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4<head>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00005 <title>The XML library for Gnome</title>
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Daniel Veillardccb09631998-10-27 06:21:04 +00009
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +000010<body bgcolor="#ffffff">
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +000011<p><a href="http://www.gnome.org/"><img src="smallfootonly.gif"
12alt="Gnome Logo"></a><a href="http://www.w3.org/Status"><img src="w3c.png"
13alt="W3C Logo"></a></p>
Daniel Veillardec303412000-03-24 13:41:54 +000014
Daniel Veillardccb09631998-10-27 06:21:04 +000015<h1 align="center">The XML library for Gnome</h1>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +000016
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +000017<h2 style="text-align: center">libxml, a.k.a. gnome-xml</h2>
18
19<p></p>
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +000020<ul>
21 <li><a href="#Introducti">Introduction</a></li>
22 <li><a href="#Documentat">Documentation</a></li>
Daniel Veillard10a2c651999-12-12 13:03:50 +000023 <li><a href="#Downloads">Downloads</a></li>
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +000024 <li><a href="#News">News</a></li>
25 <li><a href="#XML">XML</a></li>
26 <li><a href="#tree">The tree output</a></li>
27 <li><a href="#interface">The SAX interface</a></li>
28 <li><a href="#library">The XML library interfaces</a>
29 <ul>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +000030 <li><a href="#Invoking">Invoking the parser: the pull way</a></li>
31 <li><a href="#Invoking">Invoking the parser: the push way</a></li>
32 <li><a href="#Invoking2">Invoking the parser: the SAX interface</a></li>
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +000033 <li><a href="#Building">Building a tree from scratch</a></li>
34 <li><a href="#Traversing">Traversing the tree</a></li>
35 <li><a href="#Modifying">Modifying the tree</a></li>
36 <li><a href="#Saving">Saving the tree</a></li>
37 <li><a href="#Compressio">Compression</a></li>
38 </ul>
39 </li>
40 <li><a href="#Entities">Entities or no entities</a></li>
41 <li><a href="#Namespaces">Namespaces</a></li>
42 <li><a href="#Validation">Validation</a></li>
43 <li><a href="#Principles">DOM principles</a></li>
44 <li><a href="#real">A real example</a></li>
Daniel Veillardc310d562000-06-23 18:32:15 +000045 <li><a href="#Contributi">Contribution</a></li>
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +000046</ul>
47
48<h2><a name="Introducti">Introduction</a></h2>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +000049
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +000050<p>This document describes libxml, the <a
51href="http://www.w3.org/XML/">XML</a> library provided in the <a
52href="http://www.gnome.org/">Gnome</a> framework. XML is a standard for
53building tag-based structured documents/data.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +000054
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +000055<p>Here are some key points about libxml:</p>
56<ul>
Daniel Veillard6f0adb52000-07-03 11:41:26 +000057 <li>It is written in plain C, making as few assumptions as possible and
58 sticking closely to ANSI C for easy embedding.</li>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +000059 <li>The internal document repesentation is as close as possible to the <a
60 href="http://www.w3.org/DOM/">DOM</a> interfaces.</li>
61 <li>Libxml also has a <a href="http://www.megginson.com/SAX/index.html">SAX
Daniel Veillard402e8c82000-02-29 22:57:47 +000062 like interface</a>; the interface is designed to be compatible with <a
63 href="http://www.jclark.com/xml/expat.html">Expat</a>.</li>
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +000064 <li>Libxml now includes a nearly complete <a
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +000065 href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xpath">XPath</a> implementation.</li>
Daniel Veillard402e8c82000-02-29 22:57:47 +000066 <li>Libxml exports Push and Pull type parser interfaces for both XML and
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +000067 HTML.</li>
Daniel Veillardec303412000-03-24 13:41:54 +000068 <li>This library is released both under the <a
69 href="http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Legal/copyright-software-19980720.html">W3C
70 IPR</a> and the GNU LGPL. Use either at your convenience, basically this
71 should make everybody happy, if not, drop me a mail.</li>
Daniel Veillardc310d562000-06-23 18:32:15 +000072 <li>There is <a href="upgrade.html">a first set of instructions</a>
Daniel Veillardedfb29b2000-03-14 19:59:05 +000073 concerning upgrade from libxml-1.x to libxml-2.x</li>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +000074</ul>
Daniel Veillardccb09631998-10-27 06:21:04 +000075
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +000076<h2><a name="Documentat">Documentation</a></h2>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +000077
Daniel Veillard402e8c82000-02-29 22:57:47 +000078<p>There are some on-line resources about using libxml:</p>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +000079<ol>
Daniel Veillard365e13b2000-07-02 07:56:37 +000080 <li>Check the <a href="FAQ.html">FAQ</a></li>
Daniel Veillardc19fccc2000-07-03 11:52:01 +000081 <li>Check the <a href="http://xmlsoft.org/html/libxml-lib.html">extensive
Daniel Veillard365e13b2000-07-02 07:56:37 +000082 documentation</a> automatically extracted from code comments.</li>
Daniel Veillard8d869642000-07-14 12:12:59 +000083 <li>Look at the documentation about <a href="encoding.html">libxml
84 internationalization support</a></li>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +000085 <li>This page provides a global overview and <a href="#real">some
Daniel Veillard402e8c82000-02-29 22:57:47 +000086 examples</a> on how to use libxml.</li>
87 <li><a href="mailto:james@daa.com.au">James Henstridge</a> wrote <a
88 href="http://www.daa.com.au/~james/gnome/xml-sax/xml-sax.html">some nice
89 documentation</a> explaining how to use the libxml SAX interface.</li>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +000090 <li>George Lebl wrote <a
91 href="http://www-4.ibm.com/software/developer/library/gnome3/">an article
Daniel Veillard402e8c82000-02-29 22:57:47 +000092 for IBM developerWorks</a> about using libxml.</li>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +000093 <li>It is also a good idea to check to <a href="mailto:raph@levien.com">Raph
94 Levien</a> <a href="http://levien.com/gnome/">web site</a> since he is
95 building the <a href="http://levien.com/gnome/gdome.html">DOM interface
Daniel Veillard402e8c82000-02-29 22:57:47 +000096 gdome</a> on top of libxml result tree and an implementation of <a
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +000097 href="http://www.w3.org/Graphics/SVG/">SVG</a> called <a
98 href="http://www.levien.com/svg/">gill</a>. Check his <a
99 href="http://www.levien.com/gnome/domination.html">DOMination
100 paper</a>.</li>
Daniel Veillardec303412000-03-24 13:41:54 +0000101 <li>Check <a href="http://cvs.gnome.org/lxr/source/gnome-xml/TODO">the TODO
102 file</a></li>
103 <li>Read the <a href="upgrade.html">1.x to 2.x upgrade path</a>. If you are
104 starting a new project using libxml you should really use the 2.x
105 version.</li>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000106 <li>And don't forget to look at the <a href="/messages/">mailing-list
Daniel Veillardc310d562000-06-23 18:32:15 +0000107 archive</a>.</li>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000108</ol>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000109
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000110<h3>Reporting bugs and getting help</h3>
Daniel Veillard4c3a2031999-11-19 17:46:26 +0000111
Daniel Veillard402e8c82000-02-29 22:57:47 +0000112<p>Well, bugs or missing features are always possible, and I will make a point
113of fixing them in a timely fashion. The best way to report a bug is to <a
Daniel Veillard4c3a2031999-11-19 17:46:26 +0000114href="http://bugs.gnome.org/db/pa/lgnome-xml.html">use the Gnome bug tracking
Daniel Veillard402e8c82000-02-29 22:57:47 +0000115database</a>. I look at reports there regularly and it's good to have a
Daniel Veillard4c3a2031999-11-19 17:46:26 +0000116reminder when a bug is still open. Check the <a
117href="http://bugs.gnome.org/Reporting.html">instructions on reporting bugs</a>
Daniel Veillard402e8c82000-02-29 22:57:47 +0000118and be sure to specify that the bug is for the package gnome-xml.</p>
Daniel Veillard4c3a2031999-11-19 17:46:26 +0000119
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000120<p>There is also a mailing-list <a
121href="mailto:xml@rufus.w3.org">xml@rufus.w3.org</a> for libxml, with an <a
122href="http://xmlsoft.org/messages">on-line archive</a>. To subscribe to this
Daniel Veillard402e8c82000-02-29 22:57:47 +0000123majordomo based list, send a mail message to <a
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000124href="mailto:majordomo@rufus.w3.org">majordomo@rufus.w3.org</a> with
125"subscribe xml" in the <strong>content</strong> of the message.</p>
126
Daniel Veillard402e8c82000-02-29 22:57:47 +0000127<p>Alternatively, you can just send the bug to the <a
Daniel Veillard10a2c651999-12-12 13:03:50 +0000128href="mailto:xml@rufus.w3.org">xml@rufus.w3.org</a> list.</p>
Daniel Veillard4c3a2031999-11-19 17:46:26 +0000129
Daniel Veillardec303412000-03-24 13:41:54 +0000130<p>Of course, bugs reports with a suggested patch for fixing them will
131probably be processed faster.</p>
132
133<p>If you're looking for help, a quick look at <a
134href="http://xmlsoft.org/messages/#407">the list archive</a> may actually
135provide the answer, I usually send source samples when answering libxml usage
Daniel Veillard6f0adb52000-07-03 11:41:26 +0000136questions. The <a href="http://xmlsoft.org/html/book1.html">auto-generated
Daniel Veillardec303412000-03-24 13:41:54 +0000137documentantion</a> is not as polished as I would like (i need to learn more
138about Docbook), but it's a good starting point.</p>
139
Daniel Veillard10a2c651999-12-12 13:03:50 +0000140<h2><a name="Downloads">Downloads</a></h2>
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000141
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000142<p>The latest versions of libxml can be found on <a
Daniel Veillard6c8b1172000-03-01 00:40:41 +0000143href="ftp://rpmfind.net/pub/libxml/">rpmfind.net</a> or on the <a
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000144href="ftp://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/MIRRORS.html">Gnome FTP server</a> either
Daniel Veillard10a2c651999-12-12 13:03:50 +0000145as a <a href="ftp://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/stable/sources/libxml/">source
Daniel Veillard306be992000-07-03 12:38:45 +0000146archive</a> or <a
147href="ftp://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/contrib/redhat/SRPMS/">RPM packages</a>.
148(NOTE that you need both the <a
Daniel Veillardc19fccc2000-07-03 11:52:01 +0000149href="http://rpmfind.net/linux/RPM/libxml2.html">libxml(2)</a> and <a
150href="http://rpmfind.net/linux/RPM/libxml2-devel.html">libxml(2)-devel</a>
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000151packages installed to compile applications using libxml.)</p>
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000152
Daniel Veillard6c8b1172000-03-01 00:40:41 +0000153<p><a name="Snapshot">Snapshot:</a></p>
154<ul>
155 <li>Code from the W3C cvs base libxml <a
156 href="ftp://rpmfind.net/pub/libxml/cvs-snapshot.tar.gz">cvs-snapshot.tar.gz</a></li>
157 <li>Docs, content of the web site, the list archive included <a
158 href="ftp://rpmfind.net/pub/libxml/libxml-docs.tar.gz">libxml-docs.tar.gz</a></li>
159</ul>
160
161<p><a name="Contribs">Contribs:</a></p>
162
163<p>I do accept external contributions, especially if compiling on another
164platform, get in touch with me to upload the package. I will keep them in the
165<a href="ftp://rpmfind.net/pub/libxml/contribs/">contrib directory</a></p>
166
Daniel Veillardc310d562000-06-23 18:32:15 +0000167<p>Libxml is also available from 2 CVS bases:</p>
Daniel Veillard10a2c651999-12-12 13:03:50 +0000168<ul>
169 <li><p>The <a href="http://dev.w3.org/cvsweb/XML/">W3C CVS base</a>,
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000170 available read-only using the CVS pserver authentification (I tend to use
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +0000171 this base for my own development, so it's updated more regularly, but the
172 content may not be as stable):</p>
Daniel Veillard10a2c651999-12-12 13:03:50 +0000173 <pre>CVSROOT=:pserver:anonymous@dev.w3.org:/sources/public
Daniel Veillard365e13b2000-07-02 07:56:37 +0000174 password: anonymous
175 module: XML</pre>
Daniel Veillard10a2c651999-12-12 13:03:50 +0000176 </li>
177 <li><p>The <a
178 href="http://cvs.gnome.org/bonsai/rview.cgi?cvsroot=/cvs/gnome&amp;dir=gnome-xml">Gnome
Daniel Veillard402e8c82000-02-29 22:57:47 +0000179 CVS base</a>. Check the <a
180 href="http://developer.gnome.org/tools/cvs.html">Gnome CVS Tools</a> page;
181 the CVS module is <b>gnome-xml</b>.</p>
Daniel Veillard10a2c651999-12-12 13:03:50 +0000182 </li>
183</ul>
184
185<h2><a name="News">News</a></h2>
186
Daniel Veillard944b5ff1999-12-15 19:08:24 +0000187<h3>CVS only : check the <a
188href="http://cvs.gnome.org/lxr/source/gnome-xml/ChangeLog">Changelog</a> file
189for really accurate description</h3>
Daniel Veillard4c3a2031999-11-19 17:46:26 +0000190<ul>
Daniel Veillard10a2c651999-12-12 13:03:50 +0000191 <li>working on HTML and XML links recognition layers, get in touch with me
Daniel Veillard944b5ff1999-12-15 19:08:24 +0000192 if you want to test those.</li>
Daniel Veillard361d8452000-04-03 19:48:13 +0000193</ul>
194
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000195<h3>1.8.9: July 9 2000</h3>
196<ul>
197 <li>fixed the spec the RPMs should be better</li>
198 <li>fixed a serious bug in the FTP implementation, released 1.8.9 to solve
199 rpmfind users problem</li>
200</ul>
201
Daniel Veillard6388e172000-07-03 16:07:19 +0000202<h3>2.1.1: July 1 2000</h3>
203<ul>
204 <li>fixes a couple of bugs in the 2.1.0 packaging</li>
205 <li>improvements on the HTML parser</li>
206</ul>
207
Daniel Veillard3f6f7f62000-06-30 17:58:25 +0000208<h3>2.1.0 and 1.8.8: June 29 2000</h3>
209<ul>
210 <li>1.8.8 is mostly a comodity package for upgrading to libxml2 accoding to
211 <a href="upgrade.html">new instructions</a>. It fixes a nasty problem
212 about &amp;#38; charref parsing</li>
213 <li>2.1.0 also ease the upgrade from libxml v1 to the recent version. it
214 also contains numerous fixes and enhancements:
215 <ul>
216 <li>added xmlStopParser() to stop parsing</li>
217 <li>improved a lot parsing speed when there is large CDATA blocs</li>
218 <li>includes XPath patches provided by Picdar Technology</li>
219 <li>tried to fix as much as possible DtD validation and namespace
220 related problems</li>
221 <li>output to a given encoding has been added/tested</li>
222 <li>lot of various fixes</li>
223 </ul>
224 </li>
225</ul>
226
Daniel Veillarde0aed302000-04-16 08:52:20 +0000227<h3>2.0.0: Apr 12 2000</h3>
Daniel Veillard361d8452000-04-03 19:48:13 +0000228<ul>
229 <li>First public release of libxml2. If you are using libxml, it's a good
Daniel Veillarde0aed302000-04-16 08:52:20 +0000230 idea to check the 1.x to 2.x upgrade instructions. NOTE: while initally
231 scheduled for Apr 3 the relase occured only on Apr 12 due to massive
232 workload.</li>
Daniel Veillard361d8452000-04-03 19:48:13 +0000233 <li>The include are now located under $prefix/include/libxml (instead of
Daniel Veillarde0aed302000-04-16 08:52:20 +0000234 $prefix/include/gnome-xml), they also are referenced by
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000235 <pre>#include &lt;libxml/xxx.h&gt;</pre>
Daniel Veillarde0aed302000-04-16 08:52:20 +0000236 <p>instead of</p>
Daniel Veillard361d8452000-04-03 19:48:13 +0000237 <pre>#include "xxx.h"</pre>
238 </li>
Daniel Veillard8f621982000-03-20 13:07:15 +0000239 <li>a new URI module for parsing URIs and following strictly RFC 2396</li>
240 <li>the memory allocation routines used by libxml can now be overloaded
241 dynamically by using xmlMemSetup()</li>
Daniel Veillard361d8452000-04-03 19:48:13 +0000242 <li>The previously CVS only tool tester has been renamed
243 <strong>xmllint</strong> and is now installed as part of the libxml2
244 package</li>
Daniel Veillarde0aed302000-04-16 08:52:20 +0000245 <li>The I/O interface has been revamped. There is now ways to plug in
246 specific I/O modules, either at the URI scheme detection level using
247 xmlRegisterInputCallbacks() or by passing I/O functions when creating a
248 parser context using xmlCreateIOParserCtxt()</li>
249 <li>there is a C preprocessor macro LIBXML_VERSION providing the version
250 number of the libxml module in use</li>
251 <li>a number of optional features of libxml can now be excluded at configure
252 time (FTP/HTTP/HTML/XPath/Debug)</li>
Daniel Veillardedfb29b2000-03-14 19:59:05 +0000253</ul>
254
255<h3>2.0.0beta: Mar 14 2000</h3>
256<ul>
257 <li>This is a first Beta release of libxml version 2</li>
258 <li>It's available only from<a href="ftp://rpmfind.net/pub/libxml/">
259 rpmfind.net FTP</a>, it's packaged as libxml2-2.0.0beta and available as
260 tar and RPMs</li>
261 <li>This version is now the head in the Gnome CVS base, the old one is
262 available under the tag LIB_XML_1_X</li>
263 <li>This includes a very large set of changes. Froma programmatic point of
264 view applications should not have to be modified too much, check the <a
265 href="upgrade.html">upgrade page</a></li>
266 <li>Some interfaces may changes (especially a bit about encoding).</li>
267 <li>the updates includes:
Daniel Veillard6c8b1172000-03-01 00:40:41 +0000268 <ul>
Daniel Veillardedfb29b2000-03-14 19:59:05 +0000269 <li>fix I18N support. ISO-Latin-x/UTF-8/UTF-16 (nearly) seems correctly
270 handled now</li>
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +0000271 <li>Better handling of entities, especially well formedness checking and
272 proper PEref extensions in external subsets</li>
Daniel Veillard6c8b1172000-03-01 00:40:41 +0000273 <li>DTD conditional sections</li>
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +0000274 <li>Validation now correcly handle entities content</li>
Daniel Veillard6c8b1172000-03-01 00:40:41 +0000275 <li><a href="http://rpmfind.net/tools/gdome/messages/0039.html">change
276 structures to accomodate DOM</a></li>
Daniel Veillard6c8b1172000-03-01 00:40:41 +0000277 </ul>
278 </li>
Daniel Veillardedfb29b2000-03-14 19:59:05 +0000279 <li>Serious progress were made toward compliance, <a
280 href="conf/result.html">here are the result of the test</a> against the
281 OASIS testsuite (except the japanese tests since I don't support that
282 encoding yet). This URL is rebuilt every couple of hours using the CVS
283 head version.</li>
Daniel Veillarde41f2b72000-01-30 20:00:07 +0000284</ul>
285
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +0000286<h3>1.8.7: Mar 6 2000</h3>
287<ul>
288 <li>This is a bug fix release:</li>
289 <li>It is possible to disable the ignorable blanks heuristic used by
290 libxml-1.x, a new function xmlKeepBlanksDefault(0) will allow this. Note
291 that for adherence to XML spec, this behaviour will be disabled by default
292 in 2.x . The same function will allow to keep compatibility for old
293 code.</li>
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000294 <li>Blanks in &lt;a&gt; &lt;/a&gt; constructs are not ignored anymore,
295 avoiding heuristic is really the Right Way :-\</li>
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +0000296 <li>The unchecked use of snprintf which was breaking libxml-1.8.6
297 compilation on some platforms has been fixed</li>
298 <li>nanoftp.c nanohttp.c: Fixed '#' and '?' stripping when processing
299 URIs</li>
300</ul>
301
Daniel Veillarde41f2b72000-01-30 20:00:07 +0000302<h3>1.8.6: Jan 31 2000</h3>
303<ul>
304 <li>added a nanoFTP transport module, debugged until the new version of <a
305 href="http://rpmfind.net/linux/rpm2html/rpmfind.html">rpmfind</a> can use
306 it without troubles</li>
Daniel Veillardda07c342000-01-25 18:31:22 +0000307</ul>
308
309<h3>1.8.5: Jan 21 2000</h3>
310<ul>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000311 <li>adding APIs to parse a well balanced chunk of XML (production <a
312 href="http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml#NT-content">[43] content</a> of the XML
313 spec)</li>
Daniel Veillard461a66c2000-01-18 18:01:01 +0000314 <li>fixed a hideous bug in xmlGetProp pointed by Rune.Djurhuus@fast.no</li>
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000315 <li>Jody Goldberg &lt;jgoldberg@home.com&gt; provided another patch trying
316 to solve the zlib checks problems</li>
Daniel Veillard461a66c2000-01-18 18:01:01 +0000317 <li>The current state in gnome CVS base is expected to ship as 1.8.5 with
318 gnumeric soon</li>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000319</ul>
320
321<h3>1.8.4: Jan 13 2000</h3>
322<ul>
323 <li>bug fixes, reintroduced xmlNewGlobalNs(), fixed xmlNewNs()</li>
324 <li>all exit() call should have been removed from libxml</li>
325 <li>fixed a problem with INCLUDE_WINSOCK on WIN32 platform</li>
326 <li>added newDocFragment()</li>
Daniel Veillardf84f71f2000-01-05 19:54:23 +0000327</ul>
328
329<h3>1.8.3: Jan 5 2000</h3>
330<ul>
331 <li>a Push interface for the XML and HTML parsers</li>
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +0000332 <li>a shell-like interface to the document tree (try tester --shell :-)</li>
Daniel Veillarddbfd6411999-12-28 16:35:14 +0000333 <li>lots of bug fixes and improvement added over XMas hollidays</li>
Daniel Veillard437b87b2000-01-03 17:30:46 +0000334 <li>fixed the DTD parsing code to work with the xhtml DTD</li>
Daniel Veillardf84f71f2000-01-05 19:54:23 +0000335 <li>added xmlRemoveProp(), xmlRemoveID() and xmlRemoveRef()</li>
336 <li>Fixed bugs in xmlNewNs()</li>
Daniel Veillard437b87b2000-01-03 17:30:46 +0000337 <li>External entity loading code has been revamped, now it uses
Daniel Veillardf84f71f2000-01-05 19:54:23 +0000338 xmlLoadExternalEntity(), some fix on entities processing were added</li>
Daniel Veillard437b87b2000-01-03 17:30:46 +0000339 <li>cleaned up WIN32 includes of socket stuff</li>
Daniel Veillard5cb5ab81999-12-21 15:35:29 +0000340</ul>
341
342<h3>1.8.2: Dec 21 1999</h3>
343<ul>
Daniel Veillardb24054a1999-12-18 15:32:46 +0000344 <li>I got another problem with includes and C++, I hope this issue is fixed
345 for good this time</li>
Daniel Veillard5cb5ab81999-12-21 15:35:29 +0000346 <li>Added a few tree modification functions: xmlReplaceNode,
347 xmlAddPrevSibling, xmlAddNextSibling, xmlNodeSetName and
348 xmlDocSetRootElement</li>
349 <li>Tried to improve the HTML output with help from <a
350 href="mailto:clahey@umich.edu">Chris Lahey</a></li>
Daniel Veillarde4e51311999-12-18 15:32:46 +0000351</ul>
Daniel Veillardb24054a1999-12-18 15:32:46 +0000352
Daniel Veillarde4e51311999-12-18 15:32:46 +0000353<h3>1.8.1: Dec 18 1999</h3>
354<ul>
355 <li>various patches to avoid troubles when using libxml with C++ compilers
356 the "namespace" keyword and C escaping in include files</li>
357 <li>a problem in one of the core macros IS_CHAR was corrected</li>
358 <li>fixed a bug introduced in 1.8.0 breaking default namespace processing,
359 and more specifically the Dia application</li>
Daniel Veillard944b5ff1999-12-15 19:08:24 +0000360 <li>fixed a posteriori validation (validation after parsing, or by using a
361 Dtd not specified in the original document)</li>
Daniel Veillardb24054a1999-12-18 15:32:46 +0000362 <li>fixed a bug in</li>
Daniel Veillard10a2c651999-12-12 13:03:50 +0000363</ul>
364
365<h3>1.8.0: Dec 12 1999</h3>
366<ul>
367 <li>cleanup, especially memory wise</li>
368 <li>the parser should be more reliable, especially the HTML one, it should
369 not crash, whatever the input !</li>
370 <li>Integrated various patches, especially a speedup improvement for large
371 dataset from <a href="mailto:cnygard@bellatlantic.net">Carl Nygard</a>,
372 configure with --with-buffers to enable them.</li>
373 <li>attribute normalization, oops should have been added long ago !</li>
374 <li>attributes defaulted from Dtds should be available, xmlSetProp() now
375 does entities escapting by default.</li>
Daniel Veillard4c3a2031999-11-19 17:46:26 +0000376</ul>
Daniel Veillard35008381999-10-25 13:15:52 +0000377
378<h3>1.7.4: Oct 25 1999</h3>
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000379<ul>
Daniel Veillard35008381999-10-25 13:15:52 +0000380 <li>Lots of HTML improvement</li>
381 <li>Fixed some errors when saving both XML and HTML</li>
382 <li>More examples, the regression tests should now look clean</li>
383 <li>Fixed a bug with contiguous charref</li>
384</ul>
385
386<h3>1.7.3: Sep 29 1999</h3>
387<ul>
388 <li>portability problems fixed</li>
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000389 <li>snprintf was used unconditionnally, leading to link problems on system
Daniel Veillard35008381999-10-25 13:15:52 +0000390 were it's not available, fixed</li>
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000391</ul>
392
393<h3>1.7.1: Sep 24 1999</h3>
394<ul>
395 <li>The basic type for strings manipulated by libxml has been renamed in
396 1.7.1 from <strong>CHAR</strong> to <strong>xmlChar</strong>. The reason
397 is that CHAR was conflicting with a predefined type on Windows. However on
398 non WIN32 environment, compatibility is provided by the way of a
399 <strong>#define </strong>.</li>
400 <li>Changed another error : the use of a structure field called errno, and
401 leading to troubles on platforms where it's a macro</li>
402</ul>
403
404<h3>1.7.0: sep 23 1999</h3>
405<ul>
406 <li>Added the ability to fetch remote DTD or parsed entities, see the <a
Daniel Veillardc19fccc2000-07-03 11:52:01 +0000407 href="html/gnome-xml-nanohttp.html">nanohttp</a> module.</li>
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000408 <li>Added an errno to report errors by another mean than a simple printf
409 like callback</li>
410 <li>Finished ID/IDREF support and checking when validation</li>
411 <li>Serious memory leaks fixed (there is now a <a
Daniel Veillardc19fccc2000-07-03 11:52:01 +0000412 href="html/gnome-xml-xmlmemory.html">memory wrapper</a> module)</li>
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000413 <li>Improvement of <a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xpath">XPath</a>
414 implementation</li>
415 <li>Added an HTML parser front-end</li>
416</ul>
417
418<h2><a name="XML">XML</a></h2>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000419
Daniel Veillard402e8c82000-02-29 22:57:47 +0000420<p><a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml">XML is a standard</a> for
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +0000421markup-based structured documents. Here is <a name="example">an example XML
422document</a>:</p>
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000423<pre>&lt;?xml version="1.0"?&gt;
424&lt;EXAMPLE prop1="gnome is great" prop2="&amp;amp; linux too"&gt;
425 &lt;head&gt;
426 &lt;title&gt;Welcome to Gnome&lt;/title&gt;
427 &lt;/head&gt;
428 &lt;chapter&gt;
429 &lt;title&gt;The Linux adventure&lt;/title&gt;
430 &lt;p&gt;bla bla bla ...&lt;/p&gt;
431 &lt;image href="linus.gif"/&gt;
432 &lt;p&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;
433 &lt;/chapter&gt;
434&lt;/EXAMPLE&gt;</pre>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000435
Daniel Veillard402e8c82000-02-29 22:57:47 +0000436<p>The first line specifies that it's an XML document and gives useful
437information about its encoding. Then the document is a text format whose
438structure is specified by tags between brackets. <strong>Each tag opened has
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +0000439to be closed</strong>. XML is pedantic about this. However, if a tag is empty
440(no content), a single tag can serve as both the opening and closing tag if it
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000441ends with <code>/&gt;</code> rather than with <code>&gt;</code>. Note that,
442for example, the image tag has no content (just an attribute) and is closed by
443ending the tag with <code>/&gt;</code>.</p>
Daniel Veillardccb09631998-10-27 06:21:04 +0000444
Daniel Veillard402e8c82000-02-29 22:57:47 +0000445<p>XML can be applied sucessfully to a wide range of uses, from long term
446structured document maintenance (where it follows the steps of SGML) to simple
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +0000447data encoding mechanisms like configuration file formatting (glade),
448spreadsheets (gnumeric), or even shorter lived documents such as WebDAV where
449it is used to encode remote calls between a client and a server.</p>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000450
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000451<h2><a name="tree">The tree output</a></h2>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000452
453<p>The parser returns a tree built during the document analysis. The value
Daniel Veillard402e8c82000-02-29 22:57:47 +0000454returned is an <strong>xmlDocPtr</strong> (i.e., a pointer to an
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +0000455<strong>xmlDoc</strong> structure). This structure contains information such
Daniel Veillard306be992000-07-03 12:38:45 +0000456as the file name, the document type, and a <strong>children</strong> pointer
457which is the root of the document (or more exactly the first child under the
458root which is the document). The tree is made of <strong>xmlNode</strong>s,
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000459chained in double-linked lists of siblings and with children&lt;-&gt;parent
Daniel Veillard306be992000-07-03 12:38:45 +0000460relationship. An xmlNode can also carry properties (a chain of xmlAttr
461structures). An attribute may have a value which is a list of TEXT or
462ENTITY_REF nodes.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000463
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000464<p>Here is an example (erroneous with respect to the XML spec since there
465should be only one ELEMENT under the root):</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000466
467<p><img src="structure.gif" alt=" structure.gif "></p>
468
469<p>In the source package there is a small program (not installed by default)
Daniel Veillard361d8452000-04-03 19:48:13 +0000470called <strong>xmllint</strong> which parses XML files given as argument and
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +0000471prints them back as parsed. This is useful for detecting errors both in XML
472code and in the XML parser itself. It has an option <strong>--debug</strong>
473which prints the actual in-memory structure of the document, here is the
474result with the <a href="#example">example</a> given before:</p>
Daniel Veillard10c6a8f1998-10-28 01:00:12 +0000475<pre>DOCUMENT
476version=1.0
477standalone=true
478 ELEMENT EXAMPLE
479 ATTRIBUTE prop1
480 TEXT
481 content=gnome is great
482 ATTRIBUTE prop2
483 ENTITY_REF
484 TEXT
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000485 content= linux too
Daniel Veillard402e8c82000-02-29 22:57:47 +0000486 ELEMENT head
Daniel Veillard10c6a8f1998-10-28 01:00:12 +0000487 ELEMENT title
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +0000488 TEXT
489 content=Welcome to Gnome
Daniel Veillard10c6a8f1998-10-28 01:00:12 +0000490 ELEMENT chapter
491 ELEMENT title
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +0000492 TEXT
493 content=The Linux adventure
Daniel Veillard10c6a8f1998-10-28 01:00:12 +0000494 ELEMENT p
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +0000495 TEXT
496 content=bla bla bla ...
Daniel Veillard10c6a8f1998-10-28 01:00:12 +0000497 ELEMENT image
498 ATTRIBUTE href
499 TEXT
500 content=linus.gif
501 ELEMENT p
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +0000502 TEXT
503 content=...</pre>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000504
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000505<p>This should be useful for learning the internal representation model.</p>
Daniel Veillardccb09631998-10-27 06:21:04 +0000506
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000507<h2><a name="interface">The SAX interface</a></h2>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000508
Daniel Veillard402e8c82000-02-29 22:57:47 +0000509<p>Sometimes the DOM tree output is just too large to fit reasonably into
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000510memory. In that case (and if you don't expect to save back the XML document
511loaded using libxml), it's better to use the SAX interface of libxml. SAX is a
Daniel Veillard402e8c82000-02-29 22:57:47 +0000512<strong>callback-based interface</strong> to the parser. Before parsing, the
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +0000513application layer registers a customized set of callbacks which are called by
514the library as it progresses through the XML input.</p>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000515
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000516<p>To get more detailed step-by-step guidance on using the SAX interface of
517libxml, see the
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000518href="http://www.daa.com.au/~james/gnome/xml-sax/xml-sax.html"&gt;nice
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +0000519documentation.written by <a href="mailto:james@daa.com.au">James
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000520Henstridge</a>.</p>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000521
522<p>You can debug the SAX behaviour by using the <strong>testSAX</strong>
523program located in the gnome-xml module (it's usually not shipped in the
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000524binary packages of libxml, but you can find it in the tar source
Daniel Veillard402e8c82000-02-29 22:57:47 +0000525distribution). Here is the sequence of callbacks that would be reported by
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000526testSAX when parsing the example XML document shown earlier:</p>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000527<pre>SAX.setDocumentLocator()
528SAX.startDocument()
529SAX.getEntity(amp)
530SAX.startElement(EXAMPLE, prop1='gnome is great', prop2='&amp;amp; linux too')
531SAX.characters( , 3)
532SAX.startElement(head)
533SAX.characters( , 4)
534SAX.startElement(title)
535SAX.characters(Welcome to Gnome, 16)
536SAX.endElement(title)
537SAX.characters( , 3)
538SAX.endElement(head)
539SAX.characters( , 3)
540SAX.startElement(chapter)
541SAX.characters( , 4)
542SAX.startElement(title)
543SAX.characters(The Linux adventure, 19)
544SAX.endElement(title)
545SAX.characters( , 4)
546SAX.startElement(p)
547SAX.characters(bla bla bla ..., 15)
548SAX.endElement(p)
549SAX.characters( , 4)
550SAX.startElement(image, href='linus.gif')
551SAX.endElement(image)
552SAX.characters( , 4)
553SAX.startElement(p)
554SAX.characters(..., 3)
555SAX.endElement(p)
556SAX.characters( , 3)
557SAX.endElement(chapter)
558SAX.characters( , 1)
559SAX.endElement(EXAMPLE)
560SAX.endDocument()</pre>
561
Daniel Veillard402e8c82000-02-29 22:57:47 +0000562<p>Most of the other functionalities of libxml are based on the DOM
563tree-building facility, so nearly everything up to the end of this document
564presupposes the use of the standard DOM tree build. Note that the DOM tree
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000565itself is built by a set of registered default callbacks, without internal
566specific interface.</p>
567
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000568<h2><a name="library">The XML library interfaces</a></h2>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000569
570<p>This section is directly intended to help programmers getting bootstrapped
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000571using the XML library from the C language. It is not intended to be extensive.
572I hope the automatically generated documents will provide the completeness
573required, but as a separate set of documents. The interfaces of the XML
574library are by principle low level, there is nearly zero abstraction. Those
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000575interested in a higher level API should <a href="#DOM">look at DOM</a>.</p>
Daniel Veillardccb09631998-10-27 06:21:04 +0000576
Daniel Veillardc19fccc2000-07-03 11:52:01 +0000577<p>The <a href="html/gnome-xml-parser.html">parser interfaces for XML</a> are
578separated from the <a href="html/gnome-xml-htmlparser.html">HTML parser
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000579interfaces</a>. Let's have a look at how the XML parser can be called:</p>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000580
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000581<h3><a name="Invoking">Invoking the parser : the pull method</a></h3>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000582
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000583<p>Usually, the first thing to do is to read an XML input. The parser accepts
584documents either from in-memory strings or from files. The functions are
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000585defined in "parser.h":</p>
Daniel Veillard10c6a8f1998-10-28 01:00:12 +0000586<dl>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000587 <dt><code>xmlDocPtr xmlParseMemory(char *buffer, int size);</code></dt>
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000588 <dd><p>Parse a null-terminated string containing the document.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000589 </dd>
Daniel Veillard10c6a8f1998-10-28 01:00:12 +0000590</dl>
591<dl>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000592 <dt><code>xmlDocPtr xmlParseFile(const char *filename);</code></dt>
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +0000593 <dd><p>Parse an XML document contained in a (possibly compressed)
594 file.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000595 </dd>
Daniel Veillard10c6a8f1998-10-28 01:00:12 +0000596</dl>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000597
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000598<p>The parser returns a pointer to the document structure (or NULL in case of
Daniel Veillard10c6a8f1998-10-28 01:00:12 +0000599failure).</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000600
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000601<h3 id="Invoking1">Invoking the parser: the push method</h3>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000602
603<p>In order for the application to keep the control when the document is been
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000604fetched (which is common for GUI based programs) libxml provides a push
605interface, too, as of version 1.8.3. Here are the interface functions:</p>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000606<pre>xmlParserCtxtPtr xmlCreatePushParserCtxt(xmlSAXHandlerPtr sax,
607 void *user_data,
608 const char *chunk,
609 int size,
610 const char *filename);
611int xmlParseChunk (xmlParserCtxtPtr ctxt,
612 const char *chunk,
613 int size,
614 int terminate);</pre>
615
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000616<p>and here is a simple example showing how to use the interface:</p>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000617<pre> FILE *f;
618
619 f = fopen(filename, "r");
620 if (f != NULL) {
621 int res, size = 1024;
622 char chars[1024];
623 xmlParserCtxtPtr ctxt;
624
625 res = fread(chars, 1, 4, f);
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000626 if (res &gt; 0) {
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000627 ctxt = xmlCreatePushParserCtxt(NULL, NULL,
628 chars, res, filename);
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000629 while ((res = fread(chars, 1, size, f)) &gt; 0) {
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000630 xmlParseChunk(ctxt, chars, res, 0);
631 }
632 xmlParseChunk(ctxt, chars, 0, 1);
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000633 doc = ctxt-&gt;myDoc;
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000634 xmlFreeParserCtxt(ctxt);
635 }
636 }</pre>
637
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000638<p>Also note that the HTML parser embedded into libxml also has a push
639interface; the functions are just prefixed by "html" rather than "xml"</p>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000640
641<h3 id="Invoking2">Invoking the parser: the SAX interface</h3>
642
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000643<p>A couple of comments can be made, first this mean that the parser is
Daniel Veillard10c6a8f1998-10-28 01:00:12 +0000644memory-hungry, first to load the document in memory, second to build the tree.
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000645Reading a document without building the tree is possible using the SAX
646interfaces (see SAX.h and <a
647href="http://www.daa.com.au/~james/gnome/xml-sax/xml-sax.html">James
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000648Henstridge's documentation</a>). Note also that the push interface can be
649limited to SAX. Just use the two first arguments of
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000650<code>xmlCreatePushParserCtxt()</code>.</p>
Daniel Veillardccb09631998-10-27 06:21:04 +0000651
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000652<h3><a name="Building">Building a tree from scratch</a></h3>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000653
654<p>The other way to get an XML tree in memory is by building it. Basically
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +0000655there is a set of functions dedicated to building new elements. (These are
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000656also described in &lt;libxml/tree.h&gt;.) For example, here is a piece of code
Daniel Veillard361d8452000-04-03 19:48:13 +0000657that produces the XML document used in the previous examples:</p>
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000658<pre> #include &lt;libxml/tree.h&gt;
Daniel Veillard361d8452000-04-03 19:48:13 +0000659 xmlDocPtr doc;
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +0000660 xmlNodePtr tree, subtree;
661
662 doc = xmlNewDoc("1.0");
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000663 doc-&gt;children = xmlNewDocNode(doc, NULL, "EXAMPLE", NULL);
664 xmlSetProp(doc-&gt;children, "prop1", "gnome is great");
665 xmlSetProp(doc-&gt;children, "prop2", "&amp; linux too");
666 tree = xmlNewChild(doc-&gt;children, NULL, "head", NULL);
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +0000667 subtree = xmlNewChild(tree, NULL, "title", "Welcome to Gnome");
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000668 tree = xmlNewChild(doc-&gt;children, NULL, "chapter", NULL);
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +0000669 subtree = xmlNewChild(tree, NULL, "title", "The Linux adventure");
670 subtree = xmlNewChild(tree, NULL, "p", "bla bla bla ...");
671 subtree = xmlNewChild(tree, NULL, "image", NULL);
672 xmlSetProp(subtree, "href", "linus.gif");</pre>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000673
674<p>Not really rocket science ...</p>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +0000675
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000676<h3><a name="Traversing">Traversing the tree</a></h3>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000677
Daniel Veillard306be992000-07-03 12:38:45 +0000678<p>Basically by <a href="html/gnome-xml-tree.html">including "tree.h"</a> your
679code has access to the internal structure of all the elements of the tree. The
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +0000680names should be somewhat simple like <strong>parent</strong>,
Daniel Veillard306be992000-07-03 12:38:45 +0000681<strong>children</strong>, <strong>next</strong>, <strong>prev</strong>,
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000682<strong>properties</strong>, etc... For example, still with the previous
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000683example:</p>
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000684<pre><code>doc-&gt;children-&gt;children-&gt;children</code></pre>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000685
686<p>points to the title element,</p>
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000687<pre>doc-&gt;children-&gt;children-&gt;next-&gt;child-&gt;child</pre>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000688
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +0000689<p>points to the text node containing the chapter title "The Linux
690adventure".</p>
Daniel Veillard10c6a8f1998-10-28 01:00:12 +0000691
Daniel Veillardb24054a1999-12-18 15:32:46 +0000692<p><strong>NOTE</strong>: XML allows <em>PI</em>s and <em>comments</em> to be
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000693present before the document root, so <code>doc-&gt;children</code> may point
694to an element which is not the document Root Element, a function
Daniel Veillard5cb5ab81999-12-21 15:35:29 +0000695<code>xmlDocGetRootElement()</code> was added for this purpose.</p>
Daniel Veillardb24054a1999-12-18 15:32:46 +0000696
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000697<h3><a name="Modifying">Modifying the tree</a></h3>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000698
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000699<p>Functions are provided for reading and writing the document content. Here
Daniel Veillardc19fccc2000-07-03 11:52:01 +0000700is an excerpt from the <a href="html/gnome-xml-tree.html">tree API</a>:</p>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +0000701<dl>
Daniel Veillarddd6b3671999-09-23 22:19:22 +0000702 <dt><code>xmlAttrPtr xmlSetProp(xmlNodePtr node, const xmlChar *name, const
703 xmlChar *value);</code></dt>
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000704 <dd><p>This sets (or changes) an attribute carried by an ELEMENT node. The
705 value can be NULL.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000706 </dd>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +0000707</dl>
708<dl>
Daniel Veillarddd6b3671999-09-23 22:19:22 +0000709 <dt><code>const xmlChar *xmlGetProp(xmlNodePtr node, const xmlChar
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000710 *name);</code></dt>
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000711 <dd><p>This function returns a pointer to the property content. Note that
712 no extra copy is made.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000713 </dd>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +0000714</dl>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000715
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000716<p>Two functions are provided for reading and writing the text associated with
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +0000717elements:</p>
718<dl>
Daniel Veillarddd6b3671999-09-23 22:19:22 +0000719 <dt><code>xmlNodePtr xmlStringGetNodeList(xmlDocPtr doc, const xmlChar
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000720 *value);</code></dt>
721 <dd><p>This function takes an "external" string and convert it to one text
722 node or possibly to a list of entity and text nodes. All non-predefined
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +0000723 entity references like &amp;Gnome; will be stored internally as entity
724 nodes, hence the result of the function may not be a single node.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000725 </dd>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +0000726</dl>
727<dl>
Daniel Veillarddd6b3671999-09-23 22:19:22 +0000728 <dt><code>xmlChar *xmlNodeListGetString(xmlDocPtr doc, xmlNodePtr list, int
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000729 inLine);</code></dt>
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +0000730 <dd><p>This function is the inverse of
731 <code>xmlStringGetNodeList()</code>. It generates a new string
732 containing the content of the text and entity nodes. Note the extra
733 argument inLine. If this argument is set to 1, the function will expand
734 entity references. For example, instead of returning the &amp;Gnome;
735 XML encoding in the string, it will substitute it with its value (say,
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000736 "GNU Network Object Model Environment"). Set this argument if you want
737 to use the string for non-XML usage like User Interface.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000738 </dd>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +0000739</dl>
Daniel Veillard10c6a8f1998-10-28 01:00:12 +0000740
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000741<h3><a name="Saving">Saving a tree</a></h3>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000742
743<p>Basically 3 options are possible:</p>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +0000744<dl>
Daniel Veillarddd6b3671999-09-23 22:19:22 +0000745 <dt><code>void xmlDocDumpMemory(xmlDocPtr cur, xmlChar**mem, int
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000746 *size);</code></dt>
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000747 <dd><p>Returns a buffer into which the document has been saved.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000748 </dd>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +0000749</dl>
750<dl>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000751 <dt><code>extern void xmlDocDump(FILE *f, xmlDocPtr doc);</code></dt>
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000752 <dd><p>Dumps a document to an open file descriptor.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000753 </dd>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +0000754</dl>
755<dl>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000756 <dt><code>int xmlSaveFile(const char *filename, xmlDocPtr cur);</code></dt>
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +0000757 <dd><p>Saves the document to a file. In this case, the compression
758 interface is triggered if it has been turned on.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000759 </dd>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +0000760</dl>
Daniel Veillard10c6a8f1998-10-28 01:00:12 +0000761
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000762<h3><a name="Compressio">Compression</a></h3>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000763
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000764<p>The library transparently handles compression when doing file-based
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +0000765accesses. The level of compression on saves can be turned on either globally
766or individually for one file:</p>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +0000767<dl>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000768 <dt><code>int xmlGetDocCompressMode (xmlDocPtr doc);</code></dt>
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000769 <dd><p>Gets the document compression ratio (0-9).</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000770 </dd>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +0000771</dl>
772<dl>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000773 <dt><code>void xmlSetDocCompressMode (xmlDocPtr doc, int mode);</code></dt>
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000774 <dd><p>Sets the document compression ratio.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000775 </dd>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +0000776</dl>
777<dl>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000778 <dt><code>int xmlGetCompressMode(void);</code></dt>
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000779 <dd><p>Gets the default compression ratio.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000780 </dd>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +0000781</dl>
782<dl>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000783 <dt><code>void xmlSetCompressMode(int mode);</code></dt>
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000784 <dd><p>Sets the default compression ratio.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000785 </dd>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +0000786</dl>
787
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000788<h2><a name="Entities">Entities or no entities</a></h2>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000789
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000790<p>Entities in principle are similar to simple C macros. An entity defines an
791abbreviation for a given string that you can reuse many times throughout the
792content of your document. Entities are especially useful when a given string
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +0000793may occur frequently within a document, or to confine the change needed to a
794document to a restricted area in the internal subset of the document (at the
795beginning). Example:</p>
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000796<pre>1 &lt;?xml version="1.0"?&gt;
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00007972 &lt;!DOCTYPE EXAMPLE SYSTEM "example.dtd" [
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00007983 &lt;!ENTITY xml "Extensible Markup Language"&gt;
7994 ]&gt;
8005 &lt;EXAMPLE&gt;
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00008016 &amp;xml;
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00008027 &lt;/EXAMPLE&gt;</pre>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000803
804<p>Line 3 declares the xml entity. Line 6 uses the xml entity, by prefixing
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000805it's name with '&amp;' and following it by ';' without any spaces added. There
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000806are 5 predefined entities in libxml allowing you to escape charaters with
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000807predefined meaning in some parts of the xml document content:
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000808<strong>&amp;lt;</strong> for the character '&lt;', <strong>&amp;gt;</strong>
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000809for the character '&gt;', <strong>&amp;apos;</strong> for the character ''',
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000810<strong>&amp;quot;</strong> for the character '"', and
811<strong>&amp;amp;</strong> for the character '&amp;'.</p>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000812
813<p>One of the problems related to entities is that you may want the parser to
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +0000814substitute an entity's content so that you can see the replacement text in
815your application. Or you may prefer to keep entity references as such in the
816content to be able to save the document back without losing this usually
817precious information (if the user went through the pain of explicitly defining
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000818entities, he may have a a rather negative attitude if you blindly susbtitute
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000819them as saving time). The <a
Daniel Veillardc19fccc2000-07-03 11:52:01 +0000820href="html/gnome-xml-parser.html#XMLSUBSTITUTEENTITIESDEFAULT">xmlSubstituteEntitiesDefault()</a>
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000821function allows you to check and change the behaviour, which is to not
822substitute entities by default.</p>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000823
824<p>Here is the DOM tree built by libxml for the previous document in the
825default case:</p>
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000826<pre>/gnome/src/gnome-xml -&gt; ./xmllint --debug test/ent1
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000827DOCUMENT
828version=1.0
829 ELEMENT EXAMPLE
830 TEXT
831 content=
832 ENTITY_REF
833 INTERNAL_GENERAL_ENTITY xml
834 content=Extensible Markup Language
835 TEXT
836 content=</pre>
837
838<p>And here is the result when substituting entities:</p>
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000839<pre>/gnome/src/gnome-xml -&gt; ./tester --debug --noent test/ent1
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000840DOCUMENT
841version=1.0
842 ELEMENT EXAMPLE
843 TEXT
844 content= Extensible Markup Language</pre>
845
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000846<p>So, entities or no entities? Basically, it depends on your use case. I
847suggest that you keep the non-substituting default behaviour and avoid using
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000848entities in your XML document or data if you are not willing to handle the
849entity references elements in the DOM tree.</p>
850
851<p>Note that at save time libxml enforce the conversion of the predefined
852entities where necessary to prevent well-formedness problems, and will also
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000853transparently replace those with chars (i.e., it will not generate entity
854reference elements in the DOM tree or call the reference() SAX callback when
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000855finding them in the input).</p>
856
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000857<h2><a name="Namespaces">Namespaces</a></h2>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000858
Daniel Veillardec303412000-03-24 13:41:54 +0000859<p>The libxml library implements <a
860href="http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml-names/">XML namespaces</a> support by
861recognizing namespace contructs in the input, and does namespace lookup
862automatically when building the DOM tree. A namespace declaration is
863associated with an in-memory structure and all elements or attributes within
864that namespace point to it. Hence testing the namespace is a simple and fast
865equality operation at the user level.</p>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000866
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +0000867<p>I suggest that people using libxml use a namespace, and declare it in the
868root element of their document as the default namespace. Then they don't need
869to use the prefix in the content but we will have a basis for future semantic
870refinement and merging of data from different sources. This doesn't augment
871significantly the size of the XML output, but significantly increase its value
Daniel Veillardec303412000-03-24 13:41:54 +0000872in the long-term. Example:</p>
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000873<pre>&lt;mydoc xmlns="http://mydoc.example.org/schemas/"&gt;
874 &lt;elem1&gt;...&lt;/elem1&gt;
875 &lt;elem2&gt;...&lt;/elem2&gt;
876&lt;/mydoc&gt;</pre>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000877
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000878<p>Concerning the namespace value, this has to be an URL, but the URL doesn't
Daniel Veillardec303412000-03-24 13:41:54 +0000879have to point to any existing resource on the Web. It will bind all the
880element and atributes with that URL. I suggest to use an URL within a domain
881you control, and that the URL should contain some kind of version information
882if possible. For example, <code>"http://www.gnome.org/gnumeric/1.0/"</code> is
Daniel Veillard361d8452000-04-03 19:48:13 +0000883a good namespace scheme.</p>
Daniel Veillardec303412000-03-24 13:41:54 +0000884
885<p>Then when you load a file, make sure that a namespace carrying the
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000886version-independent prefix is installed on the root element of your document,
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000887and if the version information don't match something you know, warn the user
888and be liberal in what you accept as the input. Also do *not* try to base
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000889namespace checking on the prefix value. &lt;foo:text&gt; may be exactly the
890same as &lt;bar:text&gt; in another document. What really matter is the URI
891associated with the element or the attribute, not the prefix string (which is
892just a shortcut for the full URI). In libxml element and attributes have a
Daniel Veillardec303412000-03-24 13:41:54 +0000893<code>ns</code> field pointing to an xmlNs structure detailing the namespace
894prefix and it's URI.</p>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000895
896<p>@@Interfaces@@</p>
897
898<p>@@Examples@@</p>
899
900<p>Usually people object using namespace in the case of validation, I object
901this and will make sure that using namespaces won't break validity checking,
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +0000902so even is you plan to use or currently are using validation I strongly
903suggest adding namespaces to your document. A default namespace scheme
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000904<code>xmlns="http://...."</code> should not break validity even on less
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000905flexible parsers. Now using namespace to mix and differentiate content coming
906from multiple DTDs will certainly break current validation schemes. I will try
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000907to provide ways to do this, but this may not be portable or standardized.</p>
908
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000909<h2><a name="Validation">Validation, or are you afraid of DTDs ?</a></h2>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000910
911<p>Well what is validation and what is a DTD ?</p>
912
913<p>Validation is the process of checking a document against a set of
914construction rules, a <strong>DTD</strong> (Document Type Definition) is such
915a set of rules.</p>
916
917<p>The validation process and building DTDs are the two most difficult parts
918of XML life cycle. Briefly a DTD defines all the possibles element to be
919found within your document, what is the formal shape of your document tree (by
920defining the allowed content of an element, either text, a regular expression
Daniel Veillard306be992000-07-03 12:38:45 +0000921for the allowed list of children, or mixed content i.e. both text and
922children). The DTD also defines the allowed attributes for all elements and
923the types of the attributes. For more detailed informations, I suggest to read
924the related parts of the XML specification, the examples found under
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000925gnome-xml/test/valid/dtd and the large amount of books available on XML. The
926dia example in gnome-xml/test/valid should be both simple and complete enough
927to allow you to build your own.</p>
928
929<p>A word of warning, building a good DTD which will fit your needs of your
930application in the long-term is far from trivial, however the extra level of
931quality it can insure is well worth the price for some sets of applications or
932if you already have already a DTD defined for your application field.</p>
933
934<p>The validation is not completely finished but in a (very IMHO) usable
935state. Until a real validation interface is defined the way to do it is to
936define and set the <strong>xmlDoValidityCheckingDefaultValue</strong> external
937variable to 1, this will of course be changed at some point:</p>
938
939<p>extern int xmlDoValidityCheckingDefaultValue;</p>
940
941<p>...</p>
942
943<p>xmlDoValidityCheckingDefaultValue = 1;</p>
944
945<p></p>
946
947<p>To handle external entities, use the function
948<strong>xmlSetExternalEntityLoader</strong>(xmlExternalEntityLoader f); to
949link in you HTTP/FTP/Entities database library to the standard libxml
950core.</p>
951
952<p>@@interfaces@@</p>
953
Daniel Veillard35008381999-10-25 13:15:52 +0000954<h2><a name="DOM"></a><a name="Principles">DOM Principles</a></h2>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000955
956<p><a href="http://www.w3.org/DOM/">DOM</a> stands for the <em>Document Object
Daniel Veillardccb09631998-10-27 06:21:04 +0000957Model</em> this is an API for accessing XML or HTML structured documents.
958Native support for DOM in Gnome is on the way (module gnome-dom), and it will
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +0000959be based on gnome-xml. This will be a far cleaner interface to manipulate XML
Daniel Veillardc08a2c61999-09-08 21:35:25 +0000960files within Gnome since it won't expose the internal structure. DOM defines a
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +0000961set of IDL (or Java) interfaces allowing to traverse and manipulate a
962document. The DOM library will allow accessing and modifying "live" documents
963presents on other programs like this:</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000964
965<p><img src="DOM.gif" alt=" DOM.gif "></p>
966
967<p>This should help greatly doing things like modifying a gnumeric spreadsheet
Daniel Veillardccb09631998-10-27 06:21:04 +0000968embedded in a GWP document for example.</p>
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +0000969
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000970<p>The current DOM implementation on top of libxml is the <a
971href="http://cvs.gnome.org/lxr/source/gdome/">gdome Gnome module</a>, this is
972a full DOM interface, thanks to <a href="mailto:raph@levien.com">Raph
973Levien</a>.</p>
974
975<p>The gnome-dom module in the Gnome CVS base is obsolete</p>
976
Daniel Veillard35008381999-10-25 13:15:52 +0000977<h2><a name="Example"></a><a name="real">A real example</a></h2>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000978
979<p>Here is a real size example, where the actual content of the application
980data is not kept in the DOM tree but uses internal structures. It is based on
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +0000981a proposal to keep a database of jobs related to Gnome, with an XML based
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000982storage structure. Here is an <a href="gjobs.xml">XML encoded jobs
983base</a>:</p>
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000984<pre>&lt;?xml version="1.0"?&gt;
985&lt;gjob:Helping xmlns:gjob="http://www.gnome.org/some-location"&gt;
986 &lt;gjob:Jobs&gt;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +0000987
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000988 &lt;gjob:Job&gt;
989 &lt;gjob:Project ID="3"/&gt;
990 &lt;gjob:Application&gt;GBackup&lt;/gjob:Application&gt;
991 &lt;gjob:Category&gt;Development&lt;/gjob:Category&gt;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +0000992
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000993 &lt;gjob:Update&gt;
994 &lt;gjob:Status&gt;Open&lt;/gjob:Status&gt;
995 &lt;gjob:Modified&gt;Mon, 07 Jun 1999 20:27:45 -0400 MET DST&lt;/gjob:Modified&gt;
996 &lt;gjob:Salary&gt;USD 0.00&lt;/gjob:Salary&gt;
997 &lt;/gjob:Update&gt;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +0000998
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000999 &lt;gjob:Developers&gt;
1000 &lt;gjob:Developer&gt;
1001 &lt;/gjob:Developer&gt;
1002 &lt;/gjob:Developers&gt;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +00001003
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00001004 &lt;gjob:Contact&gt;
1005 &lt;gjob:Person&gt;Nathan Clemons&lt;/gjob:Person&gt;
1006 &lt;gjob:Email&gt;nathan@windsofstorm.net&lt;/gjob:Email&gt;
1007 &lt;gjob:Company&gt;
1008 &lt;/gjob:Company&gt;
1009 &lt;gjob:Organisation&gt;
1010 &lt;/gjob:Organisation&gt;
1011 &lt;gjob:Webpage&gt;
1012 &lt;/gjob:Webpage&gt;
1013 &lt;gjob:Snailmail&gt;
1014 &lt;/gjob:Snailmail&gt;
1015 &lt;gjob:Phone&gt;
1016 &lt;/gjob:Phone&gt;
1017 &lt;/gjob:Contact&gt;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +00001018
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00001019 &lt;gjob:Requirements&gt;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +00001020 The program should be released as free software, under the GPL.
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00001021 &lt;/gjob:Requirements&gt;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +00001022
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00001023 &lt;gjob:Skills&gt;
1024 &lt;/gjob:Skills&gt;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +00001025
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00001026 &lt;gjob:Details&gt;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +00001027 A GNOME based system that will allow a superuser to configure
1028 compressed and uncompressed files and/or file systems to be backed
1029 up with a supported media in the system. This should be able to
1030 perform via find commands generating a list of files that are passed
1031 to tar, dd, cpio, cp, gzip, etc., to be directed to the tape machine
1032 or via operations performed on the filesystem itself. Email
1033 notification and GUI status display very important.
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00001034 &lt;/gjob:Details&gt;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +00001035
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00001036 &lt;/gjob:Job&gt;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +00001037
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00001038 &lt;/gjob:Jobs&gt;
1039&lt;/gjob:Helping&gt;</pre>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00001040
1041<p>While loading the XML file into an internal DOM tree is a matter of calling
1042only a couple of functions, browsing the tree to gather the informations and
1043generate the internals structures is harder, and more error prone.</p>
1044
1045<p>The suggested principle is to be tolerant with respect to the input
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +00001046structure. For example, the ordering of the attributes is not significant,
1047Cthe XML specification is clear about it. It's also usually a good idea to not
Daniel Veillard306be992000-07-03 12:38:45 +00001048be dependent of the orders of the children of a given node, unless it really
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +00001049makes things harder. Here is some code to parse the informations for a
1050person:</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00001051<pre>/*
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +00001052 * A person record
1053 */
1054typedef struct person {
1055 char *name;
1056 char *email;
1057 char *company;
1058 char *organisation;
1059 char *smail;
1060 char *webPage;
1061 char *phone;
1062} person, *personPtr;
1063
1064/*
1065 * And the code needed to parse it
1066 */
1067personPtr parsePerson(xmlDocPtr doc, xmlNsPtr ns, xmlNodePtr cur) {
1068 personPtr ret = NULL;
1069
1070DEBUG("parsePerson\n");
1071 /*
1072 * allocate the struct
1073 */
1074 ret = (personPtr) malloc(sizeof(person));
1075 if (ret == NULL) {
1076 fprintf(stderr,"out of memory\n");
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00001077 return(NULL);
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +00001078 }
1079 memset(ret, 0, sizeof(person));
1080
1081 /* We don't care what the top level element name is */
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00001082 cur = cur-&gt;xmlChildrenNode;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +00001083 while (cur != NULL) {
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00001084 if ((!strcmp(cur-&gt;name, "Person")) &amp;&amp; (cur-&gt;ns == ns))
1085 ret-&gt;name = xmlNodeListGetString(doc, cur-&gt;xmlChildrenNode, 1);
1086 if ((!strcmp(cur-&gt;name, "Email")) &amp;&amp; (cur-&gt;ns == ns))
1087 ret-&gt;email = xmlNodeListGetString(doc, cur-&gt;xmlChildrenNode, 1);
1088 cur = cur-&gt;next;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +00001089 }
1090
1091 return(ret);
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00001092}</pre>
1093
1094<p>Here is a couple of things to notice:</p>
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +00001095<ul>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00001096 <li>Usually a recursive parsing style is the more convenient one, XML data
1097 being by nature subject to repetitive constructs and usualy exibit highly
1098 stuctured patterns.</li>
1099 <li>The two arguments of type <em>xmlDocPtr</em> and <em>xmlNsPtr</em>, i.e.
1100 the pointer to the global XML document and the namespace reserved to the
1101 application. Document wide information are needed for example to decode
1102 entities and it's a good coding practice to define a namespace for your
1103 application set of data and test that the element and attributes you're
1104 analyzing actually pertains to your application space. This is done by a
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00001105 simple equality test (cur-&gt;ns == ns).</li>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00001106 <li>To retrieve text and attributes value, it is suggested to use the
1107 function <em>xmlNodeListGetString</em> to gather all the text and entity
1108 reference nodes generated by the DOM output and produce an single text
1109 string.</li>
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +00001110</ul>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00001111
1112<p>Here is another piece of code used to parse another level of the
1113structure:</p>
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00001114<pre>#include &lt;libxml/tree.h&gt;
Daniel Veillard361d8452000-04-03 19:48:13 +00001115/*
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +00001116 * a Description for a Job
1117 */
1118typedef struct job {
1119 char *projectID;
1120 char *application;
1121 char *category;
1122 personPtr contact;
1123 int nbDevelopers;
1124 personPtr developers[100]; /* using dynamic alloc is left as an exercise */
1125} job, *jobPtr;
1126
1127/*
1128 * And the code needed to parse it
1129 */
1130jobPtr parseJob(xmlDocPtr doc, xmlNsPtr ns, xmlNodePtr cur) {
1131 jobPtr ret = NULL;
1132
1133DEBUG("parseJob\n");
1134 /*
1135 * allocate the struct
1136 */
1137 ret = (jobPtr) malloc(sizeof(job));
1138 if (ret == NULL) {
1139 fprintf(stderr,"out of memory\n");
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00001140 return(NULL);
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +00001141 }
1142 memset(ret, 0, sizeof(job));
1143
1144 /* We don't care what the top level element name is */
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00001145 cur = cur-&gt;xmlChildrenNode;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +00001146 while (cur != NULL) {
1147
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00001148 if ((!strcmp(cur-&gt;name, "Project")) &amp;&amp; (cur-&gt;ns == ns)) {
1149 ret-&gt;projectID = xmlGetProp(cur, "ID");
1150 if (ret-&gt;projectID == NULL) {
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00001151 fprintf(stderr, "Project has no ID\n");
1152 }
1153 }
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00001154 if ((!strcmp(cur-&gt;name, "Application")) &amp;&amp; (cur-&gt;ns == ns))
1155 ret-&gt;application = xmlNodeListGetString(doc, cur-&gt;xmlChildrenNode, 1);
1156 if ((!strcmp(cur-&gt;name, "Category")) &amp;&amp; (cur-&gt;ns == ns))
1157 ret-&gt;category = xmlNodeListGetString(doc, cur-&gt;xmlChildrenNode, 1);
1158 if ((!strcmp(cur-&gt;name, "Contact")) &amp;&amp; (cur-&gt;ns == ns))
1159 ret-&gt;contact = parsePerson(doc, ns, cur);
1160 cur = cur-&gt;next;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +00001161 }
1162
1163 return(ret);
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00001164}</pre>
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +00001165
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00001166<p>One can notice that once used to it, writing this kind of code is quite
1167simple, but boring. Ultimately, it could be possble to write stubbers taking
1168either C data structure definitions, a set of XML examples or an XML DTD and
1169produce the code needed to import and export the content between C data and
1170XML storage. This is left as an exercise to the reader :-)</p>
1171
Daniel Veillard6f0adb52000-07-03 11:41:26 +00001172<p>Feel free to use <a href="example/gjobread.c">the code for the full C
1173parsing example</a> as a template, it is also available with Makefile in the
1174Gnome CVS base under gnome-xml/example</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00001175
Daniel Veillardc310d562000-06-23 18:32:15 +00001176<h2><a name="Contributi">Contributions</a></h2>
1177<ul>
1178 <li><a href="mailto:ari@btigate.com">Ari Johnson</a> provides a C++ wrapper
1179 for libxml:
1180 <p>Website: <a
1181 href="http://lusis.org/~ari/xml++/">http://lusis.org/~ari/xml++/</a></p>
1182 <p>Download: <a
1183 href="http://lusis.org/~ari/xml++/libxml++.tar.gz">http://lusis.org/~ari/xml++/libxml++.tar.gz</a></p>
1184 </li>
1185 <li><a href="mailto:doolin@cs.utk.edu">David Doolin</a> provides a
1186 precompiled Windows version
1187 <p><a
1188 href="http://www.ce.berkeley.edu/~doolin/code/libxmlwin32/">http://www.ce.berkeley.edu/~doolin/code/libxmlwin32/</a></p>
1189 </li>
Daniel Veillard3f6f7f62000-06-30 17:58:25 +00001190 <li><a href="mailto:fnatter@gmx.net">Felix Natter</a> provided <a
1191 href="libxml-doc.el">an emacs module</a> to lookup libxml functions
1192 documentation</li>
Daniel Veillardc310d562000-06-23 18:32:15 +00001193 <li><a href="mailto:sherwin@nlm.nih.gov">Ziying Sherwin</a> provided <a
1194 href="http://xmlsoft.org/messages/0488.html">man pages</a> (not yet
1195 integrated in the distribution)</li>
1196</ul>
1197
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00001198<p></p>
1199
1200<p><a href="mailto:Daniel.Veillard@w3.org">Daniel Veillard</a></p>
1201
Daniel Veillard8d869642000-07-14 12:12:59 +00001202<p>$Id: xml.html,v 1.41 2000/07/10 12:17:33 veillard Exp $</p>
Daniel Veillardccb09631998-10-27 06:21:04 +00001203</body>
1204</html>