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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 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"
Daniel Veillardb370a742001-06-09 16:58:47 +000013alt="W3C Logo"></a><a href="http://www.redhat.com"><img src="redhat.gif"
14alt="Red Hat Logo"></a></p>
Daniel Veillardec303412000-03-24 13:41:54 +000015
Daniel Veillardec78c0f2000-08-25 10:25:23 +000016<h1 align="center">The XML C library for Gnome</h1>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +000017
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +000018<h2 style="text-align: center">libxml, a.k.a. gnome-xml</h2>
19
20<p></p>
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +000021<ul>
22 <li><a href="#Introducti">Introduction</a></li>
23 <li><a href="#Documentat">Documentation</a></li>
Daniel Veillardd5f97f82000-09-17 16:38:14 +000024 <li><a href="#Reporting">Reporting bugs and getting help</a></li>
25 <li><a href="#help">how to help</a></li>
Daniel Veillard10a2c651999-12-12 13:03:50 +000026 <li><a href="#Downloads">Downloads</a></li>
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +000027 <li><a href="#News">News</a></li>
28 <li><a href="#XML">XML</a></li>
Daniel Veillard82687162001-01-22 15:32:01 +000029 <li><a href="#XSLT">XSLT</a></li>
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +000030 <li><a href="#tree">The tree output</a></li>
31 <li><a href="#interface">The SAX interface</a></li>
32 <li><a href="#library">The XML library interfaces</a>
33 <ul>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +000034 <li><a href="#Invoking">Invoking the parser: the pull way</a></li>
35 <li><a href="#Invoking">Invoking the parser: the push way</a></li>
36 <li><a href="#Invoking2">Invoking the parser: the SAX interface</a></li>
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +000037 <li><a href="#Building">Building a tree from scratch</a></li>
38 <li><a href="#Traversing">Traversing the tree</a></li>
39 <li><a href="#Modifying">Modifying the tree</a></li>
40 <li><a href="#Saving">Saving the tree</a></li>
41 <li><a href="#Compressio">Compression</a></li>
42 </ul>
43 </li>
44 <li><a href="#Entities">Entities or no entities</a></li>
45 <li><a href="#Namespaces">Namespaces</a></li>
46 <li><a href="#Validation">Validation</a></li>
47 <li><a href="#Principles">DOM principles</a></li>
48 <li><a href="#real">A real example</a></li>
Daniel Veillard96984452000-08-31 13:50:12 +000049 <li><a href="#Contributi">Contributions</a></li>
50</ul>
51
52<p>Separate documents:</p>
53<ul>
54 <li><a href="upgrade.html">upgrade instructions for migrating to
55 libxml2</a></li>
56 <li><a href="encoding.html">libxml Internationalization support</a></li>
57 <li><a href="xmlio.html">libxml Input/Output interfaces</a></li>
Daniel Veillard189446d2000-10-13 10:23:06 +000058 <li><a href="xmlmem.html">libxml Memory interfaces</a></li>
Daniel Veillard300f7d62000-11-24 13:04:04 +000059 <li><a href="xmldtd.html">a short introduction about DTDs and
60 libxml</a></li>
Daniel Veillard6e6a6cc2001-02-15 15:55:44 +000061 <li><a href="http://xmlsoft.org/XSLT/">the libxslt page</a></li>
Daniel Veillard7b06bcb2001-06-22 16:03:51 +000062 <li><a href="http://www.cs.unibo.it/~casarini/gdome2/">the gdome2 page: a
63 standard DOM interface for libxml2</a></li>
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +000064</ul>
65
66<h2><a name="Introducti">Introduction</a></h2>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +000067
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +000068<p>This document describes libxml, the <a
Daniel Veillardec78c0f2000-08-25 10:25:23 +000069href="http://www.w3.org/XML/">XML</a> C library developped for the <a
70href="http://www.gnome.org/">Gnome</a> project. <a
71href="http://www.w3.org/XML/">XML is a standard</a> for building tag-based
72structured documents/data.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +000073
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +000074<p>Here are some key points about libxml:</p>
75<ul>
Daniel Veillard189446d2000-10-13 10:23:06 +000076 <li>Libxml exports Push and Pull type parser interfaces for both XML and
77 HTML.</li>
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +000078 <li>Libxml can do DTD validation at parse time, using a parsed document
79 instance, or with an arbitrary DTD.</li>
80 <li>Libxml now includes nearly complete <a
Daniel Veillard189446d2000-10-13 10:23:06 +000081 href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xpath">XPath</a> and <a
Daniel Veillard0c069222000-10-21 09:25:52 +000082 href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xptr">XPointer</a> implementations.</li>
Daniel Veillardec78c0f2000-08-25 10:25:23 +000083 <li>It is written in plain C, making as few assumptions as possible, and
Daniel Veillard189446d2000-10-13 10:23:06 +000084 sticking closely to ANSI C/POSIX for easy embedding. Works on
Daniel Veillardab8500d2000-10-15 21:06:19 +000085 Linux/Unix/Windows, ported to a number of other platforms.</li>
Daniel Veillardec70e912001-02-26 20:10:45 +000086 <li>Basic support for HTTP and FTP client allowing aplications to fetch
87 remote resources</li>
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +000088 <li>The design is modular, most of the extensions can be compiled out.</li>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +000089 <li>The internal document repesentation is as close as possible to the <a
90 href="http://www.w3.org/DOM/">DOM</a> interfaces.</li>
91 <li>Libxml also has a <a href="http://www.megginson.com/SAX/index.html">SAX
Daniel Veillard402e8c82000-02-29 22:57:47 +000092 like interface</a>; the interface is designed to be compatible with <a
93 href="http://www.jclark.com/xml/expat.html">Expat</a>.</li>
Daniel Veillardec303412000-03-24 13:41:54 +000094 <li>This library is released both under the <a
95 href="http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Legal/copyright-software-19980720.html">W3C
Daniel Veillard189446d2000-10-13 10:23:06 +000096 IPR</a> and the <a href="http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/lesser.html">GNU
97 LGPL</a>. Use either at your convenience, basically this should make
98 everybody happy, if not, drop me a mail.</li>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +000099</ul>
Daniel Veillardccb09631998-10-27 06:21:04 +0000100
Daniel Veillarde0c1d722001-03-21 10:28:36 +0000101<p>Warning: unless you are forced to because your application links with a
102Gnome library requiring it, <strong><span
103style="background-color: #FF0000">Do Not Use libxml1</span></strong>, use
104libxml2</p>
105
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000106<h2><a name="Documentat">Documentation</a></h2>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000107
Daniel Veillard402e8c82000-02-29 22:57:47 +0000108<p>There are some on-line resources about using libxml:</p>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000109<ol>
Daniel Veillard365e13b2000-07-02 07:56:37 +0000110 <li>Check the <a href="FAQ.html">FAQ</a></li>
Daniel Veillardc19fccc2000-07-03 11:52:01 +0000111 <li>Check the <a href="http://xmlsoft.org/html/libxml-lib.html">extensive
Daniel Veillard8c6d6af2000-08-25 17:14:13 +0000112 documentation</a> automatically extracted from code comments (using <a
113 href="http://cvs.gnome.org/bonsai/rview.cgi?cvsroot=/cvs/gnome&amp;dir=gtk-doc">gtk
114 doc</a>).</li>
Daniel Veillard8d869642000-07-14 12:12:59 +0000115 <li>Look at the documentation about <a href="encoding.html">libxml
116 internationalization support</a></li>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000117 <li>This page provides a global overview and <a href="#real">some
Daniel Veillard402e8c82000-02-29 22:57:47 +0000118 examples</a> on how to use libxml.</li>
119 <li><a href="mailto:james@daa.com.au">James Henstridge</a> wrote <a
120 href="http://www.daa.com.au/~james/gnome/xml-sax/xml-sax.html">some nice
121 documentation</a> explaining how to use the libxml SAX interface.</li>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000122 <li>George Lebl wrote <a
123 href="http://www-4.ibm.com/software/developer/library/gnome3/">an article
Daniel Veillard402e8c82000-02-29 22:57:47 +0000124 for IBM developerWorks</a> about using libxml.</li>
Daniel Veillardec303412000-03-24 13:41:54 +0000125 <li>Check <a href="http://cvs.gnome.org/lxr/source/gnome-xml/TODO">the TODO
126 file</a></li>
127 <li>Read the <a href="upgrade.html">1.x to 2.x upgrade path</a>. If you are
128 starting a new project using libxml you should really use the 2.x
129 version.</li>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000130 <li>And don't forget to look at the <a href="/messages/">mailing-list
Daniel Veillardc310d562000-06-23 18:32:15 +0000131 archive</a>.</li>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000132</ol>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000133
Daniel Veillardd5f97f82000-09-17 16:38:14 +0000134<h2><a name="Reporting">Reporting bugs and getting help</a></h2>
Daniel Veillard4c3a2031999-11-19 17:46:26 +0000135
Daniel Veillard402e8c82000-02-29 22:57:47 +0000136<p>Well, bugs or missing features are always possible, and I will make a point
Daniel Veillardd5f97f82000-09-17 16:38:14 +0000137of fixing them in a timely fashion. The best way to report a bug is to use the
Daniel Veillard81781102001-03-07 09:31:47 +0000138<a href="http://bugzilla.gnome.org/buglist.cgi?product=libxml">Gnome bug
139tracking database</a> (make sure to use the "libxml" module name). I look at
140reports there regularly and it's good to have a reminder when a bug is still
Daniel Veillarda41123c2001-04-22 19:31:20 +0000141open. Check the <a
142href="http://bugzilla.gnome.org/bugwritinghelp.html">instructions on reporting
143bugs</a> and be sure to specify that the bug is for the package libxml.</p>
Daniel Veillard4c3a2031999-11-19 17:46:26 +0000144
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000145<p>There is also a mailing-list <a
Daniel Veillard3197f162001-04-04 00:40:08 +0000146href="mailto:xml@gnome.org">xml@gnome.org</a> for libxml, with an <a
147href="http://mail.gnome.org/archives/xml/">on-line archive</a> (<a
148href="http://xmlsoft.org/messages">old</a>). To subscribe to this list, please
149visit the <a href="http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/xml">associated
Daniel Veillardf5498f32001-06-25 15:08:36 +0000150Web</a> page and follow the instructions. <strong>Do not send code, I won't
Daniel Veillardb97b4302001-06-26 23:04:22 +0000151debug it</strong> (but patches are really appreciated!), make sure you can
152reproduce the bug with xmllint or one of the test programs found in source in
153the distribution and send the command showing the error as well as the input
154(as an attachement), thanks.</p>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000155
Daniel Veillard402e8c82000-02-29 22:57:47 +0000156<p>Alternatively, you can just send the bug to the <a
Daniel Veillard33a67802001-03-07 09:44:02 +0000157href="mailto:xml@gnome.org">xml@gnome.org</a> list; if it's really libxml
Daniel Veillard6e93c4a2001-06-05 20:57:42 +0000158related I will approve it.. Please do not send me mail directly especially for
159portability problem, it makes things really harder to track and in some cases
160I'm not the best person to answer a given question, ask the list instead.</p>
Daniel Veillard4c3a2031999-11-19 17:46:26 +0000161
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000162<p>Of course, bugs reported with a suggested patch for fixing them will
Daniel Veillardec303412000-03-24 13:41:54 +0000163probably be processed faster.</p>
164
165<p>If you're looking for help, a quick look at <a
166href="http://xmlsoft.org/messages/#407">the list archive</a> may actually
167provide the answer, I usually send source samples when answering libxml usage
Daniel Veillard6f0adb52000-07-03 11:41:26 +0000168questions. The <a href="http://xmlsoft.org/html/book1.html">auto-generated
Daniel Veillardec303412000-03-24 13:41:54 +0000169documentantion</a> is not as polished as I would like (i need to learn more
170about Docbook), but it's a good starting point.</p>
171
Daniel Veillardd5f97f82000-09-17 16:38:14 +0000172<h2><a name="help">How to help</a></h2>
173
174<p>You can help the project in various ways, the best thing to do first is to
175subscribe to the mailing-list as explained before, check the <a
176href="http://xmlsoft.org/messages/">archives </a>and the <a
177href="http://bugs.gnome.org/db/pa/lgnome-xml.html">Gnome bug
178database:</a>:</p>
179<ol>
180 <li>provide patches when you find problems</li>
Daniel Veillard189446d2000-10-13 10:23:06 +0000181 <li>provide the diffs when you port libxml to a new platform. They may not
Daniel Veillardab8500d2000-10-15 21:06:19 +0000182 be integrated in all cases but help pinpointing portability problems
183 and</li>
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000184 <li>provide documentation fixes (either as patches to the code comments or
Daniel Veillardd5f97f82000-09-17 16:38:14 +0000185 as HTML diffs).</li>
186 <li>provide new documentations pieces (translations, examples, etc ...)</li>
187 <li>Check the TODO file and try to close one of the items</li>
188 <li>take one of the points raised in the archive or the bug database and
Daniel Veillard33a67802001-03-07 09:44:02 +0000189 provide a fix. <a href="mailto:Daniel.Veillard@imag.fr">Get in touch with
Daniel Veillardd5f97f82000-09-17 16:38:14 +0000190 me </a>before to avoid synchronization problems and check that the
191 suggested fix will fit in nicely :-)</li>
192</ol>
193
Daniel Veillard10a2c651999-12-12 13:03:50 +0000194<h2><a name="Downloads">Downloads</a></h2>
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000195
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000196<p>The latest versions of libxml can be found on <a
Daniel Veillard20c8cf22001-06-26 22:47:36 +0000197href="ftp://xmlsoft.org/">xmlsoft.org</a> (<a
198href="ftp://speakeasy.rpmfind.net/pub/libxml/">Seattle</a>, <a
199href="ftp://fr.rpmfind.net/pub/libxml/">France</a>) or on the <a
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000200href="ftp://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/MIRRORS.html">Gnome FTP server</a> either
Daniel Veillard10a2c651999-12-12 13:03:50 +0000201as a <a href="ftp://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/stable/sources/libxml/">source
Daniel Veillard306be992000-07-03 12:38:45 +0000202archive</a> or <a
Daniel Veillarda41123c2001-04-22 19:31:20 +0000203href="ftp://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/stable/redhat/i386/libxml/">RPM
204packages</a>. (NOTE that you need both the <a
Daniel Veillardc19fccc2000-07-03 11:52:01 +0000205href="http://rpmfind.net/linux/RPM/libxml2.html">libxml(2)</a> and <a
206href="http://rpmfind.net/linux/RPM/libxml2-devel.html">libxml(2)-devel</a>
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000207packages installed to compile applications using libxml.)</p>
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000208
Daniel Veillard6c8b1172000-03-01 00:40:41 +0000209<p><a name="Snapshot">Snapshot:</a></p>
210<ul>
211 <li>Code from the W3C cvs base libxml <a
Daniel Veillard33a67802001-03-07 09:44:02 +0000212 href="ftp://xmlsoft.org/cvs-snapshot.tar.gz">cvs-snapshot.tar.gz</a></li>
Daniel Veillard6c8b1172000-03-01 00:40:41 +0000213 <li>Docs, content of the web site, the list archive included <a
Daniel Veillard33a67802001-03-07 09:44:02 +0000214 href="ftp://xmlsoft.org/libxml-docs.tar.gz">libxml-docs.tar.gz</a></li>
Daniel Veillard6c8b1172000-03-01 00:40:41 +0000215</ul>
216
217<p><a name="Contribs">Contribs:</a></p>
218
219<p>I do accept external contributions, especially if compiling on another
220platform, get in touch with me to upload the package. I will keep them in the
Daniel Veillard33a67802001-03-07 09:44:02 +0000221<a href="ftp://xmlsoft.org/contribs/">contrib directory</a></p>
Daniel Veillard6c8b1172000-03-01 00:40:41 +0000222
Daniel Veillard82687162001-01-22 15:32:01 +0000223<p>Libxml is also available from CVS:</p>
Daniel Veillard10a2c651999-12-12 13:03:50 +0000224<ul>
Daniel Veillard10a2c651999-12-12 13:03:50 +0000225 <li><p>The <a
226 href="http://cvs.gnome.org/bonsai/rview.cgi?cvsroot=/cvs/gnome&amp;dir=gnome-xml">Gnome
Daniel Veillard402e8c82000-02-29 22:57:47 +0000227 CVS base</a>. Check the <a
228 href="http://developer.gnome.org/tools/cvs.html">Gnome CVS Tools</a> page;
229 the CVS module is <b>gnome-xml</b>.</p>
Daniel Veillard10a2c651999-12-12 13:03:50 +0000230 </li>
Daniel Veillard82687162001-01-22 15:32:01 +0000231 <li>The <strong>libxslt</strong> module is also present there</li>
Daniel Veillard10a2c651999-12-12 13:03:50 +0000232</ul>
233
234<h2><a name="News">News</a></h2>
235
Daniel Veillard944b5ff1999-12-15 19:08:24 +0000236<h3>CVS only : check the <a
237href="http://cvs.gnome.org/lxr/source/gnome-xml/ChangeLog">Changelog</a> file
Daniel Veillard189446d2000-10-13 10:23:06 +0000238for a really accurate description</h3>
Daniel Veillardab8500d2000-10-15 21:06:19 +0000239
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000240<p>Items floating around but not actively worked on, get in touch with me if
Daniel Veillardab8500d2000-10-15 21:06:19 +0000241you want to test those</p>
242<ul>
Daniel Veillard6e6a6cc2001-02-15 15:55:44 +0000243 <li>Implementing <a href="http://xmlsoft.org/XSLT">XSLT</a>, this is done as
244 a separate C library on top of libxml called libxslt, not released yet but
245 available from CVS</li>
Daniel Veillard28929b22000-11-13 18:22:49 +0000246 <li>Finishing up <a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xptr">XPointer</a> and <a
247 href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xinclude">XInclude</a></li>
Daniel Veillard82687162001-01-22 15:32:01 +0000248 <li>(seeems working but delayed from release) parsing/import of Docbook SGML
249 docs</li>
Daniel Veillardab8500d2000-10-15 21:06:19 +0000250</ul>
251
Daniel Veillard11648102001-06-26 16:08:24 +0000252<h3>2.3.12: June 26 2001</h3>
253<ul>
254 <li>lots of cleanup</li>
255 <li>a couple of validation fix</li>
256 <li>fixed line number counting</li>
257 <li>fixed serious problems in the XInclude processing</li>
258 <li>added support for UTF8 BOM at beginning of entities</li>
259 <li>fixed a strange gcc optimizer bugs in xpath handling of float, gcc-3.0
260 miscompile uri.c (William), Thomas Leitner provided a fix for the
261 optimizer on Tru64</li>
262 <li>incorporated Yon Derek and Igor Zlatkovic fixes and improvements for
263 compilation on Windows MSC</li>
264 <li>update of libxml-doc.el (Felix Natter)</li>
265 <li>fixed 2 bugs in URI normalization code</li>
266</ul>
267
Daniel Veillarde3c81b52001-06-17 14:50:34 +0000268<h3>2.3.11: June 17 2001</h3>
269<ul>
270 <li>updates to trio, Makefiles and configure should fix some portability
271 problems (alpha)</li>
272 <li>fixed some HTML serialization problems (pre, script, and block/inline
273 handling), added encoding aware APIs, cleanup of this code</li>
274 <li>added xmlHasNsProp()</li>
275 <li>implemented a specific PI for encoding support in the DocBook SGML
276 parser</li>
277 <li>some XPath fixes (-Infinity, / as a function parameter and namespaces
278 node selection)</li>
279 <li>fixed a performance problem and an error in the validation code</li>
280 <li>fixed XInclude routine to implement the recursive behaviour</li>
281 <li>fixed xmlFreeNode problem when libxml is included statically twice</li>
282 <li>added --version to xmllint for bug reports</li>
283</ul>
284
Daniel Veillard2e4f1882001-06-01 10:11:57 +0000285<h3>2.3.10: June 1 2001</h3>
286<ul>
287 <li>fixed the SGML catalog support</li>
288 <li>a number of reported bugs got fixed, in XPath, iconv detection, XInclude
289 processing</li>
290 <li>XPath string function should now handle unicode correctly</li>
291</ul>
292
Daniel Veillard4623acd2001-05-19 15:13:15 +0000293<h3>2.3.9: May 19 2001</h3>
294
295<p>Lots of bugfixes, and added a basic SGML catalog support:</p>
296<ul>
297 <li>HTML push bugfix #54891 and another patch from Jonas Borgström</li>
298 <li>some serious speed optimisation again</li>
299 <li>some documentation cleanups</li>
300 <li>trying to get better linking on solaris (-R)</li>
301 <li>XPath API cleanup from Thomas Broyer</li>
302 <li>Validation bug fixed #54631, added a patch from Gary Pennington, fixed
303 xmlValidGetValidElements()</li>
304 <li>Added an INSTALL file</li>
305 <li>Attribute removal added to API: #54433</li>
306 <li>added a basic support for SGML catalogs</li>
307 <li>fixed xmlKeepBlanksDefault(0) API</li>
308 <li>bugfix in xmlNodeGetLang()</li>
309 <li>fixed a small configure portability problem</li>
310 <li>fixed an inversion of SYSTEM and PUBLIC identifier in HTML document</li>
311</ul>
312
Daniel Veillarda265af72001-05-14 11:13:58 +0000313<h3>1.8.13: May 14 2001</h3>
314<ul>
315 <li>bugfixes release of the old libxml1 branch used by Gnome</li>
316</ul>
317
Daniel Veillard3bbbe6f2001-05-03 11:15:37 +0000318<h3>2.3.8: May 3 2001</h3>
319<ul>
320 <li>Integrated an SGML DocBook parser for the Gnome project</li>
321 <li>Fixed a few things in the HTML parser</li>
322 <li>Fixed some XPath bugs raised by XSLT use, tried to fix the floating
323 point portability issue</li>
324 <li>Speed improvement (8M/s for SAX, 3M/s for DOM, 1.5M/s for DOM+validation
325 using the XML REC as input and a 700MHz celeron).</li>
326 <li>incorporated more Windows cleanup</li>
327 <li>added xmlSaveFormatFile()</li>
328 <li>fixed problems in copying nodes with entities references (gdome)</li>
329 <li>removed some troubles surrounding the new validation module</li>
330</ul>
331
Daniel Veillarda41123c2001-04-22 19:31:20 +0000332<h3>2.3.7: April 22 2001</h3>
333<ul>
334 <li>lots of small bug fixes, corrected XPointer</li>
335 <li>Non determinist content model validation support</li>
336 <li>added xmlDocCopyNode for gdome2</li>
337 <li>revamped the way the HTML parser handles end of tags</li>
338 <li>XPath: corrctions of namespacessupport and number formatting</li>
339 <li>Windows: Igor Zlatkovic patches for MSC compilation</li>
340 <li>HTML ouput fixes from P C Chow and William M. Brack</li>
341 <li>Improved validation speed sensible for DocBook</li>
342 <li>fixed a big bug with ID declared in external parsed entities</li>
343 <li>portability fixes, update of Trio from Bjorn Reese</li>
344</ul>
345
Daniel Veillardafc73112001-04-11 11:51:41 +0000346<h3>2.3.6: April 8 2001</h3>
347<ul>
348 <li>Code cleanup using extreme gcc compiler warning options, found and
349 cleared half a dozen potential problem</li>
350 <li>the Eazel team found an XML parser bug</li>
351 <li>cleaned up the user of some of the string formatting function. used the
352 trio library code to provide the one needed when the platform is missing
353 them</li>
354 <li>xpath: removed a memory leak and fixed the predicate evaluation problem,
355 extended the testsuite and cleaned up the result. XPointer seems broken
356 ...</li>
357</ul>
358
Daniel Veillard56a4cb82001-03-24 17:00:36 +0000359<h3>2.3.5: Mar 23 2001</h3>
360<ul>
361 <li>Biggest change is separate parsing and evaluation of XPath expressions,
362 there is some new APIs for this too</li>
363 <li>included a number of bug fixes(XML push parser, 51876, notations,
364 52299)</li>
365 <li>Fixed some portability issues</li>
366</ul>
367
Daniel Veillarde356c282001-03-10 12:32:04 +0000368<h3>2.3.4: Mar 10 2001</h3>
369<ul>
370 <li>Fixed bugs #51860 and #51861</li>
371 <li>Added a global variable xmlDefaultBufferSize to allow default buffer
372 size to be application tunable.</li>
373 <li>Some cleanup in the validation code, still a bug left and this part
374 should probably be rewritten to support ambiguous content model :-\</li>
375 <li>Fix a couple of serious bugs introduced or raised by changes in 2.3.3
376 parser</li>
377 <li>Fixed another bug in xmlNodeGetContent()</li>
378 <li>Bjorn fixed XPath node collection and Number formatting</li>
379 <li>Fixed a loop reported in the HTML parsing</li>
380 <li>blank space are reported even if the Dtd content model proves that they
381 are formatting spaces, this is for XmL conformance</li>
382</ul>
383
Daniel Veillardb402c072001-03-01 17:28:58 +0000384<h3>2.3.3: Mar 1 2001</h3>
385<ul>
386 <li>small change in XPath for XSLT</li>
387 <li>documentation cleanups</li>
388 <li>fix in validation by Gary Pennington</li>
389 <li>serious parsing performances improvements</li>
390</ul>
391
Daniel Veillardec70e912001-02-26 20:10:45 +0000392<h3>2.3.2: Feb 24 2001</h3>
Daniel Veillard71681102001-02-24 17:48:53 +0000393<ul>
394 <li>chasing XPath bugs, found a bunch, completed some TODO</li>
395 <li>fixed a Dtd parsing bug</li>
396 <li>fixed a bug in xmlNodeGetContent</li>
397 <li>ID/IDREF support partly rewritten by Gary Pennington</li>
398</ul>
399
Daniel Veillardec70e912001-02-26 20:10:45 +0000400<h3>2.3.1: Feb 15 2001</h3>
Daniel Veillard6e6a6cc2001-02-15 15:55:44 +0000401<ul>
402 <li>some XPath and HTML bug fixes for XSLT</li>
403 <li>small extension of the hash table interfaces for DOM gdome2
404 implementation</li>
405 <li>A few bug fixes</li>
406</ul>
407
Daniel Veillardec70e912001-02-26 20:10:45 +0000408<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 +0000409<ul>
410 <li>Lots of XPath bug fixes</li>
411 <li>Add a mode with Dtd lookup but without validation error reporting for
412 XSLT</li>
413 <li>Add support for text node without escaping (XSLT)</li>
414 <li>bug fixes for xmlCheckFilename</li>
415 <li>validation code bug fixes from Gary Pennington</li>
416 <li>Patch from Paul D. Smith correcting URI path normalization</li>
417 <li>Patch to allow simultaneous install of libxml-devel and
418 libxml2-devel</li>
419 <li>the example Makefile is now fixed</li>
420 <li>added HTML to the RPM packages</li>
421 <li>tree copying bugfixes</li>
422 <li>updates to Windows makefiles</li>
423 <li>optimisation patch from Bjorn Reese</li>
424</ul>
425
Daniel Veillardec70e912001-02-26 20:10:45 +0000426<h3>2.2.11: Jan 4 2001</h3>
Daniel Veillard503b8932001-01-05 06:36:31 +0000427<ul>
428 <li>bunch of bug fixes (memory I/O, xpath, ftp/http, ...)</li>
429 <li>added htmlHandleOmittedElem()</li>
430 <li>Applied Bjorn Reese's IPV6 first patch</li>
431 <li>Applied Paul D. Smith patches for validation of XInclude results</li>
Daniel Veillard82687162001-01-22 15:32:01 +0000432 <li>added XPointer xmlns() new scheme support</li>
Daniel Veillard503b8932001-01-05 06:36:31 +0000433</ul>
434
Daniel Veillard2ddd23d2000-11-25 10:42:19 +0000435<h3>2.2.10: Nov 25 2000</h3>
Daniel Veillard9d343c42000-11-25 10:12:43 +0000436<ul>
437 <li>Fix the Windows problems of 2.2.8</li>
438 <li>integrate OpenVMS patches</li>
439 <li>better handling of some nasty HTML input</li>
440 <li>Improved the XPointer implementation</li>
441 <li>integrate a number of provided patches</li>
442</ul>
443
Daniel Veillard2ddd23d2000-11-25 10:42:19 +0000444<h3>2.2.9: Nov 25 2000</h3>
445<ul>
446 <li>erroneous release :-(</li>
447</ul>
448
Daniel Veillard28929b22000-11-13 18:22:49 +0000449<h3>2.2.8: Nov 13 2000</h3>
450<ul>
451 <li>First version of <a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xinclude">XInclude</a>
452 support</li>
453 <li>Patch in conditional section handling</li>
454 <li>updated MS compiler project</li>
455 <li>fixed some XPath problems</li>
456 <li>added an URI escaping function</li>
457 <li>some other bug fixes</li>
458</ul>
459
460<h3>2.2.7: Oct 31 2000</h3>
461<ul>
462 <li>added message redirection</li>
463 <li>XPath improvements (thanks TOM !)</li>
464 <li>xmlIOParseDTD() added</li>
465 <li>various small fixes in the HTML, URI, HTTP and XPointer support</li>
466 <li>some cleanup of the Makefile, autoconf and the distribution content</li>
467</ul>
468
Daniel Veillard29a11cc2000-10-25 13:32:39 +0000469<h3>2.2.6: Oct 25 2000:</h3>
470<ul>
471 <li>Added an hash table module, migrated a number of internal structure to
472 those</li>
473 <li>Fixed a posteriori validation problems</li>
474 <li>HTTP module cleanups</li>
475 <li>HTML parser improvements (tag errors, script/style handling, attribute
476 normalization)</li>
477 <li>coalescing of adjacent text nodes</li>
478 <li>couple of XPath bug fixes, exported the internal API</li>
479</ul>
480
Daniel Veillardab8500d2000-10-15 21:06:19 +0000481<h3>2.2.5: Oct 15 2000:</h3>
Daniel Veillard4c3a2031999-11-19 17:46:26 +0000482<ul>
Daniel Veillard189446d2000-10-13 10:23:06 +0000483 <li>XPointer implementation and testsuite</li>
484 <li>Lot of XPath fixes, added variable and functions registration, more
485 tests</li>
486 <li>Portability fixes, lots of enhancements toward an easy Windows build and
487 release</li>
488 <li>Late validation fixes</li>
489 <li>Integrated a lot of contributed patches</li>
490 <li>added memory management docs</li>
Daniel Veillardab8500d2000-10-15 21:06:19 +0000491 <li>a performance problem when using large buffer seems fixed</li>
Daniel Veillard189446d2000-10-13 10:23:06 +0000492</ul>
493
494<h3>2.2.4: Oct 1 2000:</h3>
495<ul>
496 <li>main XPath problem fixed</li>
497 <li>Integrated portability patches for Windows</li>
498 <li>Serious bug fixes on the URI and HTML code</li>
Daniel Veillard361d8452000-04-03 19:48:13 +0000499</ul>
500
Daniel Veillardd5f97f82000-09-17 16:38:14 +0000501<h3>2.2.3: Sep 17 2000</h3>
502<ul>
503 <li>bug fixes</li>
504 <li>cleanup of entity handling code</li>
505 <li>overall review of all loops in the parsers, all sprintf usage has been
506 checked too</li>
507 <li>Far better handling of larges Dtd. Validating against Docbook XML Dtd
508 works smoothly now.</li>
509</ul>
510
511<h3>1.8.10: Sep 6 2000</h3>
512<ul>
513 <li>bug fix release for some Gnome projects</li>
514</ul>
515
516<h3>2.2.2: August 12 2000</h3>
Daniel Veillard786d7c82000-08-12 23:38:57 +0000517<ul>
518 <li>mostly bug fixes</li>
Daniel Veillardec78c0f2000-08-25 10:25:23 +0000519 <li>started adding routines to access xml parser context options</li>
Daniel Veillard786d7c82000-08-12 23:38:57 +0000520</ul>
521
Daniel Veillardd5f97f82000-09-17 16:38:14 +0000522<h3>2.2.1: July 21 2000</h3>
Daniel Veillarda2679fa2000-07-22 02:38:15 +0000523<ul>
524 <li>a purely bug fixes release</li>
525 <li>fixed an encoding support problem when parsing from a memory block</li>
526 <li>fixed a DOCTYPE parsing problem</li>
527 <li>removed a bug in the function allowing to override the memory allocation
528 routines</li>
529</ul>
530
Daniel Veillardd5f97f82000-09-17 16:38:14 +0000531<h3>2.2.0: July 14 2000</h3>
Daniel Veillard94e90602000-07-17 14:38:19 +0000532<ul>
533 <li>applied a lot of portability fixes</li>
534 <li>better encoding support/cleanup and saving (content is now always
535 encoded in UTF-8)</li>
536 <li>the HTML parser now correctly handles encodings</li>
537 <li>added xmlHasProp()</li>
538 <li>fixed a serious problem with &amp;#38;</li>
539 <li>propagated the fix to FTP client</li>
540 <li>cleanup, bugfixes, etc ...</li>
541 <li>Added a page about <a href="encoding.html">libxml Internationalization
542 support</a></li>
543</ul>
544
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000545<h3>1.8.9: July 9 2000</h3>
546<ul>
547 <li>fixed the spec the RPMs should be better</li>
548 <li>fixed a serious bug in the FTP implementation, released 1.8.9 to solve
549 rpmfind users problem</li>
550</ul>
551
Daniel Veillard6388e172000-07-03 16:07:19 +0000552<h3>2.1.1: July 1 2000</h3>
553<ul>
554 <li>fixes a couple of bugs in the 2.1.0 packaging</li>
555 <li>improvements on the HTML parser</li>
556</ul>
557
Daniel Veillard3f6f7f62000-06-30 17:58:25 +0000558<h3>2.1.0 and 1.8.8: June 29 2000</h3>
559<ul>
560 <li>1.8.8 is mostly a comodity package for upgrading to libxml2 accoding to
561 <a href="upgrade.html">new instructions</a>. It fixes a nasty problem
562 about &amp;#38; charref parsing</li>
563 <li>2.1.0 also ease the upgrade from libxml v1 to the recent version. it
564 also contains numerous fixes and enhancements:
565 <ul>
566 <li>added xmlStopParser() to stop parsing</li>
567 <li>improved a lot parsing speed when there is large CDATA blocs</li>
568 <li>includes XPath patches provided by Picdar Technology</li>
569 <li>tried to fix as much as possible DtD validation and namespace
570 related problems</li>
571 <li>output to a given encoding has been added/tested</li>
572 <li>lot of various fixes</li>
573 </ul>
574 </li>
575</ul>
576
Daniel Veillarde0aed302000-04-16 08:52:20 +0000577<h3>2.0.0: Apr 12 2000</h3>
Daniel Veillard361d8452000-04-03 19:48:13 +0000578<ul>
579 <li>First public release of libxml2. If you are using libxml, it's a good
Daniel Veillarde0aed302000-04-16 08:52:20 +0000580 idea to check the 1.x to 2.x upgrade instructions. NOTE: while initally
581 scheduled for Apr 3 the relase occured only on Apr 12 due to massive
582 workload.</li>
Daniel Veillard361d8452000-04-03 19:48:13 +0000583 <li>The include are now located under $prefix/include/libxml (instead of
Daniel Veillarde0aed302000-04-16 08:52:20 +0000584 $prefix/include/gnome-xml), they also are referenced by
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000585 <pre>#include &lt;libxml/xxx.h&gt;</pre>
Daniel Veillarde0aed302000-04-16 08:52:20 +0000586 <p>instead of</p>
Daniel Veillard361d8452000-04-03 19:48:13 +0000587 <pre>#include "xxx.h"</pre>
588 </li>
Daniel Veillard8f621982000-03-20 13:07:15 +0000589 <li>a new URI module for parsing URIs and following strictly RFC 2396</li>
590 <li>the memory allocation routines used by libxml can now be overloaded
591 dynamically by using xmlMemSetup()</li>
Daniel Veillard361d8452000-04-03 19:48:13 +0000592 <li>The previously CVS only tool tester has been renamed
593 <strong>xmllint</strong> and is now installed as part of the libxml2
594 package</li>
Daniel Veillarde0aed302000-04-16 08:52:20 +0000595 <li>The I/O interface has been revamped. There is now ways to plug in
596 specific I/O modules, either at the URI scheme detection level using
597 xmlRegisterInputCallbacks() or by passing I/O functions when creating a
598 parser context using xmlCreateIOParserCtxt()</li>
599 <li>there is a C preprocessor macro LIBXML_VERSION providing the version
600 number of the libxml module in use</li>
601 <li>a number of optional features of libxml can now be excluded at configure
602 time (FTP/HTTP/HTML/XPath/Debug)</li>
Daniel Veillardedfb29b2000-03-14 19:59:05 +0000603</ul>
604
605<h3>2.0.0beta: Mar 14 2000</h3>
606<ul>
607 <li>This is a first Beta release of libxml version 2</li>
Daniel Veillarde356c282001-03-10 12:32:04 +0000608 <li>It's available only from<a href="ftp://xmlsoft.org/">xmlsoft.org
609 FTP</a>, it's packaged as libxml2-2.0.0beta and available as tar and
610 RPMs</li>
Daniel Veillardedfb29b2000-03-14 19:59:05 +0000611 <li>This version is now the head in the Gnome CVS base, the old one is
612 available under the tag LIB_XML_1_X</li>
613 <li>This includes a very large set of changes. Froma programmatic point of
614 view applications should not have to be modified too much, check the <a
615 href="upgrade.html">upgrade page</a></li>
616 <li>Some interfaces may changes (especially a bit about encoding).</li>
617 <li>the updates includes:
Daniel Veillard6c8b1172000-03-01 00:40:41 +0000618 <ul>
Daniel Veillardedfb29b2000-03-14 19:59:05 +0000619 <li>fix I18N support. ISO-Latin-x/UTF-8/UTF-16 (nearly) seems correctly
620 handled now</li>
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +0000621 <li>Better handling of entities, especially well formedness checking and
622 proper PEref extensions in external subsets</li>
Daniel Veillard6c8b1172000-03-01 00:40:41 +0000623 <li>DTD conditional sections</li>
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +0000624 <li>Validation now correcly handle entities content</li>
Daniel Veillard6c8b1172000-03-01 00:40:41 +0000625 <li><a href="http://rpmfind.net/tools/gdome/messages/0039.html">change
626 structures to accomodate DOM</a></li>
Daniel Veillard6c8b1172000-03-01 00:40:41 +0000627 </ul>
628 </li>
Daniel Veillardedfb29b2000-03-14 19:59:05 +0000629 <li>Serious progress were made toward compliance, <a
630 href="conf/result.html">here are the result of the test</a> against the
631 OASIS testsuite (except the japanese tests since I don't support that
632 encoding yet). This URL is rebuilt every couple of hours using the CVS
633 head version.</li>
Daniel Veillarde41f2b72000-01-30 20:00:07 +0000634</ul>
635
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +0000636<h3>1.8.7: Mar 6 2000</h3>
637<ul>
638 <li>This is a bug fix release:</li>
639 <li>It is possible to disable the ignorable blanks heuristic used by
640 libxml-1.x, a new function xmlKeepBlanksDefault(0) will allow this. Note
641 that for adherence to XML spec, this behaviour will be disabled by default
642 in 2.x . The same function will allow to keep compatibility for old
643 code.</li>
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000644 <li>Blanks in &lt;a&gt; &lt;/a&gt; constructs are not ignored anymore,
645 avoiding heuristic is really the Right Way :-\</li>
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +0000646 <li>The unchecked use of snprintf which was breaking libxml-1.8.6
647 compilation on some platforms has been fixed</li>
648 <li>nanoftp.c nanohttp.c: Fixed '#' and '?' stripping when processing
649 URIs</li>
650</ul>
651
Daniel Veillarde41f2b72000-01-30 20:00:07 +0000652<h3>1.8.6: Jan 31 2000</h3>
653<ul>
654 <li>added a nanoFTP transport module, debugged until the new version of <a
655 href="http://rpmfind.net/linux/rpm2html/rpmfind.html">rpmfind</a> can use
656 it without troubles</li>
Daniel Veillardda07c342000-01-25 18:31:22 +0000657</ul>
658
659<h3>1.8.5: Jan 21 2000</h3>
660<ul>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000661 <li>adding APIs to parse a well balanced chunk of XML (production <a
662 href="http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml#NT-content">[43] content</a> of the XML
663 spec)</li>
Daniel Veillard461a66c2000-01-18 18:01:01 +0000664 <li>fixed a hideous bug in xmlGetProp pointed by Rune.Djurhuus@fast.no</li>
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000665 <li>Jody Goldberg &lt;jgoldberg@home.com&gt; provided another patch trying
666 to solve the zlib checks problems</li>
Daniel Veillard461a66c2000-01-18 18:01:01 +0000667 <li>The current state in gnome CVS base is expected to ship as 1.8.5 with
668 gnumeric soon</li>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000669</ul>
670
671<h3>1.8.4: Jan 13 2000</h3>
672<ul>
673 <li>bug fixes, reintroduced xmlNewGlobalNs(), fixed xmlNewNs()</li>
674 <li>all exit() call should have been removed from libxml</li>
675 <li>fixed a problem with INCLUDE_WINSOCK on WIN32 platform</li>
676 <li>added newDocFragment()</li>
Daniel Veillardf84f71f2000-01-05 19:54:23 +0000677</ul>
678
679<h3>1.8.3: Jan 5 2000</h3>
680<ul>
681 <li>a Push interface for the XML and HTML parsers</li>
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +0000682 <li>a shell-like interface to the document tree (try tester --shell :-)</li>
Daniel Veillarddbfd6411999-12-28 16:35:14 +0000683 <li>lots of bug fixes and improvement added over XMas hollidays</li>
Daniel Veillard437b87b2000-01-03 17:30:46 +0000684 <li>fixed the DTD parsing code to work with the xhtml DTD</li>
Daniel Veillardf84f71f2000-01-05 19:54:23 +0000685 <li>added xmlRemoveProp(), xmlRemoveID() and xmlRemoveRef()</li>
686 <li>Fixed bugs in xmlNewNs()</li>
Daniel Veillard437b87b2000-01-03 17:30:46 +0000687 <li>External entity loading code has been revamped, now it uses
Daniel Veillardf84f71f2000-01-05 19:54:23 +0000688 xmlLoadExternalEntity(), some fix on entities processing were added</li>
Daniel Veillard437b87b2000-01-03 17:30:46 +0000689 <li>cleaned up WIN32 includes of socket stuff</li>
Daniel Veillard5cb5ab81999-12-21 15:35:29 +0000690</ul>
691
692<h3>1.8.2: Dec 21 1999</h3>
693<ul>
Daniel Veillardb24054a1999-12-18 15:32:46 +0000694 <li>I got another problem with includes and C++, I hope this issue is fixed
695 for good this time</li>
Daniel Veillard5cb5ab81999-12-21 15:35:29 +0000696 <li>Added a few tree modification functions: xmlReplaceNode,
697 xmlAddPrevSibling, xmlAddNextSibling, xmlNodeSetName and
698 xmlDocSetRootElement</li>
699 <li>Tried to improve the HTML output with help from <a
700 href="mailto:clahey@umich.edu">Chris Lahey</a></li>
Daniel Veillarde4e51311999-12-18 15:32:46 +0000701</ul>
Daniel Veillardb24054a1999-12-18 15:32:46 +0000702
Daniel Veillarde4e51311999-12-18 15:32:46 +0000703<h3>1.8.1: Dec 18 1999</h3>
704<ul>
705 <li>various patches to avoid troubles when using libxml with C++ compilers
706 the "namespace" keyword and C escaping in include files</li>
707 <li>a problem in one of the core macros IS_CHAR was corrected</li>
708 <li>fixed a bug introduced in 1.8.0 breaking default namespace processing,
709 and more specifically the Dia application</li>
Daniel Veillard944b5ff1999-12-15 19:08:24 +0000710 <li>fixed a posteriori validation (validation after parsing, or by using a
711 Dtd not specified in the original document)</li>
Daniel Veillardb24054a1999-12-18 15:32:46 +0000712 <li>fixed a bug in</li>
Daniel Veillard10a2c651999-12-12 13:03:50 +0000713</ul>
714
715<h3>1.8.0: Dec 12 1999</h3>
716<ul>
717 <li>cleanup, especially memory wise</li>
718 <li>the parser should be more reliable, especially the HTML one, it should
719 not crash, whatever the input !</li>
720 <li>Integrated various patches, especially a speedup improvement for large
721 dataset from <a href="mailto:cnygard@bellatlantic.net">Carl Nygard</a>,
722 configure with --with-buffers to enable them.</li>
723 <li>attribute normalization, oops should have been added long ago !</li>
724 <li>attributes defaulted from Dtds should be available, xmlSetProp() now
725 does entities escapting by default.</li>
Daniel Veillard4c3a2031999-11-19 17:46:26 +0000726</ul>
Daniel Veillard35008381999-10-25 13:15:52 +0000727
728<h3>1.7.4: Oct 25 1999</h3>
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000729<ul>
Daniel Veillard35008381999-10-25 13:15:52 +0000730 <li>Lots of HTML improvement</li>
731 <li>Fixed some errors when saving both XML and HTML</li>
732 <li>More examples, the regression tests should now look clean</li>
733 <li>Fixed a bug with contiguous charref</li>
734</ul>
735
736<h3>1.7.3: Sep 29 1999</h3>
737<ul>
738 <li>portability problems fixed</li>
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000739 <li>snprintf was used unconditionnally, leading to link problems on system
Daniel Veillard35008381999-10-25 13:15:52 +0000740 were it's not available, fixed</li>
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000741</ul>
742
743<h3>1.7.1: Sep 24 1999</h3>
744<ul>
745 <li>The basic type for strings manipulated by libxml has been renamed in
746 1.7.1 from <strong>CHAR</strong> to <strong>xmlChar</strong>. The reason
747 is that CHAR was conflicting with a predefined type on Windows. However on
748 non WIN32 environment, compatibility is provided by the way of a
749 <strong>#define </strong>.</li>
750 <li>Changed another error : the use of a structure field called errno, and
751 leading to troubles on platforms where it's a macro</li>
752</ul>
753
754<h3>1.7.0: sep 23 1999</h3>
755<ul>
756 <li>Added the ability to fetch remote DTD or parsed entities, see the <a
Daniel Veillard9cb5ff42001-01-29 08:22:21 +0000757 href="html/libxml-nanohttp.html">nanohttp</a> module.</li>
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000758 <li>Added an errno to report errors by another mean than a simple printf
759 like callback</li>
760 <li>Finished ID/IDREF support and checking when validation</li>
761 <li>Serious memory leaks fixed (there is now a <a
Daniel Veillard9cb5ff42001-01-29 08:22:21 +0000762 href="html/libxml-xmlmemory.html">memory wrapper</a> module)</li>
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000763 <li>Improvement of <a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xpath">XPath</a>
764 implementation</li>
765 <li>Added an HTML parser front-end</li>
766</ul>
767
768<h2><a name="XML">XML</a></h2>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000769
Daniel Veillard402e8c82000-02-29 22:57:47 +0000770<p><a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml">XML is a standard</a> for
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +0000771markup-based structured documents. Here is <a name="example">an example XML
772document</a>:</p>
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000773<pre>&lt;?xml version="1.0"?&gt;
774&lt;EXAMPLE prop1="gnome is great" prop2="&amp;amp; linux too"&gt;
775 &lt;head&gt;
776 &lt;title&gt;Welcome to Gnome&lt;/title&gt;
777 &lt;/head&gt;
778 &lt;chapter&gt;
779 &lt;title&gt;The Linux adventure&lt;/title&gt;
780 &lt;p&gt;bla bla bla ...&lt;/p&gt;
781 &lt;image href="linus.gif"/&gt;
782 &lt;p&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;
783 &lt;/chapter&gt;
784&lt;/EXAMPLE&gt;</pre>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000785
Daniel Veillard402e8c82000-02-29 22:57:47 +0000786<p>The first line specifies that it's an XML document and gives useful
787information about its encoding. Then the document is a text format whose
788structure is specified by tags between brackets. <strong>Each tag opened has
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +0000789to be closed</strong>. XML is pedantic about this. However, if a tag is empty
790(no content), a single tag can serve as both the opening and closing tag if it
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000791ends with <code>/&gt;</code> rather than with <code>&gt;</code>. Note that,
792for example, the image tag has no content (just an attribute) and is closed by
793ending the tag with <code>/&gt;</code>.</p>
Daniel Veillardccb09631998-10-27 06:21:04 +0000794
Daniel Veillard402e8c82000-02-29 22:57:47 +0000795<p>XML can be applied sucessfully to a wide range of uses, from long term
796structured document maintenance (where it follows the steps of SGML) to simple
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +0000797data encoding mechanisms like configuration file formatting (glade),
798spreadsheets (gnumeric), or even shorter lived documents such as WebDAV where
799it is used to encode remote calls between a client and a server.</p>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000800
Daniel Veillard82687162001-01-22 15:32:01 +0000801<h2><a name="XSLT">XSLT</a></h2>
802
Daniel Veillard6e6a6cc2001-02-15 15:55:44 +0000803<p>Check <a href="http://xmlsoft.org/XSLT">the separate libxslt page</a></p>
804
Daniel Veillard82687162001-01-22 15:32:01 +0000805<p><a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xslt">XSL Transformations</a>, is a language
806for transforming XML documents into other XML documents (or HTML/textual
807output).</p>
808
809<p>A separate library called libxslt is being built on top of libxml2. This
810module "libxslt" can be found in the Gnome CVS base too.</p>
811
Daniel Veillard383b1472001-01-23 11:39:52 +0000812<p>You can check the <a
Daniel Veillard6e6a6cc2001-02-15 15:55:44 +0000813href="http://cvs.gnome.org/lxr/source/libxslt/FEATURES">features</a> supported
814and the progresses on the <a
Daniel Veillard82687162001-01-22 15:32:01 +0000815href="http://cvs.gnome.org/lxr/source/libxslt/ChangeLog">Changelog</a></p>
816
Daniel Veillard4540be42000-08-19 16:40:28 +0000817<h2>An overview of libxml architecture</h2>
818
Daniel Veillardec70e912001-02-26 20:10:45 +0000819<p>Libxml is made of multiple components; some of them are optional, and most
820of the block interfaces are public. The main components are:</p>
Daniel Veillard4540be42000-08-19 16:40:28 +0000821<ul>
822 <li>an Input/Output layer</li>
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000823 <li>FTP and HTTP client layers (optional)</li>
Daniel Veillard4540be42000-08-19 16:40:28 +0000824 <li>an Internationalization layer managing the encodings support</li>
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000825 <li>a URI module</li>
Daniel Veillard4540be42000-08-19 16:40:28 +0000826 <li>the XML parser and its basic SAX interface</li>
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000827 <li>an HTML parser using the same SAX interface (optional)</li>
Daniel Veillard4540be42000-08-19 16:40:28 +0000828 <li>a SAX tree module to build an in-memory DOM representation</li>
829 <li>a tree module to manipulate the DOM representation</li>
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000830 <li>a validation module using the DOM representation (optional)</li>
Daniel Veillard4540be42000-08-19 16:40:28 +0000831 <li>an XPath module for global lookup in a DOM representation
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000832 (optional)</li>
833 <li>a debug module (optional)</li>
Daniel Veillard4540be42000-08-19 16:40:28 +0000834</ul>
835
836<p>Graphically this gives the following:</p>
837
838<p><img src="libxml.gif" alt="a graphical view of the various"></p>
839
840<p></p>
841
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000842<h2><a name="tree">The tree output</a></h2>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000843
844<p>The parser returns a tree built during the document analysis. The value
Daniel Veillard402e8c82000-02-29 22:57:47 +0000845returned is an <strong>xmlDocPtr</strong> (i.e., a pointer to an
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +0000846<strong>xmlDoc</strong> structure). This structure contains information such
Daniel Veillard306be992000-07-03 12:38:45 +0000847as the file name, the document type, and a <strong>children</strong> pointer
848which is the root of the document (or more exactly the first child under the
849root which is the document). The tree is made of <strong>xmlNode</strong>s,
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000850chained in double-linked lists of siblings and with a children&lt;-&gt;parent
Daniel Veillard306be992000-07-03 12:38:45 +0000851relationship. An xmlNode can also carry properties (a chain of xmlAttr
852structures). An attribute may have a value which is a list of TEXT or
853ENTITY_REF nodes.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000854
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000855<p>Here is an example (erroneous with respect to the XML spec since there
856should be only one ELEMENT under the root):</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000857
858<p><img src="structure.gif" alt=" structure.gif "></p>
859
860<p>In the source package there is a small program (not installed by default)
Daniel Veillard361d8452000-04-03 19:48:13 +0000861called <strong>xmllint</strong> which parses XML files given as argument and
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +0000862prints them back as parsed. This is useful for detecting errors both in XML
863code and in the XML parser itself. It has an option <strong>--debug</strong>
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000864which prints the actual in-memory structure of the document; here is the
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +0000865result with the <a href="#example">example</a> given before:</p>
Daniel Veillard10c6a8f1998-10-28 01:00:12 +0000866<pre>DOCUMENT
867version=1.0
868standalone=true
869 ELEMENT EXAMPLE
870 ATTRIBUTE prop1
871 TEXT
872 content=gnome is great
873 ATTRIBUTE prop2
874 ENTITY_REF
875 TEXT
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000876 content= linux too
Daniel Veillard402e8c82000-02-29 22:57:47 +0000877 ELEMENT head
Daniel Veillard10c6a8f1998-10-28 01:00:12 +0000878 ELEMENT title
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +0000879 TEXT
880 content=Welcome to Gnome
Daniel Veillard10c6a8f1998-10-28 01:00:12 +0000881 ELEMENT chapter
882 ELEMENT title
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +0000883 TEXT
884 content=The Linux adventure
Daniel Veillard10c6a8f1998-10-28 01:00:12 +0000885 ELEMENT p
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +0000886 TEXT
887 content=bla bla bla ...
Daniel Veillard10c6a8f1998-10-28 01:00:12 +0000888 ELEMENT image
889 ATTRIBUTE href
890 TEXT
891 content=linus.gif
892 ELEMENT p
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +0000893 TEXT
894 content=...</pre>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000895
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000896<p>This should be useful for learning the internal representation model.</p>
Daniel Veillardccb09631998-10-27 06:21:04 +0000897
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000898<h2><a name="interface">The SAX interface</a></h2>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000899
Daniel Veillard402e8c82000-02-29 22:57:47 +0000900<p>Sometimes the DOM tree output is just too large to fit reasonably into
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000901memory. In that case (and if you don't expect to save back the XML document
902loaded using libxml), it's better to use the SAX interface of libxml. SAX is a
Daniel Veillard402e8c82000-02-29 22:57:47 +0000903<strong>callback-based interface</strong> to the parser. Before parsing, the
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +0000904application layer registers a customized set of callbacks which are called by
905the library as it progresses through the XML input.</p>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000906
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000907<p>To get more detailed step-by-step guidance on using the SAX interface of
Daniel Veillard4540be42000-08-19 16:40:28 +0000908libxml, see the <a
909href="http://www.daa.com.au/~james/gnome/xml-sax/xml-sax.html">nice
910documentation</a>.written by <a href="mailto:james@daa.com.au">James
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000911Henstridge</a>.</p>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000912
913<p>You can debug the SAX behaviour by using the <strong>testSAX</strong>
914program located in the gnome-xml module (it's usually not shipped in the
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000915binary packages of libxml, but you can find it in the tar source
Daniel Veillard402e8c82000-02-29 22:57:47 +0000916distribution). Here is the sequence of callbacks that would be reported by
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000917testSAX when parsing the example XML document shown earlier:</p>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000918<pre>SAX.setDocumentLocator()
919SAX.startDocument()
920SAX.getEntity(amp)
921SAX.startElement(EXAMPLE, prop1='gnome is great', prop2='&amp;amp; linux too')
922SAX.characters( , 3)
923SAX.startElement(head)
924SAX.characters( , 4)
925SAX.startElement(title)
926SAX.characters(Welcome to Gnome, 16)
927SAX.endElement(title)
928SAX.characters( , 3)
929SAX.endElement(head)
930SAX.characters( , 3)
931SAX.startElement(chapter)
932SAX.characters( , 4)
933SAX.startElement(title)
934SAX.characters(The Linux adventure, 19)
935SAX.endElement(title)
936SAX.characters( , 4)
937SAX.startElement(p)
938SAX.characters(bla bla bla ..., 15)
939SAX.endElement(p)
940SAX.characters( , 4)
941SAX.startElement(image, href='linus.gif')
942SAX.endElement(image)
943SAX.characters( , 4)
944SAX.startElement(p)
945SAX.characters(..., 3)
946SAX.endElement(p)
947SAX.characters( , 3)
948SAX.endElement(chapter)
949SAX.characters( , 1)
950SAX.endElement(EXAMPLE)
951SAX.endDocument()</pre>
952
Daniel Veillardec70e912001-02-26 20:10:45 +0000953<p>Most of the other interfaces of libxml are based on the DOM tree-building
954facility, so nearly everything up to the end of this document presupposes the
955use of the standard DOM tree build. Note that the DOM tree itself is built by
956a set of registered default callbacks, without internal specific
957interface.</p>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000958
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000959<h2><a name="library">The XML library interfaces</a></h2>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000960
961<p>This section is directly intended to help programmers getting bootstrapped
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000962using the XML library from the C language. It is not intended to be extensive.
963I hope the automatically generated documents will provide the completeness
964required, but as a separate set of documents. The interfaces of the XML
965library are by principle low level, there is nearly zero abstraction. Those
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000966interested in a higher level API should <a href="#DOM">look at DOM</a>.</p>
Daniel Veillardccb09631998-10-27 06:21:04 +0000967
Daniel Veillard9cb5ff42001-01-29 08:22:21 +0000968<p>The <a href="html/libxml-parser.html">parser interfaces for XML</a> are
969separated from the <a href="html/libxml-htmlparser.html">HTML parser
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000970interfaces</a>. Let's have a look at how the XML parser can be called:</p>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000971
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000972<h3><a name="Invoking">Invoking the parser : the pull method</a></h3>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000973
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000974<p>Usually, the first thing to do is to read an XML input. The parser accepts
975documents either from in-memory strings or from files. The functions are
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000976defined in "parser.h":</p>
Daniel Veillard10c6a8f1998-10-28 01:00:12 +0000977<dl>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000978 <dt><code>xmlDocPtr xmlParseMemory(char *buffer, int size);</code></dt>
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000979 <dd><p>Parse a null-terminated string containing the document.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000980 </dd>
Daniel Veillard10c6a8f1998-10-28 01:00:12 +0000981</dl>
982<dl>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000983 <dt><code>xmlDocPtr xmlParseFile(const char *filename);</code></dt>
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +0000984 <dd><p>Parse an XML document contained in a (possibly compressed)
985 file.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000986 </dd>
Daniel Veillard10c6a8f1998-10-28 01:00:12 +0000987</dl>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000988
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000989<p>The parser returns a pointer to the document structure (or NULL in case of
Daniel Veillard10c6a8f1998-10-28 01:00:12 +0000990failure).</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000991
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000992<h3 id="Invoking1">Invoking the parser: the push method</h3>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000993
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000994<p>In order for the application to keep the control when the document is being
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000995fetched (which is common for GUI based programs) libxml provides a push
996interface, too, as of version 1.8.3. Here are the interface functions:</p>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000997<pre>xmlParserCtxtPtr xmlCreatePushParserCtxt(xmlSAXHandlerPtr sax,
998 void *user_data,
999 const char *chunk,
1000 int size,
1001 const char *filename);
1002int xmlParseChunk (xmlParserCtxtPtr ctxt,
1003 const char *chunk,
1004 int size,
1005 int terminate);</pre>
1006
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00001007<p>and here is a simple example showing how to use the interface:</p>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +00001008<pre> FILE *f;
1009
1010 f = fopen(filename, "r");
1011 if (f != NULL) {
1012 int res, size = 1024;
1013 char chars[1024];
1014 xmlParserCtxtPtr ctxt;
1015
1016 res = fread(chars, 1, 4, f);
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00001017 if (res &gt; 0) {
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +00001018 ctxt = xmlCreatePushParserCtxt(NULL, NULL,
1019 chars, res, filename);
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00001020 while ((res = fread(chars, 1, size, f)) &gt; 0) {
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +00001021 xmlParseChunk(ctxt, chars, res, 0);
1022 }
1023 xmlParseChunk(ctxt, chars, 0, 1);
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00001024 doc = ctxt-&gt;myDoc;
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +00001025 xmlFreeParserCtxt(ctxt);
1026 }
1027 }</pre>
1028
Daniel Veillardec70e912001-02-26 20:10:45 +00001029<p>The HTML parser embedded into libxml also has a push interface; the
1030functions are just prefixed by "html" rather than "xml".</p>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +00001031
1032<h3 id="Invoking2">Invoking the parser: the SAX interface</h3>
1033
Daniel Veillardec70e912001-02-26 20:10:45 +00001034<p>The tree-building interface makes the parser memory-hungry, first loading
1035the document in memory and then building the tree itself. Reading a document
1036without building the tree is possible using the SAX interfaces (see SAX.h and
1037<a href="http://www.daa.com.au/~james/gnome/xml-sax/xml-sax.html">James
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00001038Henstridge's documentation</a>). Note also that the push interface can be
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +00001039limited to SAX: just use the two first arguments of
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +00001040<code>xmlCreatePushParserCtxt()</code>.</p>
Daniel Veillardccb09631998-10-27 06:21:04 +00001041
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +00001042<h3><a name="Building">Building a tree from scratch</a></h3>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00001043
1044<p>The other way to get an XML tree in memory is by building it. Basically
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +00001045there is a set of functions dedicated to building new elements. (These are
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00001046also described in &lt;libxml/tree.h&gt;.) For example, here is a piece of code
Daniel Veillard361d8452000-04-03 19:48:13 +00001047that produces the XML document used in the previous examples:</p>
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00001048<pre> #include &lt;libxml/tree.h&gt;
Daniel Veillard361d8452000-04-03 19:48:13 +00001049 xmlDocPtr doc;
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +00001050 xmlNodePtr tree, subtree;
1051
1052 doc = xmlNewDoc("1.0");
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00001053 doc-&gt;children = xmlNewDocNode(doc, NULL, "EXAMPLE", NULL);
1054 xmlSetProp(doc-&gt;children, "prop1", "gnome is great");
1055 xmlSetProp(doc-&gt;children, "prop2", "&amp; linux too");
1056 tree = xmlNewChild(doc-&gt;children, NULL, "head", NULL);
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +00001057 subtree = xmlNewChild(tree, NULL, "title", "Welcome to Gnome");
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00001058 tree = xmlNewChild(doc-&gt;children, NULL, "chapter", NULL);
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +00001059 subtree = xmlNewChild(tree, NULL, "title", "The Linux adventure");
1060 subtree = xmlNewChild(tree, NULL, "p", "bla bla bla ...");
1061 subtree = xmlNewChild(tree, NULL, "image", NULL);
1062 xmlSetProp(subtree, "href", "linus.gif");</pre>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00001063
1064<p>Not really rocket science ...</p>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +00001065
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +00001066<h3><a name="Traversing">Traversing the tree</a></h3>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00001067
Daniel Veillard9cb5ff42001-01-29 08:22:21 +00001068<p>Basically by <a href="html/libxml-tree.html">including "tree.h"</a> your
Daniel Veillard306be992000-07-03 12:38:45 +00001069code has access to the internal structure of all the elements of the tree. The
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +00001070names should be somewhat simple like <strong>parent</strong>,
Daniel Veillard306be992000-07-03 12:38:45 +00001071<strong>children</strong>, <strong>next</strong>, <strong>prev</strong>,
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00001072<strong>properties</strong>, etc... For example, still with the previous
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +00001073example:</p>
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00001074<pre><code>doc-&gt;children-&gt;children-&gt;children</code></pre>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00001075
1076<p>points to the title element,</p>
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +00001077<pre>doc-&gt;children-&gt;children-&gt;next-&gt;children-&gt;children</pre>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00001078
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +00001079<p>points to the text node containing the chapter title "The Linux
1080adventure".</p>
Daniel Veillard10c6a8f1998-10-28 01:00:12 +00001081
Daniel Veillardb24054a1999-12-18 15:32:46 +00001082<p><strong>NOTE</strong>: XML allows <em>PI</em>s and <em>comments</em> to be
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00001083present before the document root, so <code>doc-&gt;children</code> may point
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +00001084to an element which is not the document Root Element; a function
Daniel Veillard5cb5ab81999-12-21 15:35:29 +00001085<code>xmlDocGetRootElement()</code> was added for this purpose.</p>
Daniel Veillardb24054a1999-12-18 15:32:46 +00001086
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +00001087<h3><a name="Modifying">Modifying the tree</a></h3>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00001088
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00001089<p>Functions are provided for reading and writing the document content. Here
Daniel Veillard9cb5ff42001-01-29 08:22:21 +00001090is an excerpt from the <a href="html/libxml-tree.html">tree API</a>:</p>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +00001091<dl>
Daniel Veillarddd6b3671999-09-23 22:19:22 +00001092 <dt><code>xmlAttrPtr xmlSetProp(xmlNodePtr node, const xmlChar *name, const
1093 xmlChar *value);</code></dt>
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00001094 <dd><p>This sets (or changes) an attribute carried by an ELEMENT node. The
1095 value can be NULL.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00001096 </dd>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +00001097</dl>
1098<dl>
Daniel Veillarddd6b3671999-09-23 22:19:22 +00001099 <dt><code>const xmlChar *xmlGetProp(xmlNodePtr node, const xmlChar
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00001100 *name);</code></dt>
Daniel Veillardc92c3042000-09-29 02:42:04 +00001101 <dd><p>This function returns a pointer to new copy of the property
1102 content. Note that the user must deallocate the result.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00001103 </dd>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +00001104</dl>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00001105
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00001106<p>Two functions are provided for reading and writing the text associated with
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +00001107elements:</p>
1108<dl>
Daniel Veillarddd6b3671999-09-23 22:19:22 +00001109 <dt><code>xmlNodePtr xmlStringGetNodeList(xmlDocPtr doc, const xmlChar
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00001110 *value);</code></dt>
Daniel Veillardec70e912001-02-26 20:10:45 +00001111 <dd><p>This function takes an "external" string and converts it to one
1112 text node or possibly to a list of entity and text nodes. All
1113 non-predefined entity references like &amp;Gnome; will be stored
1114 internally as entity nodes, hence the result of the function may not be
1115 a single node.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00001116 </dd>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +00001117</dl>
1118<dl>
Daniel Veillarddd6b3671999-09-23 22:19:22 +00001119 <dt><code>xmlChar *xmlNodeListGetString(xmlDocPtr doc, xmlNodePtr list, int
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00001120 inLine);</code></dt>
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +00001121 <dd><p>This function is the inverse of
1122 <code>xmlStringGetNodeList()</code>. It generates a new string
1123 containing the content of the text and entity nodes. Note the extra
1124 argument inLine. If this argument is set to 1, the function will expand
1125 entity references. For example, instead of returning the &amp;Gnome;
1126 XML encoding in the string, it will substitute it with its value (say,
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +00001127 "GNU Network Object Model Environment").</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00001128 </dd>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +00001129</dl>
Daniel Veillard10c6a8f1998-10-28 01:00:12 +00001130
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +00001131<h3><a name="Saving">Saving a tree</a></h3>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00001132
1133<p>Basically 3 options are possible:</p>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +00001134<dl>
Daniel Veillarddd6b3671999-09-23 22:19:22 +00001135 <dt><code>void xmlDocDumpMemory(xmlDocPtr cur, xmlChar**mem, int
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00001136 *size);</code></dt>
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00001137 <dd><p>Returns a buffer into which the document has been saved.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00001138 </dd>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +00001139</dl>
1140<dl>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00001141 <dt><code>extern void xmlDocDump(FILE *f, xmlDocPtr doc);</code></dt>
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00001142 <dd><p>Dumps a document to an open file descriptor.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00001143 </dd>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +00001144</dl>
1145<dl>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00001146 <dt><code>int xmlSaveFile(const char *filename, xmlDocPtr cur);</code></dt>
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +00001147 <dd><p>Saves the document to a file. In this case, the compression
1148 interface is triggered if it has been turned on.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00001149 </dd>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +00001150</dl>
Daniel Veillard10c6a8f1998-10-28 01:00:12 +00001151
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +00001152<h3><a name="Compressio">Compression</a></h3>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00001153
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00001154<p>The library transparently handles compression when doing file-based
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +00001155accesses. The level of compression on saves can be turned on either globally
1156or individually for one file:</p>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +00001157<dl>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00001158 <dt><code>int xmlGetDocCompressMode (xmlDocPtr doc);</code></dt>
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00001159 <dd><p>Gets the document compression ratio (0-9).</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00001160 </dd>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +00001161</dl>
1162<dl>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00001163 <dt><code>void xmlSetDocCompressMode (xmlDocPtr doc, int mode);</code></dt>
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00001164 <dd><p>Sets the document compression ratio.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00001165 </dd>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +00001166</dl>
1167<dl>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00001168 <dt><code>int xmlGetCompressMode(void);</code></dt>
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00001169 <dd><p>Gets the default compression ratio.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00001170 </dd>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +00001171</dl>
1172<dl>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00001173 <dt><code>void xmlSetCompressMode(int mode);</code></dt>
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00001174 <dd><p>Sets the default compression ratio.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00001175 </dd>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +00001176</dl>
1177
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +00001178<h2><a name="Entities">Entities or no entities</a></h2>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00001179
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00001180<p>Entities in principle are similar to simple C macros. An entity defines an
1181abbreviation for a given string that you can reuse many times throughout the
1182content of your document. Entities are especially useful when a given string
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +00001183may occur frequently within a document, or to confine the change needed to a
1184document to a restricted area in the internal subset of the document (at the
1185beginning). Example:</p>
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00001186<pre>1 &lt;?xml version="1.0"?&gt;
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +000011872 &lt;!DOCTYPE EXAMPLE SYSTEM "example.dtd" [
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +000011883 &lt;!ENTITY xml "Extensible Markup Language"&gt;
11894 ]&gt;
11905 &lt;EXAMPLE&gt;
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +000011916 &amp;xml;
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +000011927 &lt;/EXAMPLE&gt;</pre>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00001193
1194<p>Line 3 declares the xml entity. Line 6 uses the xml entity, by prefixing
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +00001195its name with '&amp;' and following it by ';' without any spaces added. There
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00001196are 5 predefined entities in libxml allowing you to escape charaters with
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00001197predefined meaning in some parts of the xml document content:
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00001198<strong>&amp;lt;</strong> for the character '&lt;', <strong>&amp;gt;</strong>
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00001199for the character '&gt;', <strong>&amp;apos;</strong> for the character ''',
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00001200<strong>&amp;quot;</strong> for the character '"', and
1201<strong>&amp;amp;</strong> for the character '&amp;'.</p>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00001202
1203<p>One of the problems related to entities is that you may want the parser to
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +00001204substitute an entity's content so that you can see the replacement text in
1205your application. Or you may prefer to keep entity references as such in the
1206content to be able to save the document back without losing this usually
1207precious information (if the user went through the pain of explicitly defining
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00001208entities, he may have a a rather negative attitude if you blindly susbtitute
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00001209them as saving time). The <a
Daniel Veillard9cb5ff42001-01-29 08:22:21 +00001210href="html/libxml-parser.html#XMLSUBSTITUTEENTITIESDEFAULT">xmlSubstituteEntitiesDefault()</a>
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00001211function allows you to check and change the behaviour, which is to not
1212substitute entities by default.</p>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00001213
1214<p>Here is the DOM tree built by libxml for the previous document in the
1215default case:</p>
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00001216<pre>/gnome/src/gnome-xml -&gt; ./xmllint --debug test/ent1
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00001217DOCUMENT
1218version=1.0
1219 ELEMENT EXAMPLE
1220 TEXT
1221 content=
1222 ENTITY_REF
1223 INTERNAL_GENERAL_ENTITY xml
1224 content=Extensible Markup Language
1225 TEXT
1226 content=</pre>
1227
1228<p>And here is the result when substituting entities:</p>
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00001229<pre>/gnome/src/gnome-xml -&gt; ./tester --debug --noent test/ent1
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00001230DOCUMENT
1231version=1.0
1232 ELEMENT EXAMPLE
1233 TEXT
1234 content= Extensible Markup Language</pre>
1235
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00001236<p>So, entities or no entities? Basically, it depends on your use case. I
1237suggest that you keep the non-substituting default behaviour and avoid using
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00001238entities in your XML document or data if you are not willing to handle the
1239entity references elements in the DOM tree.</p>
1240
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +00001241<p>Note that at save time libxml enforces the conversion of the predefined
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00001242entities where necessary to prevent well-formedness problems, and will also
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +00001243transparently replace those with chars (i.e. it will not generate entity
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00001244reference elements in the DOM tree or call the reference() SAX callback when
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00001245finding them in the input).</p>
1246
Daniel Veillard7b9c4b72000-08-25 16:26:50 +00001247<p><span style="background-color: #FF0000">WARNING</span>: handling entities
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +00001248on top of the libxml SAX interface is difficult!!! If you plan to use
Daniel Veillard7b9c4b72000-08-25 16:26:50 +00001249non-predefined entities in your documents, then the learning cuvre to handle
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +00001250then using the SAX API may be long. If you plan to use complex documents, I
Daniel Veillard7b9c4b72000-08-25 16:26:50 +00001251strongly suggest you consider using the DOM interface instead and let libxml
Daniel Veillard8c6d6af2000-08-25 17:14:13 +00001252deal with the complexity rather than trying to do it yourself.</p>
Daniel Veillard7b9c4b72000-08-25 16:26:50 +00001253
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +00001254<h2><a name="Namespaces">Namespaces</a></h2>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00001255
Daniel Veillardec303412000-03-24 13:41:54 +00001256<p>The libxml library implements <a
1257href="http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml-names/">XML namespaces</a> support by
1258recognizing namespace contructs in the input, and does namespace lookup
1259automatically when building the DOM tree. A namespace declaration is
1260associated with an in-memory structure and all elements or attributes within
1261that namespace point to it. Hence testing the namespace is a simple and fast
1262equality operation at the user level.</p>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00001263
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +00001264<p>I suggest that people using libxml use a namespace, and declare it in the
1265root element of their document as the default namespace. Then they don't need
1266to use the prefix in the content but we will have a basis for future semantic
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +00001267refinement and merging of data from different sources. This doesn't increase
Daniel Veillardec70e912001-02-26 20:10:45 +00001268the size of the XML output significantly, but significantly increases its
1269value in the long-term. Example:</p>
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00001270<pre>&lt;mydoc xmlns="http://mydoc.example.org/schemas/"&gt;
1271 &lt;elem1&gt;...&lt;/elem1&gt;
1272 &lt;elem2&gt;...&lt;/elem2&gt;
1273&lt;/mydoc&gt;</pre>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00001274
Daniel Veillardec70e912001-02-26 20:10:45 +00001275<p>The namespace value has to be an absolute URL, but the URL doesn't have to
1276point to any existing resource on the Web. It will bind all the element and
1277atributes with that URL. I suggest to use an URL within a domain you control,
1278and that the URL should contain some kind of version information if possible.
1279For example, <code>"http://www.gnome.org/gnumeric/1.0/"</code> is a good
1280namespace scheme.</p>
Daniel Veillardec303412000-03-24 13:41:54 +00001281
1282<p>Then when you load a file, make sure that a namespace carrying the
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00001283version-independent prefix is installed on the root element of your document,
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00001284and if the version information don't match something you know, warn the user
1285and be liberal in what you accept as the input. Also do *not* try to base
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00001286namespace checking on the prefix value. &lt;foo:text&gt; may be exactly the
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +00001287same as &lt;bar:text&gt; in another document. What really matters is the URI
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00001288associated with the element or the attribute, not the prefix string (which is
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +00001289just a shortcut for the full URI). In libxml, element and attributes have an
Daniel Veillardec303412000-03-24 13:41:54 +00001290<code>ns</code> field pointing to an xmlNs structure detailing the namespace
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +00001291prefix and its URI.</p>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00001292
1293<p>@@Interfaces@@</p>
1294
1295<p>@@Examples@@</p>
1296
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +00001297<p>Usually people object to using namespaces together with validity checking.
1298I will try to make sure that using namespaces won't break validity checking,
1299so even if you plan to use or currently are using validation I strongly
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +00001300suggest adding namespaces to your document. A default namespace scheme
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00001301<code>xmlns="http://...."</code> should not break validity even on less
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +00001302flexible parsers. Using namespaces to mix and differentiate content coming
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00001303from multiple DTDs will certainly break current validation schemes. I will try
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00001304to provide ways to do this, but this may not be portable or standardized.</p>
1305
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +00001306<h2><a name="Validation">Validation, or are you afraid of DTDs ?</a></h2>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00001307
1308<p>Well what is validation and what is a DTD ?</p>
1309
1310<p>Validation is the process of checking a document against a set of
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +00001311construction rules; a <strong>DTD</strong> (Document Type Definition) is such
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00001312a set of rules.</p>
1313
1314<p>The validation process and building DTDs are the two most difficult parts
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +00001315of the XML life cycle. Briefly a DTD defines all the possibles element to be
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00001316found within your document, what is the formal shape of your document tree (by
1317defining the allowed content of an element, either text, a regular expression
Daniel Veillard306be992000-07-03 12:38:45 +00001318for the allowed list of children, or mixed content i.e. both text and
1319children). The DTD also defines the allowed attributes for all elements and
Daniel Veillardec70e912001-02-26 20:10:45 +00001320the types of the attributes. For more detailed information, I suggest that you
Daniel Veillard81781102001-03-07 09:31:47 +00001321read the related parts of the XML specification, the examples found under
Daniel Veillardec70e912001-02-26 20:10:45 +00001322gnome-xml/test/valid/dtd and any of the large number of books available on
1323XML. The dia example in gnome-xml/test/valid should be both simple and
1324complete enough to allow you to build your own.</p>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00001325
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +00001326<p>A word of warning, building a good DTD which will fit the needs of your
1327application in the long-term is far from trivial; however, the extra level of
1328quality it can ensure is well worth the price for some sets of applications or
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00001329if you already have already a DTD defined for your application field.</p>
1330
1331<p>The validation is not completely finished but in a (very IMHO) usable
1332state. Until a real validation interface is defined the way to do it is to
1333define and set the <strong>xmlDoValidityCheckingDefaultValue</strong> external
1334variable to 1, this will of course be changed at some point:</p>
1335
1336<p>extern int xmlDoValidityCheckingDefaultValue;</p>
1337
1338<p>...</p>
1339
1340<p>xmlDoValidityCheckingDefaultValue = 1;</p>
1341
1342<p></p>
1343
1344<p>To handle external entities, use the function
1345<strong>xmlSetExternalEntityLoader</strong>(xmlExternalEntityLoader f); to
1346link in you HTTP/FTP/Entities database library to the standard libxml
1347core.</p>
1348
1349<p>@@interfaces@@</p>
1350
Daniel Veillard35008381999-10-25 13:15:52 +00001351<h2><a name="DOM"></a><a name="Principles">DOM Principles</a></h2>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00001352
1353<p><a href="http://www.w3.org/DOM/">DOM</a> stands for the <em>Document Object
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +00001354Model</em>; this is an API for accessing XML or HTML structured documents.
Daniel Veillardec70e912001-02-26 20:10:45 +00001355Native support for DOM in Gnome is on the way (module gnome-dom), and will be
1356based on gnome-xml. This will be a far cleaner interface to manipulate XML
Daniel Veillard3197f162001-04-04 00:40:08 +00001357files within Gnome since it won't expose the internal structure.</p>
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +00001358
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00001359<p>The current DOM implementation on top of libxml is the <a
Daniel Veillarda47fb3d2001-03-25 17:23:49 +00001360href="http://cvs.gnome.org/lxr/source/gdome2/">gdome2 Gnome module</a>, this
1361is a full DOM interface, thanks to Paolo Casarini, check the <a
1362href="http://www.cs.unibo.it/~casarini/gdome2/">Gdome2 homepage</a> for more
1363informations.</p>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00001364
Daniel Veillard35008381999-10-25 13:15:52 +00001365<h2><a name="Example"></a><a name="real">A real example</a></h2>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00001366
1367<p>Here is a real size example, where the actual content of the application
1368data is not kept in the DOM tree but uses internal structures. It is based on
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +00001369a proposal to keep a database of jobs related to Gnome, with an XML based
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00001370storage structure. Here is an <a href="gjobs.xml">XML encoded jobs
1371base</a>:</p>
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00001372<pre>&lt;?xml version="1.0"?&gt;
1373&lt;gjob:Helping xmlns:gjob="http://www.gnome.org/some-location"&gt;
1374 &lt;gjob:Jobs&gt;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +00001375
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00001376 &lt;gjob:Job&gt;
1377 &lt;gjob:Project ID="3"/&gt;
1378 &lt;gjob:Application&gt;GBackup&lt;/gjob:Application&gt;
1379 &lt;gjob:Category&gt;Development&lt;/gjob:Category&gt;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +00001380
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00001381 &lt;gjob:Update&gt;
1382 &lt;gjob:Status&gt;Open&lt;/gjob:Status&gt;
1383 &lt;gjob:Modified&gt;Mon, 07 Jun 1999 20:27:45 -0400 MET DST&lt;/gjob:Modified&gt;
1384 &lt;gjob:Salary&gt;USD 0.00&lt;/gjob:Salary&gt;
1385 &lt;/gjob:Update&gt;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +00001386
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00001387 &lt;gjob:Developers&gt;
1388 &lt;gjob:Developer&gt;
1389 &lt;/gjob:Developer&gt;
1390 &lt;/gjob:Developers&gt;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +00001391
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00001392 &lt;gjob:Contact&gt;
1393 &lt;gjob:Person&gt;Nathan Clemons&lt;/gjob:Person&gt;
1394 &lt;gjob:Email&gt;nathan@windsofstorm.net&lt;/gjob:Email&gt;
1395 &lt;gjob:Company&gt;
1396 &lt;/gjob:Company&gt;
1397 &lt;gjob:Organisation&gt;
1398 &lt;/gjob:Organisation&gt;
1399 &lt;gjob:Webpage&gt;
1400 &lt;/gjob:Webpage&gt;
1401 &lt;gjob:Snailmail&gt;
1402 &lt;/gjob:Snailmail&gt;
1403 &lt;gjob:Phone&gt;
1404 &lt;/gjob:Phone&gt;
1405 &lt;/gjob:Contact&gt;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +00001406
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00001407 &lt;gjob:Requirements&gt;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +00001408 The program should be released as free software, under the GPL.
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00001409 &lt;/gjob:Requirements&gt;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +00001410
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00001411 &lt;gjob:Skills&gt;
1412 &lt;/gjob:Skills&gt;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +00001413
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00001414 &lt;gjob:Details&gt;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +00001415 A GNOME based system that will allow a superuser to configure
1416 compressed and uncompressed files and/or file systems to be backed
1417 up with a supported media in the system. This should be able to
1418 perform via find commands generating a list of files that are passed
1419 to tar, dd, cpio, cp, gzip, etc., to be directed to the tape machine
1420 or via operations performed on the filesystem itself. Email
1421 notification and GUI status display very important.
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00001422 &lt;/gjob:Details&gt;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +00001423
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00001424 &lt;/gjob:Job&gt;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +00001425
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00001426 &lt;/gjob:Jobs&gt;
1427&lt;/gjob:Helping&gt;</pre>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00001428
1429<p>While loading the XML file into an internal DOM tree is a matter of calling
Daniel Veillardec70e912001-02-26 20:10:45 +00001430only a couple of functions, browsing the tree to gather the ata and generate
1431the internal structures is harder, and more error prone.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00001432
1433<p>The suggested principle is to be tolerant with respect to the input
Daniel Veillardec70e912001-02-26 20:10:45 +00001434structure. For example, the ordering of the attributes is not significant, the
1435XML specification is clear about it. It's also usually a good idea not to
1436depend on the order of the children of a given node, unless it really makes
1437things harder. Here is some code to parse the information for a person:</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00001438<pre>/*
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +00001439 * A person record
1440 */
1441typedef struct person {
1442 char *name;
1443 char *email;
1444 char *company;
1445 char *organisation;
1446 char *smail;
1447 char *webPage;
1448 char *phone;
1449} person, *personPtr;
1450
1451/*
1452 * And the code needed to parse it
1453 */
1454personPtr parsePerson(xmlDocPtr doc, xmlNsPtr ns, xmlNodePtr cur) {
1455 personPtr ret = NULL;
1456
1457DEBUG("parsePerson\n");
1458 /*
1459 * allocate the struct
1460 */
1461 ret = (personPtr) malloc(sizeof(person));
1462 if (ret == NULL) {
1463 fprintf(stderr,"out of memory\n");
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00001464 return(NULL);
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +00001465 }
1466 memset(ret, 0, sizeof(person));
1467
1468 /* We don't care what the top level element name is */
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00001469 cur = cur-&gt;xmlChildrenNode;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +00001470 while (cur != NULL) {
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00001471 if ((!strcmp(cur-&gt;name, "Person")) &amp;&amp; (cur-&gt;ns == ns))
1472 ret-&gt;name = xmlNodeListGetString(doc, cur-&gt;xmlChildrenNode, 1);
1473 if ((!strcmp(cur-&gt;name, "Email")) &amp;&amp; (cur-&gt;ns == ns))
1474 ret-&gt;email = xmlNodeListGetString(doc, cur-&gt;xmlChildrenNode, 1);
1475 cur = cur-&gt;next;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +00001476 }
1477
1478 return(ret);
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00001479}</pre>
1480
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +00001481<p>Here are a couple of things to notice:</p>
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +00001482<ul>
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +00001483 <li>Usually a recursive parsing style is the more convenient one: XML data
1484 is by nature subject to repetitive constructs and usually exibits highly
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00001485 stuctured patterns.</li>
1486 <li>The two arguments of type <em>xmlDocPtr</em> and <em>xmlNsPtr</em>, i.e.
1487 the pointer to the global XML document and the namespace reserved to the
1488 application. Document wide information are needed for example to decode
1489 entities and it's a good coding practice to define a namespace for your
1490 application set of data and test that the element and attributes you're
1491 analyzing actually pertains to your application space. This is done by a
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00001492 simple equality test (cur-&gt;ns == ns).</li>
Daniel Veillardec70e912001-02-26 20:10:45 +00001493 <li>To retrieve text and attributes value, you can use the function
1494 <em>xmlNodeListGetString</em> to gather all the text and entity reference
1495 nodes generated by the DOM output and produce an single text string.</li>
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +00001496</ul>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00001497
1498<p>Here is another piece of code used to parse another level of the
1499structure:</p>
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00001500<pre>#include &lt;libxml/tree.h&gt;
Daniel Veillard361d8452000-04-03 19:48:13 +00001501/*
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +00001502 * a Description for a Job
1503 */
1504typedef struct job {
1505 char *projectID;
1506 char *application;
1507 char *category;
1508 personPtr contact;
1509 int nbDevelopers;
1510 personPtr developers[100]; /* using dynamic alloc is left as an exercise */
1511} job, *jobPtr;
1512
1513/*
1514 * And the code needed to parse it
1515 */
1516jobPtr parseJob(xmlDocPtr doc, xmlNsPtr ns, xmlNodePtr cur) {
1517 jobPtr ret = NULL;
1518
1519DEBUG("parseJob\n");
1520 /*
1521 * allocate the struct
1522 */
1523 ret = (jobPtr) malloc(sizeof(job));
1524 if (ret == NULL) {
1525 fprintf(stderr,"out of memory\n");
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00001526 return(NULL);
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +00001527 }
1528 memset(ret, 0, sizeof(job));
1529
1530 /* We don't care what the top level element name is */
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00001531 cur = cur-&gt;xmlChildrenNode;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +00001532 while (cur != NULL) {
1533
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00001534 if ((!strcmp(cur-&gt;name, "Project")) &amp;&amp; (cur-&gt;ns == ns)) {
1535 ret-&gt;projectID = xmlGetProp(cur, "ID");
1536 if (ret-&gt;projectID == NULL) {
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00001537 fprintf(stderr, "Project has no ID\n");
1538 }
1539 }
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00001540 if ((!strcmp(cur-&gt;name, "Application")) &amp;&amp; (cur-&gt;ns == ns))
1541 ret-&gt;application = xmlNodeListGetString(doc, cur-&gt;xmlChildrenNode, 1);
1542 if ((!strcmp(cur-&gt;name, "Category")) &amp;&amp; (cur-&gt;ns == ns))
1543 ret-&gt;category = xmlNodeListGetString(doc, cur-&gt;xmlChildrenNode, 1);
1544 if ((!strcmp(cur-&gt;name, "Contact")) &amp;&amp; (cur-&gt;ns == ns))
1545 ret-&gt;contact = parsePerson(doc, ns, cur);
1546 cur = cur-&gt;next;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +00001547 }
1548
1549 return(ret);
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00001550}</pre>
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +00001551
Daniel Veillardec70e912001-02-26 20:10:45 +00001552<p>Once you are used to it, writing this kind of code is quite simple, but
1553boring. Ultimately, it could be possble to write stubbers taking either C data
1554structure definitions, a set of XML examples or an XML DTD and produce the
1555code needed to import and export the content between C data and XML storage.
1556This is left as an exercise to the reader :-)</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00001557
Daniel Veillard6f0adb52000-07-03 11:41:26 +00001558<p>Feel free to use <a href="example/gjobread.c">the code for the full C
1559parsing example</a> as a template, it is also available with Makefile in the
1560Gnome CVS base under gnome-xml/example</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00001561
Daniel Veillardc310d562000-06-23 18:32:15 +00001562<h2><a name="Contributi">Contributions</a></h2>
1563<ul>
Daniel Veillard851c59c2000-11-24 16:06:22 +00001564 <li><a href="mailto:ari@lusis.org">Ari Johnson</a> provides a C++ wrapper
Daniel Veillardc310d562000-06-23 18:32:15 +00001565 for libxml:
1566 <p>Website: <a
1567 href="http://lusis.org/~ari/xml++/">http://lusis.org/~ari/xml++/</a></p>
1568 <p>Download: <a
1569 href="http://lusis.org/~ari/xml++/libxml++.tar.gz">http://lusis.org/~ari/xml++/libxml++.tar.gz</a></p>
1570 </li>
1571 <li><a href="mailto:doolin@cs.utk.edu">David Doolin</a> provides a
1572 precompiled Windows version
1573 <p><a
Daniel Veillardc5d64342001-06-24 12:13:24 +00001574 href="http://www.ce.berkeley.edu/~doolin/code/libxmlwin32/">http://www.ce.berkeley.edu/~doolin/code/libxmlwin32/</a>
1575 (older). The distribution now includes projects and makefiles for Windows
1576 compiler contributed by various people.</p>
Daniel Veillardc310d562000-06-23 18:32:15 +00001577 </li>
Daniel Veillarde356c282001-03-10 12:32:04 +00001578 <li><a
1579 href="http://mail.gnome.org/archives/xml/2001-March/msg00014.html">Matt
1580 Sergeant</a> developped <a
1581 href="http://axkit.org/download/">XML::LibXSLT</a>, a perl wrapper for
1582 libxml2/libxslt as part of the <a href="http://axkit.com/">AxKit XML
1583 application server</a></li>
Daniel Veillardc5d64342001-06-24 12:13:24 +00001584 <li><a href="mailto:fnatter@gmx.net">Felix Natter</a> and <a
1585 href="mailto:geertk@ai.rug.nl">Geert Kloosterman</a> provide <a
Daniel Veillardca989762001-06-23 17:39:29 +00001586 href="libxml-doc.el">an emacs module</a> to lookup libxml(2) functions
Daniel Veillard3f6f7f62000-06-30 17:58:25 +00001587 documentation</li>
Daniel Veillardc310d562000-06-23 18:32:15 +00001588 <li><a href="mailto:sherwin@nlm.nih.gov">Ziying Sherwin</a> provided <a
Daniel Veillardc5d64342001-06-24 12:13:24 +00001589 href="http://xmlsoft.org/messages/0488.html">man pages</a></li>
1590 <li>Seems <a href="http://www.arsdigita.com/">ArsDigita</a> wrote a Tcl
1591 wrapper for libxml called <a
1592 href="http://www.linuxgazette.com/issue63/washington.html">ns_xml</a></li>
Daniel Veillardc310d562000-06-23 18:32:15 +00001593</ul>
1594
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00001595<p></p>
1596
Daniel Veillard33a67802001-03-07 09:44:02 +00001597<p><a href="mailto:Daniel.Veillard@imag.fr">Daniel Veillard</a></p>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00001598
Daniel Veillardb97b4302001-06-26 23:04:22 +00001599<p>$Id: xml.html,v 1.94 2001/06/26 22:47:36 veillard Exp $</p>
Daniel Veillardccb09631998-10-27 06:21:04 +00001600</body>
1601</html>