orchis:~/XML -&gt; xmllint --memory --noout test/ent2
3000warning: failed to load external entity "title.xml"
3001orchis:~/XML -&gt; export XML_DEBUG_CATALOG=
3002orchis:~/XML -&gt; xmllint --memory --noout test/ent2
3003Failed to parse catalog /etc/xml/catalog
3004Failed to parse catalog /etc/xml/catalog
3005warning: failed to load external entity "title.xml"
3006Catalogs cleanup
3007orchis:~/XML -&gt; </pre>
3008
3009<p>The test/ent2 references an entity, running the parser from memory makes
3010the base URI unavailable and the the "title.xml" entity cannot be loaded.
3011Setting up the debug environment variable allows to detect that an attempt is
3012made to load the <code>/etc/xml/catalog</code> but since it's not present the
3013resolution fails.</p>
3014
3015<p>But the most advanced way to debug XML catalog processing is to use the
3016<strong>xmlcatalog</strong> command shipped with libxml2, it allows to load
3017catalogs and make resolution queries to see what is going on. This is also
3018used for the regression tests:</p>
3019<pre>orchis:~/XML -&gt; ./xmlcatalog test/catalogs/docbook.xml \
3020 "-//OASIS//DTD DocBook XML V4.1.2//EN"
3021http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/xml/4.1.2/docbookx.dtd
3022orchis:~/XML -&gt; </pre>
3023
3024<p>For debugging what is going on, adding one -v flags increase the verbosity
3025level to indicate the processing done (adding a second flag also indicate
3026what elements are recognized at parsing):</p>
3027<pre>orchis:~/XML -&gt; ./xmlcatalog -v test/catalogs/docbook.xml \
3028 "-//OASIS//DTD DocBook XML V4.1.2//EN"
3029Parsing catalog test/catalogs/docbook.xml's content
3030Found public match -//OASIS//DTD DocBook XML V4.1.2//EN
3031http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/xml/4.1.2/docbookx.dtd
3032Catalogs cleanup
3033orchis:~/XML -&gt; </pre>
3034
3035<p>A shell interface is also available to debug and process multiple queries
3036(and for regression tests):</p>
3037<pre>orchis:~/XML -&gt; ./xmlcatalog -shell test/catalogs/docbook.xml \
3038 "-//OASIS//DTD DocBook XML V4.1.2//EN"
3039&gt; help
3040Commands available:
3041public PublicID: make a PUBLIC identifier lookup
3042system SystemID: make a SYSTEM identifier lookup
3043resolve PublicID SystemID: do a full resolver lookup
3044add 'type' 'orig' 'replace' : add an entry
3045del 'values' : remove values
3046dump: print the current catalog state
3047debug: increase the verbosity level
3048quiet: decrease the verbosity level
3049exit: quit the shell
3050&gt; public "-//OASIS//DTD DocBook XML V4.1.2//EN"
3051http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/xml/4.1.2/docbookx.dtd
3052&gt; quit
3053orchis:~/XML -&gt; </pre>
3054
3055<p>This should be sufficient for most debugging purpose, this was actually
3056used heavily to debug the XML Catalog implementation itself.</p>
3057
3058<h3><a name="Declaring">How to create and maintain</a> catalogs:</h3>
3059
3060<p>Basically XML Catalogs are XML files, you can either use XML tools to
3061manage them or use <strong>xmlcatalog</strong> for this. The basic step is
3062to create a catalog the -create option provide this facility:</p>
3063<pre>orchis:~/XML -&gt; ./xmlcatalog --create tst.xml
3064&lt;?xml version="1.0"?&gt;
3065&lt;!DOCTYPE catalog PUBLIC "-//OASIS//DTD Entity Resolution XML Catalog V1.0//EN"
3066 "http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/entity/release/1.0/catalog.dtd"&gt;
3067&lt;catalog xmlns="urn:oasis:names:tc:entity:xmlns:xml:catalog"/&gt;
3068orchis:~/XML -&gt; </pre>
3069
3070<p>By default xmlcatalog does not overwrite the original catalog and save the
3071result on the standard output, this can be overridden using the -noout
3072option. The <code>-add</code> command allows to add entries in the
3073catalog:</p>
3074<pre>orchis:~/XML -&gt; ./xmlcatalog --noout --create --add "public" \
3075 "-//OASIS//DTD DocBook XML V4.1.2//EN" \
3076 http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/xml/4.1.2/docbookx.dtd tst.xml
3077orchis:~/XML -&gt; cat tst.xml
3078&lt;?xml version="1.0"?&gt;
3079&lt;!DOCTYPE catalog PUBLIC "-//OASIS//DTD Entity Resolution XML Catalog V1.0//EN" \
3080 "http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/entity/release/1.0/catalog.dtd"&gt;
3081&lt;catalog xmlns="urn:oasis:names:tc:entity:xmlns:xml:catalog"&gt;
3082&lt;public publicId="-//OASIS//DTD DocBook XML V4.1.2//EN"
3083 uri="http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/xml/4.1.2/docbookx.dtd"/&gt;
3084&lt;/catalog&gt;
3085orchis:~/XML -&gt; </pre>
3086
3087<p>The <code>-add</code> option will always take 3 parameters even if some of
3088the XML Catalog constructs (like nextCatalog) will have only a single
3089argument, just pass a third empty string, it will be ignored.</p>
3090
3091<p>Similarly the <code>-del</code> option remove matching entries from the
3092catalog:</p>
3093<pre>orchis:~/XML -&gt; ./xmlcatalog --del \
3094 "http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/xml/4.1.2/docbookx.dtd" tst.xml
3095&lt;?xml version="1.0"?&gt;
3096&lt;!DOCTYPE catalog PUBLIC "-//OASIS//DTD Entity Resolution XML Catalog V1.0//EN"
3097 "http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/entity/release/1.0/catalog.dtd"&gt;
3098&lt;catalog xmlns="urn:oasis:names:tc:entity:xmlns:xml:catalog"/&gt;
3099orchis:~/XML -&gt; </pre>
3100
3101<p>The catalog is now empty. Note that the matching of <code>-del</code> is
3102exact and would have worked in a similar fashion with the Public ID
3103string.</p>
3104
3105<p>This is rudimentary but should be sufficient to manage a not too complex
3106catalog tree of resources.</p>
3107
3108<h3><a name="implemento">The implementor corner quick review of the
3109API:</a></h3>
3110
3111<p>First, and like for every other module of libxml, there is an
3112automatically generated <a href="html/libxml-catalog.html">API page for
3113catalog support</a>.</p>
3114
3115<p>The header for the catalog interfaces should be included as:</p>
3116<pre>#include &lt;libxml/catalog.h&gt;</pre>
3117
3118<p>The API is voluntarily kept very simple. First it is not obvious that
3119applications really need access to it since it is the default behaviour of
3120libxml (Note: it is possible to completely override libxml default catalog by
3121using <a href="html/libxml-parser.html">xmlSetExternalEntityLoader</a> to
3122plug an application specific resolver).</p>
3123
3124<p>Basically libxml support 2 catalog lists:</p>
3125<ul>
3126 <li>the default one, global shared by all the application</li>
3127 <li>a per-document catalog, this one is built if the document uses the
3128 <code>oasis-xml-catalog</code> PIs to specify its own catalog list, it is
3129 associated to the parser context and destroyed when the parsing context
3130 is destroyed.</li>
3131</ul>
3132
3133<p>the document one will be used first if it exists.</p>
3134
3135<h4>Initialization routines:</h4>
3136
3137<p>xmlInitializeCatalog(), xmlLoadCatalog() and xmlLoadCatalogs() should be
3138used at startup to initialize the catalog, if the catalog should be
3139initialized with specific values xmlLoadCatalog() or xmlLoadCatalogs()
3140should be called before xmlInitializeCatalog() which would otherwise do a
3141default initialization first.</p>
3142
3143<p>The xmlCatalogAddLocal() call is used by the parser to grow the document
3144own catalog list if needed.</p>
3145
3146<h4>Preferences setup:</h4>
3147
3148<p>The XML Catalog spec requires the possibility to select default
3149preferences between public and system delegation,
3150xmlCatalogSetDefaultPrefer() allows this, xmlCatalogSetDefaults() and
3151xmlCatalogGetDefaults() allow to control if XML Catalogs resolution should
3152be forbidden, allowed for global catalog, for document catalog or both, the
3153default is to allow both.</p>
3154
3155<p>And of course xmlCatalogSetDebug() allows to generate debug messages
3156(through the xmlGenericError() mechanism).</p>
3157
3158<h4>Querying routines:</h4>
3159
3160<p>xmlCatalogResolve(), xmlCatalogResolveSystem(), xmlCatalogResolvePublic()
3161and xmlCatalogResolveURI() are relatively explicit if you read the XML
3162Catalog specification they correspond to section 7 algorithms, they should
3163also work if you have loaded an SGML catalog with a simplified semantic.</p>
3164
3165<p>xmlCatalogLocalResolve() and xmlCatalogLocalResolveURI() are the same but
3166operate on the document catalog list</p>
3167
3168<h4>Cleanup and Miscellaneous:</h4>
3169
3170<p>xmlCatalogCleanup() free-up the global catalog, xmlCatalogFreeLocal() is
3171the per-document equivalent.</p>
3172
3173<p>xmlCatalogAdd() and xmlCatalogRemove() are used to dynamically modify the
3174first catalog in the global list, and xmlCatalogDump() allows to dump a
3175catalog state, those routines are primarily designed for xmlcatalog, I'm not
3176sure that exposing more complex interfaces (like navigation ones) would be
3177really useful.</p>
3178
3179<p>The xmlParseCatalogFile() is a function used to load XML Catalog files,
3180it's similar as xmlParseFile() except it bypass all catalog lookups, it's
3181provided because this functionality may be useful for client tools.</p>
3182
3183<h4>threaded environments:</h4>
3184
3185<p>Since the catalog tree is built progressively, some care has been taken to
3186try to avoid troubles in multithreaded environments. The code is now thread
3187safe assuming that the libxml library has been compiled with threads
3188support.</p>
3189
3190<p></p>
3191
3192<h3><a name="Other">Other resources</a></h3>
3193
3194<p>The XML Catalog specification is relatively recent so there isn't much
3195literature to point at:</p>
3196<ul>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00003197 <li>You can find a good rant from Norm Walsh about <a
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00003198 href="http://www.arbortext.com/Think_Tank/XML_Resources/Issue_Three/issue_three.html">the
3199 need for catalogs</a>, it provides a lot of context informations even if
Daniel Veillard93d3a472002-04-26 14:04:55 +00003200 I don't agree with everything presented. Norm also wrote a more recent
3201 article <a
3202 href="http://wwws.sun.com/software/xml/developers/resolver/article/">XML
3203 entities and URI resolvers</a> describing them.</li>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00003204 <li>An <a href="http://home.ccil.org/~cowan/XML/XCatalog.html">old XML
3205 catalog proposal</a> from John Cowan</li>
3206 <li>The <a href="http://www.rddl.org/">Resource Directory Description
3207 Language</a> (RDDL) another catalog system but more oriented toward
3208 providing metadata for XML namespaces.</li>
3209 <li>the page from the OASIS Technical <a
3210 href="http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/entity/">Committee on Entity
3211 Resolution</a> who maintains XML Catalog, you will find pointers to the
3212 specification update, some background and pointers to others tools
3213 providing XML Catalog support</li>
Daniel Veillard35e937a2002-01-19 22:21:54 +00003214 <li>Here is a <a href="buildDocBookCatalog">shell script</a> to generate
3215 XML Catalogs for DocBook 4.1.2 . If it can write to the /etc/xml/
3216 directory, it will set-up /etc/xml/catalog and /etc/xml/docbook based on
3217 the resources found on the system. Otherwise it will just create
3218 ~/xmlcatalog and ~/dbkxmlcatalog and doing:
Daniel Veillardc575b992002-02-08 13:28:40 +00003219 <p><code>export XMLCATALOG=$HOME/xmlcatalog</code></p>
Daniel Veillard35e937a2002-01-19 22:21:54 +00003220 <p>should allow to process DocBook documentations without requiring
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00003221 network accesses for the DTD or stylesheets</p>
Daniel Veillard35e937a2002-01-19 22:21:54 +00003222 </li>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00003223 <li>I have uploaded <a href="ftp://xmlsoft.org/test/dbk412catalog.tar.gz">a
Daniel Veillard35e937a2002-01-19 22:21:54 +00003224 small tarball</a> containing XML Catalogs for DocBook 4.1.2 which seems
3225 to work fine for me too</li>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00003226 <li>The <a href="http://www.xmlsoft.org/xmlcatalog_man.html">xmlcatalog
3227 manual page</a></li>
3228</ul>
3229
3230<p>If you have suggestions for corrections or additions, simply contact
3231me:</p>
3232
3233<h2><a name="library">The parser interfaces</a></h2>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003234
3235<p>This section is directly intended to help programmers getting bootstrapped
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +00003236using the XML library from the C language. It is not intended to be
3237extensive. I hope the automatically generated documents will provide the
3238completeness required, but as a separate set of documents. The interfaces of
3239the XML library are by principle low level, there is nearly zero abstraction.
3240Those interested in a higher level API should <a href="#DOM">look at
3241DOM</a>.</p>
Daniel Veillardccb09631998-10-27 06:21:04 +00003242
Daniel Veillard9cb5ff42001-01-29 08:22:21 +00003243<p>The <a href="html/libxml-parser.html">parser interfaces for XML</a> are
3244separated from the <a href="html/libxml-htmlparser.html">HTML parser
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00003245interfaces</a>. Let's have a look at how the XML parser can be called:</p>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +00003246
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00003247<h3><a name="Invoking">Invoking the parser : the pull method</a></h3>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003248
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00003249<p>Usually, the first thing to do is to read an XML input. The parser accepts
3250documents either from in-memory strings or from files. The functions are
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003251defined in "parser.h":</p>
Daniel Veillard10c6a8f1998-10-28 01:00:12 +00003252<dl>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003253 <dt><code>xmlDocPtr xmlParseMemory(char *buffer, int size);</code></dt>
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00003254 <dd><p>Parse a null-terminated string containing the document.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003255 </dd>
Daniel Veillard10c6a8f1998-10-28 01:00:12 +00003256</dl>
3257<dl>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003258 <dt><code>xmlDocPtr xmlParseFile(const char *filename);</code></dt>
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +00003259 <dd><p>Parse an XML document contained in a (possibly compressed)
3260 file.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003261 </dd>
Daniel Veillard10c6a8f1998-10-28 01:00:12 +00003262</dl>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003263
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00003264<p>The parser returns a pointer to the document structure (or NULL in case of
Daniel Veillard10c6a8f1998-10-28 01:00:12 +00003265failure).</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003266
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00003267<h3 id="Invoking1">Invoking the parser: the push method</h3>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +00003268
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +00003269<p>In order for the application to keep the control when the document is
3270being fetched (which is common for GUI based programs) libxml provides a push
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00003271interface, too, as of version 1.8.3. Here are the interface functions:</p>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +00003272<pre>xmlParserCtxtPtr xmlCreatePushParserCtxt(xmlSAXHandlerPtr sax,
3273 void *user_data,
3274 const char *chunk,
3275 int size,
3276 const char *filename);
3277int xmlParseChunk (xmlParserCtxtPtr ctxt,
3278 const char *chunk,
3279 int size,
3280 int terminate);</pre>
3281
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00003282<p>and here is a simple example showing how to use the interface:</p>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +00003283<pre> FILE *f;
3284
3285 f = fopen(filename, "r");
3286 if (f != NULL) {
3287 int res, size = 1024;
3288 char chars[1024];
3289 xmlParserCtxtPtr ctxt;
3290
3291 res = fread(chars, 1, 4, f);
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00003292 if (res &gt; 0) {
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +00003293 ctxt = xmlCreatePushParserCtxt(NULL, NULL,
3294 chars, res, filename);
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00003295 while ((res = fread(chars, 1, size, f)) &gt; 0) {
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +00003296 xmlParseChunk(ctxt, chars, res, 0);
3297 }
3298 xmlParseChunk(ctxt, chars, 0, 1);
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00003299 doc = ctxt-&gt;myDoc;
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +00003300 xmlFreeParserCtxt(ctxt);
3301 }
3302 }</pre>
3303
Daniel Veillardec70e912001-02-26 20:10:45 +00003304<p>The HTML parser embedded into libxml also has a push interface; the
3305functions are just prefixed by "html" rather than "xml".</p>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +00003306
3307<h3 id="Invoking2">Invoking the parser: the SAX interface</h3>
3308
Daniel Veillardec70e912001-02-26 20:10:45 +00003309<p>The tree-building interface makes the parser memory-hungry, first loading
3310the document in memory and then building the tree itself. Reading a document
3311without building the tree is possible using the SAX interfaces (see SAX.h and
3312<a href="http://www.daa.com.au/~james/gnome/xml-sax/xml-sax.html">James
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00003313Henstridge's documentation</a>). Note also that the push interface can be
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +00003314limited to SAX: just use the two first arguments of
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +00003315<code>xmlCreatePushParserCtxt()</code>.</p>
Daniel Veillardccb09631998-10-27 06:21:04 +00003316
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +00003317<h3><a name="Building">Building a tree from scratch</a></h3>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003318
3319<p>The other way to get an XML tree in memory is by building it. Basically
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +00003320there is a set of functions dedicated to building new elements. (These are
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +00003321also described in &lt;libxml/tree.h&gt;.) For example, here is a piece of
3322code that produces the XML document used in the previous examples:</p>
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00003323<pre> #include &lt;libxml/tree.h&gt;
Daniel Veillard361d8452000-04-03 19:48:13 +00003324 xmlDocPtr doc;
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +00003325 xmlNodePtr tree, subtree;
3326
3327 doc = xmlNewDoc("1.0");
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00003328 doc-&gt;children = xmlNewDocNode(doc, NULL, "EXAMPLE", NULL);
3329 xmlSetProp(doc-&gt;children, "prop1", "gnome is great");
3330 xmlSetProp(doc-&gt;children, "prop2", "&amp; linux too");
3331 tree = xmlNewChild(doc-&gt;children, NULL, "head", NULL);
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +00003332 subtree = xmlNewChild(tree, NULL, "title", "Welcome to Gnome");
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00003333 tree = xmlNewChild(doc-&gt;children, NULL, "chapter", NULL);
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +00003334 subtree = xmlNewChild(tree, NULL, "title", "The Linux adventure");
3335 subtree = xmlNewChild(tree, NULL, "p", "bla bla bla ...");
3336 subtree = xmlNewChild(tree, NULL, "image", NULL);
3337 xmlSetProp(subtree, "href", "linus.gif");</pre>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003338
3339<p>Not really rocket science ...</p>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +00003340
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +00003341<h3><a name="Traversing">Traversing the tree</a></h3>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003342
Daniel Veillard9cb5ff42001-01-29 08:22:21 +00003343<p>Basically by <a href="html/libxml-tree.html">including "tree.h"</a> your
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +00003344code has access to the internal structure of all the elements of the tree.
3345The names should be somewhat simple like <strong>parent</strong>,
Daniel Veillard306be992000-07-03 12:38:45 +00003346<strong>children</strong>, <strong>next</strong>, <strong>prev</strong>,
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00003347<strong>properties</strong>, etc... For example, still with the previous
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +00003348example:</p>
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00003349<pre><code>doc-&gt;children-&gt;children-&gt;children</code></pre>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003350
3351<p>points to the title element,</p>
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +00003352<pre>doc-&gt;children-&gt;children-&gt;next-&gt;children-&gt;children</pre>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003353
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +00003354<p>points to the text node containing the chapter title "The Linux
3355adventure".</p>
Daniel Veillard10c6a8f1998-10-28 01:00:12 +00003356
Daniel Veillardb24054a1999-12-18 15:32:46 +00003357<p><strong>NOTE</strong>: XML allows <em>PI</em>s and <em>comments</em> to be
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00003358present before the document root, so <code>doc-&gt;children</code> may point
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +00003359to an element which is not the document Root Element; a function
Daniel Veillard5cb5ab81999-12-21 15:35:29 +00003360<code>xmlDocGetRootElement()</code> was added for this purpose.</p>
Daniel Veillardb24054a1999-12-18 15:32:46 +00003361
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +00003362<h3><a name="Modifying">Modifying the tree</a></h3>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003363
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00003364<p>Functions are provided for reading and writing the document content. Here
Daniel Veillard9cb5ff42001-01-29 08:22:21 +00003365is an excerpt from the <a href="html/libxml-tree.html">tree API</a>:</p>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +00003366<dl>
Daniel Veillarddd6b3671999-09-23 22:19:22 +00003367 <dt><code>xmlAttrPtr xmlSetProp(xmlNodePtr node, const xmlChar *name, const
3368 xmlChar *value);</code></dt>
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +00003369 <dd><p>This sets (or changes) an attribute carried by an ELEMENT node.
3370 The value can be NULL.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003371 </dd>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +00003372</dl>
3373<dl>
Daniel Veillarddd6b3671999-09-23 22:19:22 +00003374 <dt><code>const xmlChar *xmlGetProp(xmlNodePtr node, const xmlChar
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003375 *name);</code></dt>
Daniel Veillardc92c3042000-09-29 02:42:04 +00003376 <dd><p>This function returns a pointer to new copy of the property
3377 content. Note that the user must deallocate the result.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003378 </dd>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +00003379</dl>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003380
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +00003381<p>Two functions are provided for reading and writing the text associated
3382with elements:</p>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +00003383<dl>
Daniel Veillarddd6b3671999-09-23 22:19:22 +00003384 <dt><code>xmlNodePtr xmlStringGetNodeList(xmlDocPtr doc, const xmlChar
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003385 *value);</code></dt>
Daniel Veillardec70e912001-02-26 20:10:45 +00003386 <dd><p>This function takes an "external" string and converts it to one
3387 text node or possibly to a list of entity and text nodes. All
3388 non-predefined entity references like &amp;Gnome; will be stored
3389 internally as entity nodes, hence the result of the function may not be
3390 a single node.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003391 </dd>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +00003392</dl>
3393<dl>
Daniel Veillarddd6b3671999-09-23 22:19:22 +00003394 <dt><code>xmlChar *xmlNodeListGetString(xmlDocPtr doc, xmlNodePtr list, int
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003395 inLine);</code></dt>
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +00003396 <dd><p>This function is the inverse of
3397 <code>xmlStringGetNodeList()</code>. It generates a new string
3398 containing the content of the text and entity nodes. Note the extra
3399 argument inLine. If this argument is set to 1, the function will expand
3400 entity references. For example, instead of returning the &amp;Gnome;
3401 XML encoding in the string, it will substitute it with its value (say,
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +00003402 "GNU Network Object Model Environment").</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003403 </dd>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +00003404</dl>
Daniel Veillard10c6a8f1998-10-28 01:00:12 +00003405
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +00003406<h3><a name="Saving">Saving a tree</a></h3>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003407
3408<p>Basically 3 options are possible:</p>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +00003409<dl>
Daniel Veillarddd6b3671999-09-23 22:19:22 +00003410 <dt><code>void xmlDocDumpMemory(xmlDocPtr cur, xmlChar**mem, int
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003411 *size);</code></dt>
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00003412 <dd><p>Returns a buffer into which the document has been saved.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003413 </dd>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +00003414</dl>
3415<dl>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003416 <dt><code>extern void xmlDocDump(FILE *f, xmlDocPtr doc);</code></dt>
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00003417 <dd><p>Dumps a document to an open file descriptor.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003418 </dd>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +00003419</dl>
3420<dl>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003421 <dt><code>int xmlSaveFile(const char *filename, xmlDocPtr cur);</code></dt>
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +00003422 <dd><p>Saves the document to a file. In this case, the compression
3423 interface is triggered if it has been turned on.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003424 </dd>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +00003425</dl>
Daniel Veillard10c6a8f1998-10-28 01:00:12 +00003426
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +00003427<h3><a name="Compressio">Compression</a></h3>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003428
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00003429<p>The library transparently handles compression when doing file-based
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +00003430accesses. The level of compression on saves can be turned on either globally
3431or individually for one file:</p>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +00003432<dl>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003433 <dt><code>int xmlGetDocCompressMode (xmlDocPtr doc);</code></dt>
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00003434 <dd><p>Gets the document compression ratio (0-9).</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003435 </dd>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +00003436</dl>
3437<dl>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003438 <dt><code>void xmlSetDocCompressMode (xmlDocPtr doc, int mode);</code></dt>
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00003439 <dd><p>Sets the document compression ratio.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003440 </dd>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +00003441</dl>
3442<dl>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003443 <dt><code>int xmlGetCompressMode(void);</code></dt>
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00003444 <dd><p>Gets the default compression ratio.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003445 </dd>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +00003446</dl>
3447<dl>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003448 <dt><code>void xmlSetCompressMode(int mode);</code></dt>
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00003449 <dd><p>Sets the default compression ratio.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003450 </dd>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +00003451</dl>
3452
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +00003453<h2><a name="Entities">Entities or no entities</a></h2>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00003454
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00003455<p>Entities in principle are similar to simple C macros. An entity defines an
3456abbreviation for a given string that you can reuse many times throughout the
3457content of your document. Entities are especially useful when a given string
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +00003458may occur frequently within a document, or to confine the change needed to a
3459document to a restricted area in the internal subset of the document (at the
3460beginning). Example:</p>
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00003461<pre>1 &lt;?xml version="1.0"?&gt;
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +000034622 &lt;!DOCTYPE EXAMPLE SYSTEM "example.dtd" [
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +000034633 &lt;!ENTITY xml "Extensible Markup Language"&gt;
34644 ]&gt;
34655 &lt;EXAMPLE&gt;
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +000034666 &amp;xml;
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +000034677 &lt;/EXAMPLE&gt;</pre>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00003468
3469<p>Line 3 declares the xml entity. Line 6 uses the xml entity, by prefixing
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +00003470its name with '&amp;' and following it by ';' without any spaces added. There
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00003471are 5 predefined entities in libxml allowing you to escape characters with
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00003472predefined meaning in some parts of the xml document content:
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00003473<strong>&amp;lt;</strong> for the character '&lt;', <strong>&amp;gt;</strong>
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00003474for the character '&gt;', <strong>&amp;apos;</strong> for the character ''',
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00003475<strong>&amp;quot;</strong> for the character '"', and
3476<strong>&amp;amp;</strong> for the character '&amp;'.</p>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00003477
3478<p>One of the problems related to entities is that you may want the parser to
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +00003479substitute an entity's content so that you can see the replacement text in
3480your application. Or you may prefer to keep entity references as such in the
3481content to be able to save the document back without losing this usually
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +00003482precious information (if the user went through the pain of explicitly
3483defining entities, he may have a a rather negative attitude if you blindly
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00003484substitute them as saving time). The <a
Daniel Veillard9cb5ff42001-01-29 08:22:21 +00003485href="html/libxml-parser.html#XMLSUBSTITUTEENTITIESDEFAULT">xmlSubstituteEntitiesDefault()</a>
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00003486function allows you to check and change the behaviour, which is to not
3487substitute entities by default.</p>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00003488
3489<p>Here is the DOM tree built by libxml for the previous document in the
3490default case:</p>
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00003491<pre>/gnome/src/gnome-xml -&gt; ./xmllint --debug test/ent1
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00003492DOCUMENT
3493version=1.0
3494 ELEMENT EXAMPLE
3495 TEXT
3496 content=
3497 ENTITY_REF
3498 INTERNAL_GENERAL_ENTITY xml
3499 content=Extensible Markup Language
3500 TEXT
3501 content=</pre>
3502
3503<p>And here is the result when substituting entities:</p>
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00003504<pre>/gnome/src/gnome-xml -&gt; ./tester --debug --noent test/ent1
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00003505DOCUMENT
3506version=1.0
3507 ELEMENT EXAMPLE
3508 TEXT
3509 content= Extensible Markup Language</pre>
3510
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00003511<p>So, entities or no entities? Basically, it depends on your use case. I
3512suggest that you keep the non-substituting default behaviour and avoid using
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00003513entities in your XML document or data if you are not willing to handle the
3514entity references elements in the DOM tree.</p>
3515
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +00003516<p>Note that at save time libxml enforces the conversion of the predefined
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00003517entities where necessary to prevent well-formedness problems, and will also
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +00003518transparently replace those with chars (i.e. it will not generate entity
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00003519reference elements in the DOM tree or call the reference() SAX callback when
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00003520finding them in the input).</p>
3521
Daniel Veillard7b9c4b72000-08-25 16:26:50 +00003522<p><span style="background-color: #FF0000">WARNING</span>: handling entities
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +00003523on top of the libxml SAX interface is difficult!!! If you plan to use
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00003524non-predefined entities in your documents, then the learning curve to handle
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +00003525then using the SAX API may be long. If you plan to use complex documents, I
Daniel Veillard7b9c4b72000-08-25 16:26:50 +00003526strongly suggest you consider using the DOM interface instead and let libxml
Daniel Veillard8c6d6af2000-08-25 17:14:13 +00003527deal with the complexity rather than trying to do it yourself.</p>
Daniel Veillard7b9c4b72000-08-25 16:26:50 +00003528
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +00003529<h2><a name="Namespaces">Namespaces</a></h2>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00003530
Daniel Veillardec303412000-03-24 13:41:54 +00003531<p>The libxml library implements <a
3532href="http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml-names/">XML namespaces</a> support by
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00003533recognizing namespace constructs in the input, and does namespace lookup
Daniel Veillardec303412000-03-24 13:41:54 +00003534automatically when building the DOM tree. A namespace declaration is
3535associated with an in-memory structure and all elements or attributes within
3536that namespace point to it. Hence testing the namespace is a simple and fast
3537equality operation at the user level.</p>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00003538
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +00003539<p>I suggest that people using libxml use a namespace, and declare it in the
3540root element of their document as the default namespace. Then they don't need
3541to use the prefix in the content but we will have a basis for future semantic
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +00003542refinement and merging of data from different sources. This doesn't increase
Daniel Veillardec70e912001-02-26 20:10:45 +00003543the size of the XML output significantly, but significantly increases its
3544value in the long-term. Example:</p>
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00003545<pre>&lt;mydoc xmlns="http://mydoc.example.org/schemas/"&gt;
3546 &lt;elem1&gt;...&lt;/elem1&gt;
3547 &lt;elem2&gt;...&lt;/elem2&gt;
3548&lt;/mydoc&gt;</pre>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00003549
Daniel Veillardec70e912001-02-26 20:10:45 +00003550<p>The namespace value has to be an absolute URL, but the URL doesn't have to
3551point to any existing resource on the Web. It will bind all the element and
Daniel Veillardc0801af2002-05-28 16:28:42 +00003552attributes with that URL. I suggest to use an URL within a domain you
3553control, and that the URL should contain some kind of version information if
3554possible. For example, <code>"http://www.gnome.org/gnumeric/1.0/"</code> is a
3555good namespace scheme.</p>
Daniel Veillardec303412000-03-24 13:41:54 +00003556
3557<p>Then when you load a file, make sure that a namespace carrying the
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00003558version-independent prefix is installed on the root element of your document,
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00003559and if the version information don't match something you know, warn the user
3560and be liberal in what you accept as the input. Also do *not* try to base
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00003561namespace checking on the prefix value. &lt;foo:text&gt; may be exactly the
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +00003562same as &lt;bar:text&gt; in another document. What really matters is the URI
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00003563associated with the element or the attribute, not the prefix string (which is
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +00003564just a shortcut for the full URI). In libxml, element and attributes have an
Daniel Veillardec303412000-03-24 13:41:54 +00003565<code>ns</code> field pointing to an xmlNs structure detailing the namespace
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +00003566prefix and its URI.</p>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00003567
3568<p>@@Interfaces@@</p>
3569
3570<p>@@Examples@@</p>
3571
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +00003572<p>Usually people object to using namespaces together with validity checking.
3573I will try to make sure that using namespaces won't break validity checking,
3574so even if you plan to use or currently are using validation I strongly
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +00003575suggest adding namespaces to your document. A default namespace scheme
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00003576<code>xmlns="http://...."</code> should not break validity even on less
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +00003577flexible parsers. Using namespaces to mix and differentiate content coming
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +00003578from multiple DTDs will certainly break current validation schemes. I will
3579try to provide ways to do this, but this may not be portable or
3580standardized.</p>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00003581
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00003582<h2><a name="Upgrading">Upgrading 1.x code</a></h2>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00003583
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00003584<p>Incompatible changes:</p>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00003585
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00003586<p>Version 2 of libxml is the first version introducing serious backward
3587incompatible changes. The main goals were:</p>
3588<ul>
3589 <li>a general cleanup. A number of mistakes inherited from the very early
3590 versions couldn't be changed due to compatibility constraints. Example
3591 the "childs" element in the nodes.</li>
3592 <li>Uniformization of the various nodes, at least for their header and link
3593 parts (doc, parent, children, prev, next), the goal is a simpler
3594 programming model and simplifying the task of the DOM implementors.</li>
3595 <li>better conformances to the XML specification, for example version 1.x
3596 had an heuristic to try to detect ignorable white spaces. As a result the
3597 SAX event generated were ignorableWhitespace() while the spec requires
3598 character() in that case. This also mean that a number of DOM node
3599 containing blank text may populate the DOM tree which were not present
3600 before.</li>
3601</ul>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00003602
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00003603<h3>How to fix libxml-1.x code:</h3>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00003604
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00003605<p>So client code of libxml designed to run with version 1.x may have to be
3606changed to compile against version 2.x of libxml. Here is a list of changes
3607that I have collected, they may not be sufficient, so in case you find other
3608change which are required, <a href="mailto:Daniel.Ïeillardw3.org">drop me a
3609mail</a>:</p>
3610<ol>
3611 <li>The package name have changed from libxml to libxml2, the library name
3612 is now -lxml2 . There is a new xml2-config script which should be used to
3613 select the right parameters libxml2</li>
3614 <li>Node <strong>childs</strong> field has been renamed
3615 <strong>children</strong> so s/childs/children/g should be applied
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00003616 (probability of having "childs" anywhere else is close to 0+</li>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00003617 <li>The document don't have anymore a <strong>root</strong> element it has
3618 been replaced by <strong>children</strong> and usually you will get a
3619 list of element here. For example a Dtd element for the internal subset
3620 and it's declaration may be found in that list, as well as processing
3621 instructions or comments found before or after the document root element.
3622 Use <strong>xmlDocGetRootElement(doc)</strong> to get the root element of
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00003623 a document. Alternatively if you are sure to not reference DTDs nor have
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00003624 PIs or comments before or after the root element
3625 s/-&gt;root/-&gt;children/g will probably do it.</li>
3626 <li>The white space issue, this one is more complex, unless special case of
3627 validating parsing, the line breaks and spaces usually used for indenting
3628 and formatting the document content becomes significant. So they are
3629 reported by SAX and if your using the DOM tree, corresponding nodes are
3630 generated. Too approach can be taken:
3631 <ol>
3632 <li>lazy one, use the compatibility call
3633 <strong>xmlKeepBlanksDefault(0)</strong> but be aware that you are
3634 relying on a special (and possibly broken) set of heuristics of
3635 libxml to detect ignorable blanks. Don't complain if it breaks or
3636 make your application not 100% clean w.r.t. to it's input.</li>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00003637 <li>the Right Way: change you code to accept possibly insignificant
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00003638 blanks characters, or have your tree populated with weird blank text
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00003639 nodes. You can spot them using the commodity function
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00003640 <strong>xmlIsBlankNode(node)</strong> returning 1 for such blank
3641 nodes.</li>
3642 </ol>
3643 <p>Note also that with the new default the output functions don't add any
3644 extra indentation when saving a tree in order to be able to round trip
3645 (read and save) without inflating the document with extra formatting
3646 chars.</p>
3647 </li>
3648 <li>The include path has changed to $prefix/libxml/ and the includes
3649 themselves uses this new prefix in includes instructions... If you are
3650 using (as expected) the
3651 <pre>xml2-config --cflags</pre>
3652 <p>output to generate you compile commands this will probably work out of
3653 the box</p>
3654 </li>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00003655 <li>xmlDetectCharEncoding takes an extra argument indicating the length in
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00003656 byte of the head of the document available for character detection.</li>
3657</ol>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00003658
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00003659<h3>Ensuring both libxml-1.x and libxml-2.x compatibility</h3>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00003660
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00003661<p>Two new version of libxml (1.8.11) and libxml2 (2.3.4) have been released
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00003662to allow smooth upgrade of existing libxml v1code while retaining
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00003663compatibility. They offers the following:</p>
3664<ol>
3665 <li>similar include naming, one should use
3666 <strong>#include&lt;libxml/...&gt;</strong> in both cases.</li>
3667 <li>similar identifiers defined via macros for the child and root fields:
3668 respectively <strong>xmlChildrenNode</strong> and
3669 <strong>xmlRootNode</strong></li>
3670 <li>a new macro <strong>LIBXML_TEST_VERSION</strong> which should be
3671 inserted once in the client code</li>
3672</ol>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00003673
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00003674<p>So the roadmap to upgrade your existing libxml applications is the
3675following:</p>
3676<ol>
3677 <li>install the libxml-1.8.8 (and libxml-devel-1.8.8) packages</li>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00003678 <li>find all occurrences where the xmlDoc <strong>root</strong> field is
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00003679 used and change it to <strong>xmlRootNode</strong></li>
Daniel Veillardc0801af2002-05-28 16:28:42 +00003680 <li>similarly find all occurrences where the xmlNode
3681 <strong>childs</strong> field is used and change it to
3682 <strong>xmlChildrenNode</strong></li>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00003683 <li>add a <strong>LIBXML_TEST_VERSION</strong> macro somewhere in your
3684 <strong>main()</strong> or in the library init entry point</li>
3685 <li>Recompile, check compatibility, it should still work</li>
Daniel Veillardc0801af2002-05-28 16:28:42 +00003686 <li>Change your configure script to look first for xml2-config and fall
3687 back using xml-config . Use the --cflags and --libs output of the command
3688 as the Include and Linking parameters needed to use libxml.</li>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00003689 <li>install libxml2-2.3.x and libxml2-devel-2.3.x (libxml-1.8.y and
3690 libxml-devel-1.8.y can be kept simultaneously)</li>
3691 <li>remove your config.cache, relaunch your configuration mechanism, and
3692 recompile, if steps 2 and 3 were done right it should compile as-is</li>
3693 <li>Test that your application is still running correctly, if not this may
3694 be due to extra empty nodes due to formating spaces being kept in libxml2
3695 contrary to libxml1, in that case insert xmlKeepBlanksDefault(1) in your
3696 code before calling the parser (next to
3697 <strong>LIBXML_TEST_VERSION</strong> is a fine place).</li>
3698</ol>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00003699
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00003700<p>Following those steps should work. It worked for some of my own code.</p>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00003701
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00003702<p>Let me put some emphasis on the fact that there is far more changes from
3703libxml 1.x to 2.x than the ones you may have to patch for. The overall code
3704has been considerably cleaned up and the conformance to the XML specification
3705has been drastically improved too. Don't take those changes as an excuse to
3706not upgrade, it may cost a lot on the long term ...</p>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00003707
Daniel Veillard52dcab32001-10-30 12:51:17 +00003708<h2><a name="Thread">Thread safety</a></h2>
3709
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00003710<p>Starting with 2.4.7, libxml makes provisions to ensure that concurrent
Daniel Veillard52dcab32001-10-30 12:51:17 +00003711threads can safely work in parallel parsing different documents. There is
3712however a couple of things to do to ensure it:</p>
3713<ul>
3714 <li>configure the library accordingly using the --with-threads options</li>
3715 <li>call xmlInitParser() in the "main" thread before using any of the
3716 libxml API (except possibly selecting a different memory allocator)</li>
3717</ul>
3718
3719<p>Note that the thread safety cannot be ensured for multiple threads sharing
3720the same document, the locking must be done at the application level, libxml
3721exports a basic mutex and reentrant mutexes API in &lt;libxml/threads.h&gt;.
3722The parts of the library checked for thread safety are:</p>
3723<ul>
3724 <li>concurrent loading</li>
3725 <li>file access resolution</li>
3726 <li>catalog access</li>
3727 <li>catalog building</li>
3728 <li>entities lookup/accesses</li>
3729 <li>validation</li>
3730 <li>global variables per-thread override</li>
3731 <li>memory handling</li>
3732</ul>
3733
3734<p>XPath is supposed to be thread safe now, but this wasn't tested
3735seriously.</p>
3736
Daniel Veillard35008381999-10-25 13:15:52 +00003737<h2><a name="DOM"></a><a name="Principles">DOM Principles</a></h2>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003738
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +00003739<p><a href="http://www.w3.org/DOM/">DOM</a> stands for the <em>Document
3740Object Model</em>; this is an API for accessing XML or HTML structured
3741documents. Native support for DOM in Gnome is on the way (module gnome-dom),
3742and will be based on gnome-xml. This will be a far cleaner interface to
3743manipulate XML files within Gnome since it won't expose the internal
3744structure.</p>
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +00003745
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00003746<p>The current DOM implementation on top of libxml is the <a
Daniel Veillarda47fb3d2001-03-25 17:23:49 +00003747href="http://cvs.gnome.org/lxr/source/gdome2/">gdome2 Gnome module</a>, this
3748is a full DOM interface, thanks to Paolo Casarini, check the <a
3749href="http://www.cs.unibo.it/~casarini/gdome2/">Gdome2 homepage</a> for more
3750informations.</p>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00003751
Daniel Veillard35008381999-10-25 13:15:52 +00003752<h2><a name="Example"></a><a name="real">A real example</a></h2>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003753
3754<p>Here is a real size example, where the actual content of the application
3755data is not kept in the DOM tree but uses internal structures. It is based on
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +00003756a proposal to keep a database of jobs related to Gnome, with an XML based
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003757storage structure. Here is an <a href="gjobs.xml">XML encoded jobs
3758base</a>:</p>
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00003759<pre>&lt;?xml version="1.0"?&gt;
3760&lt;gjob:Helping xmlns:gjob="http://www.gnome.org/some-location"&gt;
3761 &lt;gjob:Jobs&gt;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +00003762
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00003763 &lt;gjob:Job&gt;
3764 &lt;gjob:Project ID="3"/&gt;
3765 &lt;gjob:Application&gt;GBackup&lt;/gjob:Application&gt;
3766 &lt;gjob:Category&gt;Development&lt;/gjob:Category&gt;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +00003767
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00003768 &lt;gjob:Update&gt;
3769 &lt;gjob:Status&gt;Open&lt;/gjob:Status&gt;
3770 &lt;gjob:Modified&gt;Mon, 07 Jun 1999 20:27:45 -0400 MET DST&lt;/gjob:Modified&gt;
3771 &lt;gjob:Salary&gt;USD 0.00&lt;/gjob:Salary&gt;
3772 &lt;/gjob:Update&gt;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +00003773
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00003774 &lt;gjob:Developers&gt;
3775 &lt;gjob:Developer&gt;
3776 &lt;/gjob:Developer&gt;
3777 &lt;/gjob:Developers&gt;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +00003778
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00003779 &lt;gjob:Contact&gt;
3780 &lt;gjob:Person&gt;Nathan Clemons&lt;/gjob:Person&gt;
3781 &lt;gjob:Email&gt;nathan@windsofstorm.net&lt;/gjob:Email&gt;
3782 &lt;gjob:Company&gt;
3783 &lt;/gjob:Company&gt;
3784 &lt;gjob:Organisation&gt;
3785 &lt;/gjob:Organisation&gt;
3786 &lt;gjob:Webpage&gt;
3787 &lt;/gjob:Webpage&gt;
3788 &lt;gjob:Snailmail&gt;
3789 &lt;/gjob:Snailmail&gt;
3790 &lt;gjob:Phone&gt;
3791 &lt;/gjob:Phone&gt;
3792 &lt;/gjob:Contact&gt;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +00003793
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00003794 &lt;gjob:Requirements&gt;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +00003795 The program should be released as free software, under the GPL.
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00003796 &lt;/gjob:Requirements&gt;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +00003797
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00003798 &lt;gjob:Skills&gt;
3799 &lt;/gjob:Skills&gt;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +00003800
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00003801 &lt;gjob:Details&gt;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +00003802 A GNOME based system that will allow a superuser to configure
3803 compressed and uncompressed files and/or file systems to be backed
3804 up with a supported media in the system. This should be able to
3805 perform via find commands generating a list of files that are passed
3806 to tar, dd, cpio, cp, gzip, etc., to be directed to the tape machine
3807 or via operations performed on the filesystem itself. Email
3808 notification and GUI status display very important.
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00003809 &lt;/gjob:Details&gt;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +00003810
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00003811 &lt;/gjob:Job&gt;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +00003812
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00003813 &lt;/gjob:Jobs&gt;
3814&lt;/gjob:Helping&gt;</pre>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003815
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +00003816<p>While loading the XML file into an internal DOM tree is a matter of
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00003817calling only a couple of functions, browsing the tree to gather the data and
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +00003818generate the internal structures is harder, and more error prone.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003819
3820<p>The suggested principle is to be tolerant with respect to the input
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +00003821structure. For example, the ordering of the attributes is not significant,
3822the XML specification is clear about it. It's also usually a good idea not to
Daniel Veillardec70e912001-02-26 20:10:45 +00003823depend on the order of the children of a given node, unless it really makes
3824things harder. Here is some code to parse the information for a person:</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003825<pre>/*
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +00003826 * A person record
3827 */
3828typedef struct person {
3829 char *name;
3830 char *email;
3831 char *company;
3832 char *organisation;
3833 char *smail;
3834 char *webPage;
3835 char *phone;
3836} person, *personPtr;
3837
3838/*
3839 * And the code needed to parse it
3840 */
3841personPtr parsePerson(xmlDocPtr doc, xmlNsPtr ns, xmlNodePtr cur) {
3842 personPtr ret = NULL;
3843
3844DEBUG("parsePerson\n");
3845 /*
3846 * allocate the struct
3847 */
3848 ret = (personPtr) malloc(sizeof(person));
3849 if (ret == NULL) {
3850 fprintf(stderr,"out of memory\n");
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003851 return(NULL);
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +00003852 }
3853 memset(ret, 0, sizeof(person));
3854
3855 /* We don't care what the top level element name is */
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00003856 cur = cur-&gt;xmlChildrenNode;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +00003857 while (cur != NULL) {
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00003858 if ((!strcmp(cur-&gt;name, "Person")) &amp;&amp; (cur-&gt;ns == ns))
3859 ret-&gt;name = xmlNodeListGetString(doc, cur-&gt;xmlChildrenNode, 1);
3860 if ((!strcmp(cur-&gt;name, "Email")) &amp;&amp; (cur-&gt;ns == ns))
3861 ret-&gt;email = xmlNodeListGetString(doc, cur-&gt;xmlChildrenNode, 1);
3862 cur = cur-&gt;next;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +00003863 }
3864
3865 return(ret);
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003866}</pre>
3867
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +00003868<p>Here are a couple of things to notice:</p>
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +00003869<ul>
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +00003870 <li>Usually a recursive parsing style is the more convenient one: XML data
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00003871 is by nature subject to repetitive constructs and usually exhibits highly
3872 structured patterns.</li>
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +00003873 <li>The two arguments of type <em>xmlDocPtr</em> and <em>xmlNsPtr</em>,
3874 i.e. the pointer to the global XML document and the namespace reserved to
3875 the application. Document wide information are needed for example to
3876 decode entities and it's a good coding practice to define a namespace for
3877 your application set of data and test that the element and attributes
3878 you're analyzing actually pertains to your application space. This is
3879 done by a simple equality test (cur-&gt;ns == ns).</li>
Daniel Veillardec70e912001-02-26 20:10:45 +00003880 <li>To retrieve text and attributes value, you can use the function
3881 <em>xmlNodeListGetString</em> to gather all the text and entity reference
3882 nodes generated by the DOM output and produce an single text string.</li>
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +00003883</ul>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003884
3885<p>Here is another piece of code used to parse another level of the
3886structure:</p>
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00003887<pre>#include &lt;libxml/tree.h&gt;
Daniel Veillard361d8452000-04-03 19:48:13 +00003888/*
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +00003889 * a Description for a Job
3890 */
3891typedef struct job {
3892 char *projectID;
3893 char *application;
3894 char *category;
3895 personPtr contact;
3896 int nbDevelopers;
3897 personPtr developers[100]; /* using dynamic alloc is left as an exercise */
3898} job, *jobPtr;
3899
3900/*
3901 * And the code needed to parse it
3902 */
3903jobPtr parseJob(xmlDocPtr doc, xmlNsPtr ns, xmlNodePtr cur) {
3904 jobPtr ret = NULL;
3905
3906DEBUG("parseJob\n");
3907 /*
3908 * allocate the struct
3909 */
3910 ret = (jobPtr) malloc(sizeof(job));
3911 if (ret == NULL) {
3912 fprintf(stderr,"out of memory\n");
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003913 return(NULL);
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +00003914 }
3915 memset(ret, 0, sizeof(job));
3916
3917 /* We don't care what the top level element name is */
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00003918 cur = cur-&gt;xmlChildrenNode;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +00003919 while (cur != NULL) {
3920
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00003921 if ((!strcmp(cur-&gt;name, "Project")) &amp;&amp; (cur-&gt;ns == ns)) {
3922 ret-&gt;projectID = xmlGetProp(cur, "ID");
3923 if (ret-&gt;projectID == NULL) {
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003924 fprintf(stderr, "Project has no ID\n");
3925 }
3926 }
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00003927 if ((!strcmp(cur-&gt;name, "Application")) &amp;&amp; (cur-&gt;ns == ns))
3928 ret-&gt;application = xmlNodeListGetString(doc, cur-&gt;xmlChildrenNode, 1);
3929 if ((!strcmp(cur-&gt;name, "Category")) &amp;&amp; (cur-&gt;ns == ns))
3930 ret-&gt;category = xmlNodeListGetString(doc, cur-&gt;xmlChildrenNode, 1);
3931 if ((!strcmp(cur-&gt;name, "Contact")) &amp;&amp; (cur-&gt;ns == ns))
3932 ret-&gt;contact = parsePerson(doc, ns, cur);
3933 cur = cur-&gt;next;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +00003934 }
3935
3936 return(ret);
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003937}</pre>
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +00003938
Daniel Veillardec70e912001-02-26 20:10:45 +00003939<p>Once you are used to it, writing this kind of code is quite simple, but
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00003940boring. Ultimately, it could be possible to write stubbers taking either C
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +00003941data structure definitions, a set of XML examples or an XML DTD and produce
3942the code needed to import and export the content between C data and XML
3943storage. This is left as an exercise to the reader :-)</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003944
Daniel Veillard6f0adb52000-07-03 11:41:26 +00003945<p>Feel free to use <a href="example/gjobread.c">the code for the full C
3946parsing example</a> as a template, it is also available with Makefile in the
3947Gnome CVS base under gnome-xml/example</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003948
Daniel Veillardc310d562000-06-23 18:32:15 +00003949<h2><a name="Contributi">Contributions</a></h2>
3950<ul>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00003951 <li>Bjorn Reese, William Brack and Thomas Broyer have provided a number of
3952 patches, Gary Pennington worked on the validation API, threading support
3953 and Solaris port.</li>
3954 <li>John Fleck helps maintaining the documentation and man pages.</li>
Daniel Veillard7b4b2f92003-01-06 13:11:20 +00003955 <li><a href="mailto:igor@zlatkovic.com">Igor Zlatkovic</a> is now the
3956 maintainer of the Windows port, <a
3957 href="http://www.zlatkovic.com/projects/libxml/index.html">he provides
3958 binaries</a></li>
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +00003959 <li><a href="mailto:Gary.Pennington@sun.com">Gary Pennington</a> provides
3960 <a href="http://garypennington.net/libxml2/">Solaris binaries</a></li>
Daniel Veillarde356c282001-03-10 12:32:04 +00003961 <li><a
3962 href="http://mail.gnome.org/archives/xml/2001-March/msg00014.html">Matt
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00003963 Sergeant</a> developed <a
3964 href="http://axkit.org/download/">XML::LibXSLT</a>, a Perl wrapper for
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +00003965 libxml2/libxslt as part of the <a href="http://axkit.com/">AxKit XML
3966 application server</a></li>
3967 <li><a href="mailto:fnatter@gmx.net">Felix Natter</a> and <a
3968 href="mailto:geertk@ai.rug.nl">Geert Kloosterman</a> provide <a
Daniel Veillardca989762001-06-23 17:39:29 +00003969 href="libxml-doc.el">an emacs module</a> to lookup libxml(2) functions
Daniel Veillard3f6f7f62000-06-30 17:58:25 +00003970 documentation</li>
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +00003971 <li><a href="mailto:sherwin@nlm.nih.gov">Ziying Sherwin</a> provided <a
3972 href="http://xmlsoft.org/messages/0488.html">man pages</a></li>
Daniel Veillard5168dbf2001-07-07 00:18:23 +00003973 <li>there is a module for <a
3974 href="http://acs-misc.sourceforge.net/nsxml.html">libxml/libxslt support
3975 in OpenNSD/AOLServer</a></li>
Daniel Veillard2d347fa2002-03-17 10:34:11 +00003976 <li><a href="mailto:dkuhlman@cutter.rexx.com">Dave Kuhlman</a> provided the
3977 first version of libxml/libxslt <a
3978 href="http://www.rexx.com/~dkuhlman">wrappers for Python</a></li>
Daniel Veillard1aadc442001-11-28 13:10:32 +00003979 <li>Petr Kozelka provides <a
3980 href="http://sourceforge.net/projects/libxml2-pas">Pascal units to glue
3981 libxml2</a> with Kylix and Delphi and other Pascal compilers</li>
Daniel Veillard2d347fa2002-03-17 10:34:11 +00003982 <li><a href="mailto:aleksey@aleksey.com">Aleksey Sanin</a> implemented the
3983 <a href="http://www.w3.org/Signature/">XML Canonicalization and XML
3984 Digital Signature</a> <a
3985 href="http://www.aleksey.com/xmlsec/">implementations for libxml2</a></li>
Daniel Veillardc310d562000-06-23 18:32:15 +00003986</ul>
3987
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00003988<p></p>
Daniel Veillardccb09631998-10-27 06:21:04 +00003989</body>
3990</html>