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4<head>
Daniel Veillardec78c0f2000-08-25 10:25:23 +00005 <title>The XML C library for Gnome</title>
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Daniel Veillardec78c0f2000-08-25 10:25:23 +000011<h1 align="center">The XML C library for Gnome</h1>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +000012
Daniel Veillard9c466822001-10-25 12:03:39 +000013<h1>Note: this is the flat content of the <a href="index.html">web
14site</a></h1>
15
Daniel Veillardc9484202001-10-24 12:35:52 +000016<h1 style="text-align: center">libxml, a.k.a. gnome-xml</h1>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +000017
18<p></p>
Daniel Veillard9c466822001-10-25 12:03:39 +000019
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +000020<p>Libxml is the XML C library developed for the Gnome project. XML itself
Daniel Veillard9c466822001-10-25 12:03:39 +000021is a metalanguage to design markup languages, i.e. text language where
22semantic and structure are added to the content using extra "markup"
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +000023information enclosed between angle brackets. HTML is the most well-known
Daniel Veillard1eb24242002-03-18 11:33:03 +000024markup language. Though the library is written in C <a href="python.html">a
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +000025variety of language bindings</a> make it available in other environments.</p>
Daniel Veillard9c466822001-10-25 12:03:39 +000026
27<p>Libxml2 implements a number of existing standards related to markup
28languages:</p>
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +000029<ul>
Daniel Veillard9c466822001-10-25 12:03:39 +000030 <li>the XML standard: <a
31 href="http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml">http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml</a></li>
32 <li>Namespaces in XML: <a
33 href="http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml-names/">http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml-names/</a></li>
34 <li>XML Base: <a
35 href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xmlbase/">http://www.w3.org/TR/xmlbase/</a></li>
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +000036 <li><a href="http://www.cis.ohio-state.edu/rfc/rfc2396.txt">RFC 2396</a> :
37 Uniform Resource Identifiers <a
Daniel Veillard9c466822001-10-25 12:03:39 +000038 href="http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2396.txt">http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2396.txt</a></li>
39 <li>XML Path Language (XPath) 1.0: <a
40 href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xpath">http://www.w3.org/TR/xpath</a></li>
41 <li>HTML4 parser: <a
42 href="http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/">http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/</a></li>
43 <li>most of XML Pointer Language (XPointer) Version 1.0: <a
44 href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xptr">http://www.w3.org/TR/xptr</a></li>
45 <li>XML Inclusions (XInclude) Version 1.0: <a
46 href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xinclude/">http://www.w3.org/TR/xinclude/</a></li>
47 <li>[ISO-8859-1], <a
48 href="http://www.cis.ohio-state.edu/rfc/rfc2044.txt">rfc2044</a> [UTF-8]
49 and <a href="http://www.cis.ohio-state.edu/rfc/rfc2781.txt">rfc2781</a>
50 [UTF-16] core encodings</li>
51 <li>part of SGML Open Technical Resolution TR9401:1997</li>
52 <li>XML Catalogs Working Draft 06 August 2001: <a
53 href="http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/entity/spec-2001-08-06.html">http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/entity/spec-2001-08-06.html</a></li>
Daniel Veillard5c396542002-03-15 07:57:50 +000054 <li>Canonical XML Version 1.0: <a
55 href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xml-c14n">http://www.w3.org/TR/xml-c14n</a>
Daniel Veillard2d347fa2002-03-17 10:34:11 +000056 and the Exclusive XML Canonicalization CR draft <a
57 href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xml-exc-c14n">http://www.w3.org/TR/xml-exc-c14n</a></li>
Daniel Veillard96984452000-08-31 13:50:12 +000058</ul>
59
Daniel Veillard9c466822001-10-25 12:03:39 +000060<p>In most cases libxml tries to implement the specifications in a relatively
Daniel Veillard42766c02002-08-22 20:52:17 +000061strictly compliant way. As of release 2.4.16, libxml2 passes all 1800+ tests
62from the <a
Daniel Veillarda5393562002-02-20 11:40:49 +000063href="http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/xml-conformance/">OASIS XML Tests
64Suite</a>.</p>
Daniel Veillard5b16f582002-02-20 11:38:46 +000065
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +000066<p>To some extent libxml2 provides support for the following additional
67specifications but doesn't claim to implement them completely:</p>
Daniel Veillard9c466822001-10-25 12:03:39 +000068<ul>
69 <li>Document Object Model (DOM) <a
70 href="http://www.w3.org/TR/DOM-Level-2-Core/">http://www.w3.org/TR/DOM-Level-2-Core/</a>
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +000071 it doesn't implement the API itself, gdome2 does this on top of
Daniel Veillard9c466822001-10-25 12:03:39 +000072 libxml2</li>
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +000073 <li><a href="http://www.cis.ohio-state.edu/rfc/rfc959.txt">RFC 959</a> :
74 libxml implements a basic FTP client code</li>
75 <li><a href="http://www.cis.ohio-state.edu/rfc/rfc1945.txt">RFC 1945</a> :
76 HTTP/1.0, again a basic HTTP client code</li>
Daniel Veillard9c466822001-10-25 12:03:39 +000077 <li>SAX: a minimal SAX implementation compatible with early expat
78 versions</li>
79 <li>DocBook SGML v4: libxml2 includes a hackish parser to transition to
80 XML</li>
81</ul>
82
Daniel Veillarde6d8e202002-05-02 06:11:10 +000083<p>XML Schemas is being worked on but it would be far too early to make any
84conformance statement about it at the moment.</p>
85
Daniel Veillard2d347fa2002-03-17 10:34:11 +000086<p>Libxml2 is known to be very portable, the library should build and work
87without serious troubles on a variety of systems (Linux, Unix, Windows,
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +000088CygWin, MacOS, MacOS X, RISC Os, OS/2, VMS, QNX, MVS, ...)</p>
Daniel Veillard9c466822001-10-25 12:03:39 +000089
Daniel Veillard96984452000-08-31 13:50:12 +000090<p>Separate documents:</p>
91<ul>
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +000092 <li><a href="http://xmlsoft.org/XSLT/">the libxslt page</a> providing an
Daniel Veillard2d347fa2002-03-17 10:34:11 +000093 implementation of XSLT 1.0 and common extensions like EXSLT for
94 libxml2</li>
Daniel Veillardc6271d22001-10-27 07:50:58 +000095 <li><a href="http://www.cs.unibo.it/~casarini/gdome2/">the gdome2 page</a>
Daniel Veillard2d347fa2002-03-17 10:34:11 +000096 : a standard DOM2 implementation for libxml2</li>
97 <li><a href="http://www.aleksey.com/xmlsec/">the XMLSec page</a>: an
98 implementation of <a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xmldsig-core/">W3C XML
99 Digital Signature</a> for libxml2</li>
Daniel Veillarde6d8e202002-05-02 06:11:10 +0000100 <li>also check the related links section below for more related and active
101 projects.</li>
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000102</ul>
103
Daniel Veillarde1662542002-08-28 11:50:59 +0000104<p>Logo designed by <a href="mailto:liyanage@access.ch">Marc Liyanage</a>.</p>
105
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000106<h2><a name="Introducti">Introduction</a></h2>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000107
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +0000108<p>This document describes libxml, the <a
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000109href="http://www.w3.org/XML/">XML</a> C library developed for the <a
Daniel Veillardec78c0f2000-08-25 10:25:23 +0000110href="http://www.gnome.org/">Gnome</a> project. <a
111href="http://www.w3.org/XML/">XML is a standard</a> for building tag-based
112structured documents/data.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000113
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000114<p>Here are some key points about libxml:</p>
115<ul>
Daniel Veillard2d347fa2002-03-17 10:34:11 +0000116 <li>Libxml exports Push (progressive) and Pull (blocking) type parser
117 interfaces for both XML and HTML.</li>
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000118 <li>Libxml can do DTD validation at parse time, using a parsed document
119 instance, or with an arbitrary DTD.</li>
Daniel Veillard2d347fa2002-03-17 10:34:11 +0000120 <li>Libxml includes complete <a
Daniel Veillard8c2ecaf2001-07-10 17:53:07 +0000121 href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xpath">XPath</a>, <a
122 href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xptr">XPointer</a> and <a
123 href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xinclude">XInclude</a> implementations.</li>
Daniel Veillardec78c0f2000-08-25 10:25:23 +0000124 <li>It is written in plain C, making as few assumptions as possible, and
Daniel Veillard189446d2000-10-13 10:23:06 +0000125 sticking closely to ANSI C/POSIX for easy embedding. Works on
Daniel Veillardab8500d2000-10-15 21:06:19 +0000126 Linux/Unix/Windows, ported to a number of other platforms.</li>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000127 <li>Basic support for HTTP and FTP client allowing applications to fetch
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000128 remote resources.</li>
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000129 <li>The design is modular, most of the extensions can be compiled out.</li>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000130 <li>The internal document representation is as close as possible to the <a
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000131 href="http://www.w3.org/DOM/">DOM</a> interfaces.</li>
132 <li>Libxml also has a <a href="http://www.megginson.com/SAX/index.html">SAX
Daniel Veillard402e8c82000-02-29 22:57:47 +0000133 like interface</a>; the interface is designed to be compatible with <a
134 href="http://www.jclark.com/xml/expat.html">Expat</a>.</li>
Daniel Veillardc575b992002-02-08 13:28:40 +0000135 <li>This library is released under the <a
136 href="http://www.opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.html">MIT
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000137 License</a>. See the Copyright file in the distribution for the precise
Daniel Veillardc575b992002-02-08 13:28:40 +0000138 wording.</li>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000139</ul>
Daniel Veillardccb09631998-10-27 06:21:04 +0000140
Daniel Veillarde0c1d722001-03-21 10:28:36 +0000141<p>Warning: unless you are forced to because your application links with a
Daniel Veillard2d347fa2002-03-17 10:34:11 +0000142Gnome-1.X library requiring it, <strong><span
Daniel Veillarde0c1d722001-03-21 10:28:36 +0000143style="background-color: #FF0000">Do Not Use libxml1</span></strong>, use
144libxml2</p>
145
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000146<h2><a name="FAQ">FAQ</a></h2>
147
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000148<p>Table of Contents:</p>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000149<ul>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000150 <li><a href="FAQ.html#License">License(s)</a></li>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000151 <li><a href="FAQ.html#Installati">Installation</a></li>
152 <li><a href="FAQ.html#Compilatio">Compilation</a></li>
153 <li><a href="FAQ.html#Developer">Developer corner</a></li>
154</ul>
155
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000156<h3><a name="License">License</a>(s)</h3>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000157<ol>
158 <li><em>Licensing Terms for libxml</em>
Daniel Veillardc575b992002-02-08 13:28:40 +0000159 <p>libxml is released under the <a
160 href="http://www.opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.html">MIT
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000161 License</a>; see the file Copyright in the distribution for the precise
Daniel Veillardc575b992002-02-08 13:28:40 +0000162 wording</p>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000163 </li>
164 <li><em>Can I embed libxml in a proprietary application ?</em>
Daniel Veillard42766c02002-08-22 20:52:17 +0000165 <p>Yes. The MIT License allows you to keep proprietary the changes you
166 made to libxml, but it would be graceful to send-back bug fixes and
167 improvements as patches for possible incorporation in the main
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000168 development tree.</p>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000169 </li>
170</ol>
171
172<h3><a name="Installati">Installation</a></h3>
173<ol>
174 <li>Unless you are forced to because your application links with a Gnome
175 library requiring it, <strong><span style="background-color: #FF0000">Do
176 Not Use libxml1</span></strong>, use libxml2</li>
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +0000177 <li><em>Where can I get libxml</em> ?
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000178 <p>The original distribution comes from <a
179 href="ftp://rpmfind.net/pub/libxml/">rpmfind.net</a> or <a
MDT 2002 John Fleck30c70542002-09-24 14:24:54 +0000180 href="ftp://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/sources/libxml2/2.4/">gnome.org</a></p>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000181 <p>Most Linux and BSD distributions include libxml, this is probably the
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000182 safer way for end-users to use libxml.</p>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000183 <p>David Doolin provides precompiled Windows versions at <a
184 href="http://www.ce.berkeley.edu/~doolin/code/libxmlwin32/ ">http://www.ce.berkeley.edu/~doolin/code/libxmlwin32/</a></p>
185 </li>
186 <li><em>I see libxml and libxml2 releases, which one should I install ?</em>
187 <ul>
Daniel Veillard42766c02002-08-22 20:52:17 +0000188 <li>If you are not constrained by backward compatibility issues with
189 existing applications, install libxml2 only</li>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000190 <li>If you are not doing development, you can safely install both.
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000191 Usually the packages <a
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000192 href="http://rpmfind.net/linux/RPM/libxml.html">libxml</a> and <a
193 href="http://rpmfind.net/linux/RPM/libxml2.html">libxml2</a> are
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000194 compatible (this is not the case for development packages).</li>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000195 <li>If you are a developer and your system provides separate packaging
196 for shared libraries and the development components, it is possible
197 to install libxml and libxml2, and also <a
198 href="http://rpmfind.net/linux/RPM/libxml-devel.html">libxml-devel</a>
199 and <a
200 href="http://rpmfind.net/linux/RPM/libxml2-devel.html">libxml2-devel</a>
201 too for libxml2 &gt;= 2.3.0</li>
202 <li>If you are developing a new application, please develop against
203 libxml2(-devel)</li>
204 </ul>
205 </li>
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000206 <li><em>I can't install the libxml package, it conflicts with libxml0</em>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000207 <p>You probably have an old libxml0 package used to provide the shared
Daniel Veillard42766c02002-08-22 20:52:17 +0000208 library for libxml.so.0, you can probably safely remove it. The libxml
209 packages provided on <a
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000210 href="ftp://rpmfind.net/pub/libxml/">rpmfind.net</a> provide
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000211 libxml.so.0</p>
212 </li>
213 <li><em>I can't install the libxml(2) RPM package due to failed
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000214 dependencies</em>
215 <p>The most generic solution is to re-fetch the latest src.rpm , and
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000216 rebuild it locally with</p>
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000217 <p><code>rpm --rebuild libxml(2)-xxx.src.rpm</code>.</p>
Daniel Veillard42766c02002-08-22 20:52:17 +0000218 <p>If everything goes well it will generate two binary rpm packages (one
219 providing the shared libs and xmllint, and the other one, the -devel
220 package, providing includes, static libraries and scripts needed to build
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000221 applications with libxml(2)) that you can install locally.</p>
222 </li>
223</ol>
224
225<h3><a name="Compilatio">Compilation</a></h3>
226<ol>
227 <li><em>What is the process to compile libxml ?</em>
228 <p>As most UNIX libraries libxml follows the "standard":</p>
229 <p><code>gunzip -c xxx.tar.gz | tar xvf -</code></p>
230 <p><code>cd libxml-xxxx</code></p>
231 <p><code>./configure --help</code></p>
232 <p>to see the options, then the compilation/installation proper</p>
233 <p><code>./configure [possible options]</code></p>
234 <p><code>make</code></p>
235 <p><code>make install</code></p>
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000236 <p>At that point you may have to rerun ldconfig or a similar utility to
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000237 update your list of installed shared libs.</p>
238 </li>
239 <li><em>What other libraries are needed to compile/install libxml ?</em>
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000240 <p>Libxml does not require any other library, the normal C ANSI API
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000241 should be sufficient (please report any violation to this rule you may
242 find).</p>
243 <p>However if found at configuration time libxml will detect and use the
244 following libs:</p>
245 <ul>
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +0000246 <li><a href="http://www.info-zip.org/pub/infozip/zlib/">libz</a> : a
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000247 highly portable and available widely compression library.</li>
248 <li>iconv: a powerful character encoding conversion library. It is
249 included by default in recent glibc libraries, so it doesn't need to
250 be installed specifically on Linux. It now seems a <a
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000251 href="http://www.opennc.org/onlinepubs/7908799/xsh/iconv.html">part
252 of the official UNIX</a> specification. Here is one <a
Daniel Veillarddad3f682002-11-17 16:47:27 +0000253 href="http://www.gnu.org/software/libiconv/">implementation of the
254 library</a> which source can be found <a
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000255 href="ftp://ftp.ilog.fr/pub/Users/haible/gnu/">here</a>.</li>
256 </ul>
257 </li>
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000258 <li><em>Make check fails on some platforms</em>
Daniel Veillard42766c02002-08-22 20:52:17 +0000259 <p>Sometimes the regression tests' results don't completely match the
260 value produced by the parser, and the makefile uses diff to print the
261 delta. On some platforms the diff return breaks the compilation process;
262 if the diff is small this is probably not a serious problem.</p>
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000263 <p>Sometimes (especially on Solaris) make checks fail due to limitations
Daniel Veillarde46182c2002-02-12 14:29:11 +0000264 in make. Try using GNU-make instead.</p>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000265 </li>
266 <li><em>I use the CVS version and there is no configure script</em>
Daniel Veillard42766c02002-08-22 20:52:17 +0000267 <p>The configure script (and other Makefiles) are generated. Use the
268 autogen.sh script to regenerate the configure script and Makefiles,
269 like:</p>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000270 <p><code>./autogen.sh --prefix=/usr --disable-shared</code></p>
271 </li>
272 <li><em>I have troubles when running make tests with gcc-3.0</em>
273 <p>It seems the initial release of gcc-3.0 has a problem with the
274 optimizer which miscompiles the URI module. Please use another
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000275 compiler.</p>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000276 </li>
277</ol>
278
279<h3><a name="Developer">Developer</a> corner</h3>
280<ol>
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000281 <li><em>xmlDocDump() generates output on one line.</em>
282 <p>Libxml will not <strong>invent</strong> spaces in the content of a
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000283 document since <strong>all spaces in the content of a document are
284 significant</strong>. If you build a tree from the API and want
285 indentation:</p>
286 <ol>
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000287 <li>the correct way is to generate those yourself too.</li>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000288 <li>the dangerous way is to ask libxml to add those blanks to your
289 content <strong>modifying the content of your document in the
290 process</strong>. The result may not be what you expect. There is
291 <strong>NO</strong> way to guarantee that such a modification won't
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000292 affect other parts of the content of your document. See <a
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000293 href="http://xmlsoft.org/html/libxml-parser.html#XMLKEEPBLANKSDEFAULT">xmlKeepBlanksDefault
294 ()</a> and <a
295 href="http://xmlsoft.org/html/libxml-tree.html#XMLSAVEFORMATFILE">xmlSaveFormatFile
296 ()</a></li>
297 </ol>
298 </li>
299 <li>Extra nodes in the document:
300 <p><em>For a XML file as below:</em></p>
301 <pre>&lt;?xml version="1.0"?&gt;
302&lt;PLAN xmlns="http://www.argus.ca/autotest/1.0/"&gt;
303&lt;NODE CommFlag="0"/&gt;
304&lt;NODE CommFlag="1"/&gt;
305&lt;/PLAN&gt;</pre>
306 <p><em>after parsing it with the function
307 pxmlDoc=xmlParseFile(...);</em></p>
308 <p><em>I want to the get the content of the first node (node with the
309 CommFlag="0")</em></p>
310 <p><em>so I did it as following;</em></p>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000311 <pre>xmlNodePtr pnode;
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000312pnode=pxmlDoc-&gt;children-&gt;children;</pre>
313 <p><em>but it does not work. If I change it to</em></p>
314 <pre>pnode=pxmlDoc-&gt;children-&gt;children-&gt;next;</pre>
315 <p><em>then it works. Can someone explain it to me.</em></p>
316 <p></p>
317 <p>In XML all characters in the content of the document are significant
318 <strong>including blanks and formatting line breaks</strong>.</p>
319 <p>The extra nodes you are wondering about are just that, text nodes with
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000320 the formatting spaces which are part of the document but that people tend
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000321 to forget. There is a function <a
322 href="http://xmlsoft.org/html/libxml-parser.html">xmlKeepBlanksDefault
323 ()</a> to remove those at parse time, but that's an heuristic, and its
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000324 use should be limited to cases where you are certain there is no
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000325 mixed-content in the document.</p>
326 </li>
327 <li><em>I get compilation errors of existing code like when accessing
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000328 <strong>root</strong> or <strong>child fields</strong> of nodes.</em>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000329 <p>You are compiling code developed for libxml version 1 and using a
330 libxml2 development environment. Either switch back to libxml v1 devel or
331 even better fix the code to compile with libxml2 (or both) by <a
332 href="upgrade.html">following the instructions</a>.</p>
333 </li>
334 <li><em>I get compilation errors about non existing
335 <strong>xmlRootNode</strong> or <strong>xmlChildrenNode</strong>
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000336 fields.</em>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000337 <p>The source code you are using has been <a
338 href="upgrade.html">upgraded</a> to be able to compile with both libxml
339 and libxml2, but you need to install a more recent version:
340 libxml(-devel) &gt;= 1.8.8 or libxml2(-devel) &gt;= 2.1.0</p>
341 </li>
342 <li><em>XPath implementation looks seriously broken</em>
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000343 <p>XPath implementation prior to 2.3.0 was really incomplete. Upgrade to
344 a recent version, there are no known bugs in the current version.</p>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000345 </li>
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000346 <li><em>The example provided in the web page does not compile.</em>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000347 <p>It's hard to maintain the documentation in sync with the code
348 &lt;grin/&gt; ...</p>
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000349 <p>Check the previous points 1/ and 2/ raised before, and please send
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000350 patches.</p>
351 </li>
Daniel Veillard42766c02002-08-22 20:52:17 +0000352 <li><em>Where can I get more examples and information than privoded on the
353 web page?</em>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000354 <p>Ideally a libxml book would be nice. I have no such plan ... But you
355 can:</p>
356 <ul>
357 <li>check more deeply the <a href="html/libxml-lib.html">existing
358 generated doc</a></li>
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000359 <li>look for examples of use for libxml function using the Gnome code.
360 For example the following will query the full Gnome CVS base for the
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000361 use of the <strong>xmlAddChild()</strong> function:
362 <p><a
363 href="http://cvs.gnome.org/lxr/search?string=xmlAddChild">http://cvs.gnome.org/lxr/search?string=xmlAddChild</a></p>
364 <p>This may be slow, a large hardware donation to the gnome project
365 could cure this :-)</p>
366 </li>
367 <li><a
368 href="http://cvs.gnome.org/bonsai/rview.cgi?cvsroot=/cvs/gnome&amp;dir=gnome-xml">Browse
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +0000369 the libxml source</a> , I try to write code as clean and documented
Daniel Veillard42766c02002-08-22 20:52:17 +0000370 as possible, so looking at it may be helpful. In particular the code
371 of xmllint.c and of the various testXXX.c test programs should
372 provide good examples of how to do things with the library.</li>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000373 </ul>
374 </li>
375 <li>What about C++ ?
376 <p>libxml is written in pure C in order to allow easy reuse on a number
377 of platforms, including embedded systems. I don't intend to convert to
378 C++.</p>
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000379 <p>There are however a few C++ wrappers which may fulfill your needs:</p>
Daniel Veillard9b6fd302002-05-13 12:06:47 +0000380 <ul>
381 <li>by Ari Johnson &lt;ari@btigate.com&gt;:
382 <p>Website: <a
383 href="http://lusis.org/~ari/xml++/">http://lusis.org/~ari/xml++/</a></p>
384 <p>Download: <a
385 href="http://lusis.org/~ari/xml++/libxml++.tar.gz">http://lusis.org/~ari/xml++/libxml++.tar.gz</a></p>
386 </li>
387 <li>by Peter Jones &lt;pjones@pmade.org&gt;
388 <p>Website: <a
389 href="http://pmade.org/pjones/software/xmlwrapp/">http://pmade.org/pjones/software/xmlwrapp/</a></p>
390 </li>
391 </ul>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000392 </li>
393 <li>How to validate a document a posteriori ?
394 <p>It is possible to validate documents which had not been validated at
Daniel Veillard42766c02002-08-22 20:52:17 +0000395 initial parsing time or documents which have been built from scratch
396 using the API. Use the <a
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000397 href="http://xmlsoft.org/html/libxml-valid.html#XMLVALIDATEDTD">xmlValidateDtd()</a>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000398 function. It is also possible to simply add a DTD to an existing
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000399 document:</p>
400 <pre>xmlDocPtr doc; /* your existing document */
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000401xmlDtdPtr dtd = xmlParseDTD(NULL, filename_of_dtd); /* parse the DTD */
402
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000403 dtd-&gt;name = xmlStrDup((xmlChar*)"root_name"); /* use the given root */
404
405 doc-&gt;intSubset = dtd;
406 if (doc-&gt;children == NULL) xmlAddChild((xmlNodePtr)doc, (xmlNodePtr)dtd);
407 else xmlAddPrevSibling(doc-&gt;children, (xmlNodePtr)dtd);
408 </pre>
409 </li>
Daniel Veillarddad3f682002-11-17 16:47:27 +0000410 <li>So what is this funky "xmlChar" used all the time?
411 <p>It is a null terminated sequence of utf-8 characters. And only utf-8!
412 You need to convert strings encoded in different ways to utf-8 before
413 passing them to the API. This can be accomplished with the iconv library
414 for instance.</p>
John Fleck61f6fb62002-10-31 15:23:29 +0000415 </li>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000416 <li>etc ...</li>
417</ol>
418
419<p></p>
420
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000421<h2><a name="Documentat">Documentation</a></h2>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000422
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000423<p>There are several on-line resources related to using libxml:</p>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000424<ol>
Daniel Veillard321be0c2002-10-08 21:26:42 +0000425 <li>Use the <a href="search.php">search engine</a> to lookup
426 informations.</li>
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000427 <li>Check the <a href="FAQ.html">FAQ.</a></li>
Daniel Veillardc19fccc2000-07-03 11:52:01 +0000428 <li>Check the <a href="http://xmlsoft.org/html/libxml-lib.html">extensive
Daniel Veillard8c6d6af2000-08-25 17:14:13 +0000429 documentation</a> automatically extracted from code comments (using <a
430 href="http://cvs.gnome.org/bonsai/rview.cgi?cvsroot=/cvs/gnome&amp;dir=gtk-doc">gtk
431 doc</a>).</li>
Daniel Veillard8d869642000-07-14 12:12:59 +0000432 <li>Look at the documentation about <a href="encoding.html">libxml
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000433 internationalization support</a>.</li>
Daniel Veillardbc66f852002-01-14 09:49:20 +0000434 <li>This page provides a global overview and <a href="example.html">some
Daniel Veillard402e8c82000-02-29 22:57:47 +0000435 examples</a> on how to use libxml.</li>
Daniel Veillarddad3f682002-11-17 16:47:27 +0000436 <li>John Fleck's libxml tutorial: <a href="tutorial/index.html">html</a> or
437 <a href="tutorial/xmltutorial.pdf">pdf</a>.</li>
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +0000438 <li><a href="mailto:james@daa.com.au">James Henstridge</a> wrote <a
Daniel Veillard402e8c82000-02-29 22:57:47 +0000439 href="http://www.daa.com.au/~james/gnome/xml-sax/xml-sax.html">some nice
440 documentation</a> explaining how to use the libxml SAX interface.</li>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000441 <li>George Lebl wrote <a
442 href="http://www-4.ibm.com/software/developer/library/gnome3/">an article
Daniel Veillard402e8c82000-02-29 22:57:47 +0000443 for IBM developerWorks</a> about using libxml.</li>
Daniel Veillardec303412000-03-24 13:41:54 +0000444 <li>Check <a href="http://cvs.gnome.org/lxr/source/gnome-xml/TODO">the TODO
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000445 file</a>.</li>
Daniel Veillard42766c02002-08-22 20:52:17 +0000446 <li>Read the <a href="upgrade.html">1.x to 2.x upgrade path</a>
447 description. If you are starting a new project using libxml you should
448 really use the 2.x version.</li>
Daniel Veillard845cce42002-01-09 11:51:37 +0000449 <li>And don't forget to look at the <a
450 href="http://mail.gnome.org/archives/xml/">mailing-list archive</a>.</li>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000451</ol>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000452
Daniel Veillardd5f97f82000-09-17 16:38:14 +0000453<h2><a name="Reporting">Reporting bugs and getting help</a></h2>
Daniel Veillard4c3a2031999-11-19 17:46:26 +0000454
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000455<p>Well, bugs or missing features are always possible, and I will make a
456point of fixing them in a timely fashion. The best way to report a bug is to
457use the <a href="http://bugzilla.gnome.org/buglist.cgi?product=libxml">Gnome
Daniel Veillard42766c02002-08-22 20:52:17 +0000458bug tracking database</a> (make sure to use the "libxml2" module name). I
459look at reports there regularly and it's good to have a reminder when a bug
460is still open. Be sure to specify that the bug is for the package libxml2.</p>
Daniel Veillard4c3a2031999-11-19 17:46:26 +0000461
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000462<p>There is also a mailing-list <a
Daniel Veillard3197f162001-04-04 00:40:08 +0000463href="mailto:xml@gnome.org">xml@gnome.org</a> for libxml, with an <a
464href="http://mail.gnome.org/archives/xml/">on-line archive</a> (<a
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000465href="http://xmlsoft.org/messages">old</a>). To subscribe to this list,
466please visit the <a
467href="http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/xml">associated Web</a> page and
468follow the instructions. <strong>Do not send code, I won't debug it</strong>
469(but patches are really appreciated!).</p>
Daniel Veillard234547b2001-07-05 09:46:10 +0000470
Daniel Veillard008186f2001-09-13 14:24:44 +0000471<p>Check the following <strong><span style="color: #FF0000">before
472posting</span></strong>:</p>
Daniel Veillard234547b2001-07-05 09:46:10 +0000473<ul>
Daniel Veillard321be0c2002-10-08 21:26:42 +0000474 <li>Read the <a href="FAQ.html">FAQ</a> and <a href="search.php">use the
475 search engine</a> to get informations related to your problem.</li>
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000476 <li>Make sure you are <a href="ftp://xmlsoft.org/">using a recent
477 version</a>, and that the problem still shows up in a recent version.</li>
478 <li>Check the <a href="http://mail.gnome.org/archives/xml/">list
479 archives</a> to see if the problem was reported already. In this case
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000480 there is probably a fix available, similarly check the <a
Daniel Veillarde7ead2d2001-08-22 23:44:09 +0000481 href="http://bugzilla.gnome.org/buglist.cgi?product=libxml">registered
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000482 open bugs</a>.</li>
483 <li>Make sure you can reproduce the bug with xmllint or one of the test
484 programs found in source in the distribution.</li>
Daniel Veillard234547b2001-07-05 09:46:10 +0000485 <li>Please send the command showing the error as well as the input (as an
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000486 attachment)</li>
Daniel Veillard234547b2001-07-05 09:46:10 +0000487</ul>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000488
Daniel Veillarddadd0872001-09-15 09:21:44 +0000489<p>Then send the bug with associated informations to reproduce it to the <a
Daniel Veillard33a67802001-03-07 09:44:02 +0000490href="mailto:xml@gnome.org">xml@gnome.org</a> list; if it's really libxml
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000491related I will approve it.. Please do not send mail to me directly, it makes
492things really hard to track and in some cases I am not the best person to
493answer a given question. Ask the list instead.</p>
Daniel Veillard4c3a2031999-11-19 17:46:26 +0000494
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000495<p>Of course, bugs reported with a suggested patch for fixing them will
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000496probably be processed faster than those without.</p>
Daniel Veillardec303412000-03-24 13:41:54 +0000497
498<p>If you're looking for help, a quick look at <a
Daniel Veillardf7ed3362001-08-17 12:01:21 +0000499href="http://mail.gnome.org/archives/xml/">the list archive</a> may actually
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000500provide the answer. I usually send source samples when answering libxml usage
Daniel Veillard6f0adb52000-07-03 11:41:26 +0000501questions. The <a href="http://xmlsoft.org/html/book1.html">auto-generated
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000502documentation</a> is not as polished as I would like (i need to learn more
503about DocBook), but it's a good starting point.</p>
Daniel Veillardec303412000-03-24 13:41:54 +0000504
Daniel Veillardd5f97f82000-09-17 16:38:14 +0000505<h2><a name="help">How to help</a></h2>
506
507<p>You can help the project in various ways, the best thing to do first is to
508subscribe to the mailing-list as explained before, check the <a
Daniel Veillardf7ed3362001-08-17 12:01:21 +0000509href="http://mail.gnome.org/archives/xml/">archives </a>and the <a
510href="http://bugzilla.gnome.org/buglist.cgi?product=libxml">Gnome bug
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000511database</a>:</p>
Daniel Veillardd5f97f82000-09-17 16:38:14 +0000512<ol>
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000513 <li>Provide patches when you find problems.</li>
514 <li>Provide the diffs when you port libxml to a new platform. They may not
Daniel Veillardab8500d2000-10-15 21:06:19 +0000515 be integrated in all cases but help pinpointing portability problems
516 and</li>
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000517 <li>Provide documentation fixes (either as patches to the code comments or
Daniel Veillardd5f97f82000-09-17 16:38:14 +0000518 as HTML diffs).</li>
Daniel Veillard42766c02002-08-22 20:52:17 +0000519 <li>Provide new documentations pieces (translations, examples, etc
520 ...).</li>
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000521 <li>Check the TODO file and try to close one of the items.</li>
522 <li>Take one of the points raised in the archive or the bug database and
Daniel Veillarde7ead2d2001-08-22 23:44:09 +0000523 provide a fix. <a href="mailto:daniel@veillard.com">Get in touch with me
524 </a>before to avoid synchronization problems and check that the suggested
525 fix will fit in nicely :-)</li>
Daniel Veillardd5f97f82000-09-17 16:38:14 +0000526</ol>
527
Daniel Veillard10a2c651999-12-12 13:03:50 +0000528<h2><a name="Downloads">Downloads</a></h2>
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000529
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000530<p>The latest versions of libxml can be found on <a
Daniel Veillard20c8cf22001-06-26 22:47:36 +0000531href="ftp://xmlsoft.org/">xmlsoft.org</a> (<a
532href="ftp://speakeasy.rpmfind.net/pub/libxml/">Seattle</a>, <a
533href="ftp://fr.rpmfind.net/pub/libxml/">France</a>) or on the <a
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000534href="ftp://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/MIRRORS.html">Gnome FTP server</a> either
MDT 2002 John Fleck30c70542002-09-24 14:24:54 +0000535as a <a href="ftp://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/sources/libxml2/2.4/">source
536archive</a><!-- commenting this out because they seem to have disappeared or <a
Daniel Veillarda41123c2001-04-22 19:31:20 +0000537href="ftp://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/stable/redhat/i386/libxml/">RPM
Daniel Veillarde16b5742002-09-26 17:50:03 +0000538packages</a> -->
Daniel Veillard321be0c2002-10-08 21:26:42 +0000539 , Antonin Sprinzl also provide <a href="ftp://gd.tuwien.ac.at/pub/libxml/">a
Daniel Veillarde16b5742002-09-26 17:50:03 +0000540mirror in Austria</a>. (NOTE that you need both the <a
Daniel Veillardc19fccc2000-07-03 11:52:01 +0000541href="http://rpmfind.net/linux/RPM/libxml2.html">libxml(2)</a> and <a
542href="http://rpmfind.net/linux/RPM/libxml2-devel.html">libxml(2)-devel</a>
Daniel Veillard95189532001-07-26 18:30:26 +0000543packages installed to compile applications using libxml.) <a
Daniel Veillardb2fb8ed2002-04-01 09:33:12 +0000544href="mailto:igor@stud.fh-frankfurt.de">Igor Zlatkovic</a> is now the
545maintainer of the Windows port, <a
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000546href="http://www.fh-frankfurt.de/~igor/projects/libxml/index.html">he
Daniel Veillardc6271d22001-10-27 07:50:58 +0000547provides binaries</a>. <a href="mailto:Gary.Pennington@sun.com">Gary
Daniel Veillard1aadc442001-11-28 13:10:32 +0000548Pennington</a> provides <a href="http://garypennington.net/libxml2/">Solaris
Daniel Veillard42766c02002-08-22 20:52:17 +0000549binaries</a>. <a href="mailto:Steve.Ball@zveno.com">Steve Ball</a> provides
550<a href="http://www.zveno.com/open_source/libxml2xslt.html">Mac Os X
551binaries</a>.</p>
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000552
Daniel Veillard6c8b1172000-03-01 00:40:41 +0000553<p><a name="Snapshot">Snapshot:</a></p>
554<ul>
555 <li>Code from the W3C cvs base libxml <a
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000556 href="ftp://xmlsoft.org/cvs-snapshot.tar.gz">cvs-snapshot.tar.gz</a>.</li>
Daniel Veillard6c8b1172000-03-01 00:40:41 +0000557 <li>Docs, content of the web site, the list archive included <a
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000558 href="ftp://xmlsoft.org/libxml-docs.tar.gz">libxml-docs.tar.gz</a>.</li>
Daniel Veillard6c8b1172000-03-01 00:40:41 +0000559</ul>
560
Daniel Veillardc6271d22001-10-27 07:50:58 +0000561<p><a name="Contribs">Contributions:</a></p>
Daniel Veillard6c8b1172000-03-01 00:40:41 +0000562
563<p>I do accept external contributions, especially if compiling on another
Daniel Veillardc6271d22001-10-27 07:50:58 +0000564platform, get in touch with me to upload the package, wrappers for various
Daniel Veillard51095312001-10-28 18:51:57 +0000565languages have been provided, and can be found in the <a
566href="contribs.html">contrib section</a></p>
Daniel Veillard6c8b1172000-03-01 00:40:41 +0000567
Daniel Veillard82687162001-01-22 15:32:01 +0000568<p>Libxml is also available from CVS:</p>
Daniel Veillard10a2c651999-12-12 13:03:50 +0000569<ul>
Daniel Veillard10a2c651999-12-12 13:03:50 +0000570 <li><p>The <a
571 href="http://cvs.gnome.org/bonsai/rview.cgi?cvsroot=/cvs/gnome&amp;dir=gnome-xml">Gnome
Daniel Veillard402e8c82000-02-29 22:57:47 +0000572 CVS base</a>. Check the <a
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000573 href="http://developer.gnome.org/tools/cvs.html">Gnome CVS Tools</a>
574 page; the CVS module is <b>gnome-xml</b>.</p>
Daniel Veillard10a2c651999-12-12 13:03:50 +0000575 </li>
Daniel Veillard82687162001-01-22 15:32:01 +0000576 <li>The <strong>libxslt</strong> module is also present there</li>
Daniel Veillard10a2c651999-12-12 13:03:50 +0000577</ul>
578
579<h2><a name="News">News</a></h2>
580
Daniel Veillard944b5ff1999-12-15 19:08:24 +0000581<h3>CVS only : check the <a
582href="http://cvs.gnome.org/lxr/source/gnome-xml/ChangeLog">Changelog</a> file
Daniel Veillard189446d2000-10-13 10:23:06 +0000583for a really accurate description</h3>
Daniel Veillardab8500d2000-10-15 21:06:19 +0000584
Daniel Veillarde6d8e202002-05-02 06:11:10 +0000585<p>Items not finished and worked on, get in touch with the list if you want
586to test those</p>
Daniel Veillardab8500d2000-10-15 21:06:19 +0000587<ul>
Daniel Veillardcf27f7c2002-04-30 07:12:39 +0000588 <li>Finishing up <a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xmlschema-1/">XML
589 Schemas</a> and <a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xinclude">XInclude</a></li>
590</ul>
591
Daniel Veillardc1eed322002-12-12 11:01:32 +0000592<h3>2.4.30: Dec 12 2002</h3>
593<ul>
594 <li>2.4.29 broke the python bindings, rereleasing</li>
595 <li>Improvement/fixes of the XML API generator, and couple of minor code
596 fixes.</li>
597</ul>
598
Daniel Veillard9b4bb4d2002-12-11 19:28:47 +0000599<h3>2.4.29: Dec 11 2002</h3>
600<ul>
601 <li>Windows fixes (Igor): Windows CE port, pthread linking, python bindings
602 (Stéphane Bidoul), Mingw (Magnus Henoch), and export list updates</li>
603 <li>Fix for prev in python bindings (ERDI Gergo)</li>
604 <li>Fix for entities handling (Marcus Clarke)</li>
605 <li>Refactored the XML and HTML dumps to a single code path, fixed XHTML1
606 dump</li>
607 <li>Fix for URI parsing when handling URNs with fragment identifiers</li>
608 <li>Fix for HTTP URL escaping problem</li>
609 <li>added an TextXmlReader (C#) like API (work in progress)</li>
610 <li>Rewrote the API in XML generation script, includes a C parser and saves
611 more informations needed for C# bindings</li>
612</ul>
613
Daniel Veillardf9c4cad2002-11-22 15:57:07 +0000614<h3>2.4.28: Nov 22 2002</h3>
615<ul>
616 <li>a couple of python binding fixes</li>
617 <li>2 bug fixes in the XML push parser</li>
618 <li>potential memory leak removed (Martin Stoilov)</li>
619 <li>fix to the configure script for Unix (Dimitri Papadopoulos)</li>
620 <li>added encoding support for XInclude parse="text"</li>
621 <li>autodetection of XHTML1 and specific serialization rules added</li>
Daniel Veillard9b4bb4d2002-12-11 19:28:47 +0000622 <li>nasty threading bug fixed (William Brack)</li>
Daniel Veillardf9c4cad2002-11-22 15:57:07 +0000623</ul>
624
Daniel Veillarddad3f682002-11-17 16:47:27 +0000625<h3>2.4.27: Nov 17 2002</h3>
626<ul>
627 <li>fixes for the Python bindings</li>
628 <li>a number of bug fixes: SGML catalogs, xmlParseBalancedChunkMemory(),
629 HTML parser, Schemas (Charles Bozeman), document fragment support
630 (Christian Glahn), xmlReconciliateNs (Brian Stafford), XPointer,
631 xmlFreeNode(), xmlSAXParseMemory (Peter Jones), xmlGetNodePath (Petr
632 Pajas), entities processing</li>
633 <li>added grep to xmllint --shell</li>
634 <li>VMS update patch from Craig A. Berry</li>
635 <li>cleanup of the Windows build with support for more compilers (Igor),
636 better thread support on Windows</li>
637 <li>cleanup of Unix Makefiles and spec file</li>
638 <li>Improvements to the documentation (John Fleck)</li>
639</ul>
640
Daniel Veillard48267432002-10-18 11:21:38 +0000641<h3>2.4.26: Oct 18 2002</h3>
642<ul>
643 <li>Patches for Windows CE port, improvements on Windows paths handling</li>
644 <li>Fixes to the validation code (DTD and Schemas), xmlNodeGetPath() ,
645 HTML serialization, Namespace compliance, and a number of small
646 problems</li>
647</ul>
648
Daniel Veillarde16b5742002-09-26 17:50:03 +0000649<h3>2.4.25: Sep 26 2002</h3>
650<ul>
651 <li>A number of bug fixes: XPath, validation, Python bindings, DOM and
652 tree, xmlI/O, Html</li>
653 <li>Serious rewrite of XInclude</li>
654 <li>Made XML Schemas regexp part of the default build and APIs, small fix
655 and improvement of the regexp core</li>
656 <li>Changed the validation code to reuse XML Schemas regexp APIs</li>
657 <li>Better handling of Windows file paths, improvement of Makefiles (Igor,
658 Daniel Gehriger, Mark Vakoc)</li>
659 <li>Improved the python I/O bindings, the tests, added resolver and regexp
Daniel Veillard321be0c2002-10-08 21:26:42 +0000660 APIs</li>
Daniel Veillarde16b5742002-09-26 17:50:03 +0000661 <li>New logos from Marc Liyanage</li>
662 <li>Tutorial improvements: John Fleck, Christopher Harris</li>
663 <li>Makefile: Fixes for AMD x86_64 (Mandrake), DESTDIR (Christophe
664 Merlet)</li>
665 <li>removal of all stderr/perror use for error reporting</li>
666 <li>Better error reporting: XPath and DTD validation</li>
667 <li>update of the trio portability layer (Bjorn Reese)</li>
668</ul>
669
Daniel Veillard42766c02002-08-22 20:52:17 +0000670<p><strong>2.4.24: Aug 22 2002</strong></p>
671<ul>
672 <li>XPath fixes (William), xf:escape-uri() (Wesley Terpstra)</li>
673 <li>Python binding fixes: makefiles (William), generator, rpm build, x86-64
674 (fcrozat)</li>
675 <li>HTML &lt;style&gt; and boolean attributes serializer fixes</li>
676 <li>C14N improvements by Aleksey</li>
Daniel Veillarde1662542002-08-28 11:50:59 +0000677 <li>doc cleanups: Rick Jones</li>
Daniel Veillard42766c02002-08-22 20:52:17 +0000678 <li>Windows compiler makefile updates: Igor and Elizabeth Barham</li>
679 <li>XInclude: implementation of fallback and xml:base fixup added</li>
680</ul>
681
Daniel Veillard782afda2002-07-08 15:12:49 +0000682<h3>2.4.23: July 6 2002</h3>
683<ul>
684 <li>performances patches: Peter Jacobi</li>
685 <li>c14n fixes, testsuite and performances: Aleksey Sanin</li>
686 <li>added xmlDocFormatDump: Chema Celorio</li>
687 <li>new tutorial: John Fleck</li>
688 <li>new hash functions and performances: Sander Vesik, portability fix from
689 Peter Jacobi</li>
690 <li>a number of bug fixes: XPath (William Brack, Richard Jinks), XML and
691 HTML parsers, ID lookup function</li>
692 <li>removal of all remaining sprintf: Aleksey Sanin</li>
693</ul>
694
Daniel Veillardc0801af2002-05-28 16:28:42 +0000695<h3>2.4.22: May 27 2002</h3>
696<ul>
697 <li>a number of bug fixes: configure scripts, base handling, parser, memory
698 usage, HTML parser, XPath, documentation (Christian Cornelssen),
Daniel Veillard21473672002-06-17 07:29:22 +0000699 indentation, URI parsing</li>
Daniel Veillardc0801af2002-05-28 16:28:42 +0000700 <li>Optimizations for XMLSec, fixing and making public some of the network
701 protocol handlers (Aleksey)</li>
702 <li>performance patch from Gary Pennington</li>
703 <li>Charles Bozeman provided date and time support for XML Schemas
704 datatypes</li>
705</ul>
706
Daniel Veillardcf27f7c2002-04-30 07:12:39 +0000707<h3>2.4.21: Apr 29 2002</h3>
708
709<p>This release is both a bug fix release and also contains the early XML
710Schemas <a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xmlschema-1/">structures</a> and <a
711href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xmlschema-2/">datatypes</a> code, beware, all
712interfaces are likely to change, there is huge holes, it is clearly a work in
713progress and don't even think of putting this code in a production system,
Daniel Veillarde6d8e202002-05-02 06:11:10 +0000714it's actually not compiled in by default. The real fixes are:</p>
Daniel Veillardcf27f7c2002-04-30 07:12:39 +0000715<ul>
716 <li>a couple of bugs or limitations introduced in 2.4.20</li>
717 <li>patches for Borland C++ and MSC by Igor</li>
718 <li>some fixes on XPath strings and conformance patches by Richard
719 Jinks</li>
720 <li>patch from Aleksey for the ExcC14N specification</li>
721 <li>OSF/1 bug fix by Bjorn</li>
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +0000722</ul>
723
Daniel Veillarda7084cd2002-04-15 17:12:47 +0000724<h3>2.4.20: Apr 15 2002</h3>
725<ul>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000726 <li>bug fixes: file descriptor leak, XPath, HTML output, DTD validation</li>
Daniel Veillarda7084cd2002-04-15 17:12:47 +0000727 <li>XPath conformance testing by Richard Jinks</li>
728 <li>Portability fixes: Solaris, MPE/iX, Windows, OSF/1, python bindings,
729 libxml.m4</li>
730</ul>
731
Daniel Veillard19274092002-03-25 16:48:03 +0000732<h3>2.4.19: Mar 25 2002</h3>
733<ul>
734 <li>bug fixes: half a dozen XPath bugs, Validation, ISO-Latin to UTF8
735 encoder</li>
736 <li>portability fixes in the HTTP code</li>
Daniel Veillardb2fb8ed2002-04-01 09:33:12 +0000737 <li>memory allocation checks using valgrind, and profiling tests</li>
Daniel Veillard19274092002-03-25 16:48:03 +0000738 <li>revamp of the Windows build and Makefiles</li>
739</ul>
740
Daniel Veillard34ce8be2002-03-18 19:37:11 +0000741<h3>2.4.18: Mar 18 2002</h3>
742<ul>
743 <li>bug fixes: tree, SAX, canonicalization, validation, portability,
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000744 XPath</li>
Daniel Veillard34ce8be2002-03-18 19:37:11 +0000745 <li>removed the --with-buffer option it was becoming unmaintainable</li>
746 <li>serious cleanup of the Python makefiles</li>
747 <li>speedup patch to XPath very effective for DocBook stylesheets</li>
748 <li>Fixes for Windows build, cleanup of the documentation</li>
749</ul>
750
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +0000751<h3>2.4.17: Mar 8 2002</h3>
752<ul>
753 <li>a lot of bug fixes, including "namespace nodes have no parents in
754 XPath"</li>
755 <li>fixed/improved the Python wrappers, added more examples and more
756 regression tests, XPath extension functions can now return node-sets</li>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000757 <li>added the XML Canonicalization support from Aleksey Sanin</li>
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000758</ul>
759
Daniel Veillard5f4b5992002-02-20 10:22:49 +0000760<h3>2.4.16: Feb 20 2002</h3>
761<ul>
762 <li>a lot of bug fixes, most of them were triggered by the XML Testsuite
763 from OASIS and W3C. Compliance has been significantly improved.</li>
764 <li>a couple of portability fixes too.</li>
765</ul>
766
Daniel Veillard397ff112002-02-11 18:27:20 +0000767<h3>2.4.15: Feb 11 2002</h3>
768<ul>
769 <li>Fixed the Makefiles, especially the python module ones</li>
770 <li>A few bug fixes and cleanup</li>
771 <li>Includes cleanup</li>
772</ul>
773
Daniel Veillardb6c1e2f2002-02-08 14:52:52 +0000774<h3>2.4.14: Feb 8 2002</h3>
775<ul>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000776 <li>Change of License to the <a
Daniel Veillardb6c1e2f2002-02-08 14:52:52 +0000777 href="http://www.opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.html">MIT
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000778 License</a> basically for integration in XFree86 codebase, and removing
779 confusion around the previous dual-licensing</li>
Daniel Veillardb6c1e2f2002-02-08 14:52:52 +0000780 <li>added Python bindings, beta software but should already be quite
781 complete</li>
782 <li>a large number of fixes and cleanups, especially for all tree
783 manipulations</li>
784 <li>cleanup of the headers, generation of a reference API definition in
785 XML</li>
786</ul>
787
788<h3>2.4.13: Jan 14 2002</h3>
Daniel Veillard744683d2002-01-14 17:30:20 +0000789<ul>
790 <li>update of the documentation: John Fleck and Charlie Bozeman</li>
791 <li>cleanup of timing code from Justin Fletcher</li>
792 <li>fixes for Windows and initial thread support on Win32: Igor and Serguei
793 Narojnyi</li>
794 <li>Cygwin patch from Robert Collins</li>
795 <li>added xmlSetEntityReferenceFunc() for Keith Isdale work on xsldbg</li>
796</ul>
797
Daniel Veillardef90ba72001-12-07 14:24:22 +0000798<h3>2.4.12: Dec 7 2001</h3>
799<ul>
800 <li>a few bug fixes: thread (Gary Pennington), xmllint (Geert Kloosterman),
801 XML parser (Robin Berjon), XPointer (Danny Jamshy), I/O cleanups
802 (robert)</li>
803 <li>Eric Lavigne contributed project files for MacOS</li>
804 <li>some makefiles cleanups</li>
805</ul>
806
Daniel Veillarda4871052001-11-26 13:19:48 +0000807<h3>2.4.11: Nov 26 2001</h3>
808<ul>
809 <li>fixed a couple of errors in the includes, fixed a few bugs, some code
810 cleanups</li>
811 <li>xmllint man pages improvement by Heiko Rupp</li>
812 <li>updated VMS build instructions from John A Fotheringham</li>
813 <li>Windows Makefiles updates from Igor</li>
814</ul>
815
Daniel Veillard43d3f612001-11-10 11:57:23 +0000816<h3>2.4.10: Nov 10 2001</h3>
817<ul>
818 <li>URI escaping fix (Joel Young)</li>
819 <li>added xmlGetNodePath() (for paths or XPointers generation)</li>
820 <li>Fixes namespace handling problems when using DTD and validation</li>
821 <li>improvements on xmllint: Morus Walter patches for --format and
822 --encode, Stefan Kost and Heiko Rupp improvements on the --shell</li>
823 <li>fixes for xmlcatalog linking pointed by Weiqi Gao</li>
824 <li>fixes to the HTML parser</li>
825</ul>
826
827<h3>2.4.9: Nov 6 2001</h3>
828<ul>
829 <li>fixes more catalog bugs</li>
830 <li>avoid a compilation problem, improve xmlGetLineNo()</li>
831</ul>
832
Daniel Veillarded421aa2001-11-04 21:22:45 +0000833<h3>2.4.8: Nov 4 2001</h3>
834<ul>
835 <li>fixed SGML catalogs broken in previous release, updated xmlcatalog
836 tool</li>
837 <li>fixed a compile errors and some includes troubles.</li>
838</ul>
839
Daniel Veillard52dcab32001-10-30 12:51:17 +0000840<h3>2.4.7: Oct 30 2001</h3>
841<ul>
842 <li>exported some debugging interfaces</li>
843 <li>serious rewrite of the catalog code</li>
844 <li>integrated Gary Pennington thread safety patch, added configure option
845 and regression tests</li>
846 <li>removed an HTML parser bug</li>
847 <li>fixed a couple of potentially serious validation bugs</li>
848 <li>integrated the SGML DocBook support in xmllint</li>
849 <li>changed the nanoftp anonymous login passwd</li>
850 <li>some I/O cleanup and a couple of interfaces for Perl wrapper</li>
851 <li>general bug fixes</li>
852 <li>updated xmllint man page by John Fleck</li>
853 <li>some VMS and Windows updates</li>
854</ul>
855
Daniel Veillard60087f32001-10-10 09:45:09 +0000856<h3>2.4.6: Oct 10 2001</h3>
857<ul>
Daniel Veillard52dcab32001-10-30 12:51:17 +0000858 <li>added an updated man pages by John Fleck</li>
Daniel Veillard60087f32001-10-10 09:45:09 +0000859 <li>portability and configure fixes</li>
860 <li>an infinite loop on the HTML parser was removed (William)</li>
861 <li>Windows makefile patches from Igor</li>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000862 <li>fixed half a dozen bugs reported for libxml or libxslt</li>
Daniel Veillard60087f32001-10-10 09:45:09 +0000863 <li>updated xmlcatalog to be able to modify SGML super catalogs</li>
864</ul>
865
Daniel Veillarddadd0872001-09-15 09:21:44 +0000866<h3>2.4.5: Sep 14 2001</h3>
867<ul>
868 <li>Remove a few annoying bugs in 2.4.4</li>
869 <li>forces the HTML serializer to output decimal charrefs since some
870 version of Netscape can't handle hexadecimal ones</li>
871</ul>
872
873<h3>1.8.16: Sep 14 2001</h3>
874<ul>
875 <li>maintenance release of the old libxml1 branch, couple of bug and
876 portability fixes</li>
877</ul>
878
Daniel Veillard04382ae2001-09-12 18:51:30 +0000879<h3>2.4.4: Sep 12 2001</h3>
880<ul>
881 <li>added --convert to xmlcatalog, bug fixes and cleanups of XML
882 Catalog</li>
883 <li>a few bug fixes and some portability changes</li>
884 <li>some documentation cleanups</li>
885</ul>
886
Daniel Veillard39936902001-08-24 00:49:01 +0000887<h3>2.4.3: Aug 23 2001</h3>
888<ul>
889 <li>XML Catalog support see the doc</li>
890 <li>New NaN/Infinity floating point code</li>
891 <li>A few bug fixes</li>
892</ul>
893
894<h3>2.4.2: Aug 15 2001</h3>
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000895<ul>
896 <li>adds xmlLineNumbersDefault() to control line number generation</li>
897 <li>lot of bug fixes</li>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000898 <li>the Microsoft MSC projects files should now be up to date</li>
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000899 <li>inheritance of namespaces from DTD defaulted attributes</li>
900 <li>fixes a serious potential security bug</li>
901 <li>added a --format option to xmllint</li>
902</ul>
903
904<h3>2.4.1: July 24 2001</h3>
905<ul>
906 <li>possibility to keep line numbers in the tree</li>
907 <li>some computation NaN fixes</li>
908 <li>extension of the XPath API</li>
909 <li>cleanup for alpha and ia64 targets</li>
910 <li>patch to allow saving through HTTP PUT or POST</li>
Daniel Veillard09ab7e12001-07-10 15:49:44 +0000911</ul>
912
913<h3>2.4.0: July 10 2001</h3>
914<ul>
915 <li>Fixed a few bugs in XPath, validation, and tree handling.</li>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000916 <li>Fixed XML Base implementation, added a couple of examples to the
Daniel Veillard09ab7e12001-07-10 15:49:44 +0000917 regression tests</li>
918 <li>A bit of cleanup</li>
Daniel Veillardab8500d2000-10-15 21:06:19 +0000919</ul>
920
Daniel Veillard5b43fde2001-07-05 23:31:40 +0000921<h3>2.3.14: July 5 2001</h3>
922<ul>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000923 <li>fixed some entities problems and reduce memory requirement when
924 substituting them</li>
Daniel Veillard5b43fde2001-07-05 23:31:40 +0000925 <li>lots of improvements in the XPath queries interpreter can be
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000926 substantially faster</li>
Daniel Veillard5b43fde2001-07-05 23:31:40 +0000927 <li>Makefiles and configure cleanups</li>
928 <li>Fixes to XPath variable eval, and compare on empty node set</li>
929 <li>HTML tag closing bug fixed</li>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000930 <li>Fixed an URI reference computation problem when validating</li>
Daniel Veillard5b43fde2001-07-05 23:31:40 +0000931</ul>
932
Daniel Veillard2adbb512001-06-28 16:20:36 +0000933<h3>2.3.13: June 28 2001</h3>
934<ul>
935 <li>2.3.12 configure.in was broken as well as the push mode XML parser</li>
936 <li>a few more fixes for compilation on Windows MSC by Yon Derek</li>
937</ul>
938
939<h3>1.8.14: June 28 2001</h3>
940<ul>
941 <li>Zbigniew Chyla gave a patch to use the old XML parser in push mode</li>
942 <li>Small Makefile fix</li>
943</ul>
944
Daniel Veillard11648102001-06-26 16:08:24 +0000945<h3>2.3.12: June 26 2001</h3>
946<ul>
947 <li>lots of cleanup</li>
948 <li>a couple of validation fix</li>
949 <li>fixed line number counting</li>
950 <li>fixed serious problems in the XInclude processing</li>
951 <li>added support for UTF8 BOM at beginning of entities</li>
952 <li>fixed a strange gcc optimizer bugs in xpath handling of float, gcc-3.0
953 miscompile uri.c (William), Thomas Leitner provided a fix for the
954 optimizer on Tru64</li>
955 <li>incorporated Yon Derek and Igor Zlatkovic fixes and improvements for
956 compilation on Windows MSC</li>
957 <li>update of libxml-doc.el (Felix Natter)</li>
958 <li>fixed 2 bugs in URI normalization code</li>
959</ul>
960
Daniel Veillarde3c81b52001-06-17 14:50:34 +0000961<h3>2.3.11: June 17 2001</h3>
962<ul>
963 <li>updates to trio, Makefiles and configure should fix some portability
964 problems (alpha)</li>
965 <li>fixed some HTML serialization problems (pre, script, and block/inline
966 handling), added encoding aware APIs, cleanup of this code</li>
967 <li>added xmlHasNsProp()</li>
968 <li>implemented a specific PI for encoding support in the DocBook SGML
969 parser</li>
970 <li>some XPath fixes (-Infinity, / as a function parameter and namespaces
971 node selection)</li>
972 <li>fixed a performance problem and an error in the validation code</li>
973 <li>fixed XInclude routine to implement the recursive behaviour</li>
974 <li>fixed xmlFreeNode problem when libxml is included statically twice</li>
975 <li>added --version to xmllint for bug reports</li>
976</ul>
977
Daniel Veillard2e4f1882001-06-01 10:11:57 +0000978<h3>2.3.10: June 1 2001</h3>
979<ul>
980 <li>fixed the SGML catalog support</li>
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000981 <li>a number of reported bugs got fixed, in XPath, iconv detection,
982 XInclude processing</li>
Daniel Veillard2e4f1882001-06-01 10:11:57 +0000983 <li>XPath string function should now handle unicode correctly</li>
984</ul>
985
Daniel Veillard4623acd2001-05-19 15:13:15 +0000986<h3>2.3.9: May 19 2001</h3>
987
988<p>Lots of bugfixes, and added a basic SGML catalog support:</p>
989<ul>
990 <li>HTML push bugfix #54891 and another patch from Jonas Borgström</li>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000991 <li>some serious speed optimization again</li>
Daniel Veillard4623acd2001-05-19 15:13:15 +0000992 <li>some documentation cleanups</li>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000993 <li>trying to get better linking on Solaris (-R)</li>
Daniel Veillard4623acd2001-05-19 15:13:15 +0000994 <li>XPath API cleanup from Thomas Broyer</li>
995 <li>Validation bug fixed #54631, added a patch from Gary Pennington, fixed
996 xmlValidGetValidElements()</li>
997 <li>Added an INSTALL file</li>
998 <li>Attribute removal added to API: #54433</li>
999 <li>added a basic support for SGML catalogs</li>
1000 <li>fixed xmlKeepBlanksDefault(0) API</li>
1001 <li>bugfix in xmlNodeGetLang()</li>
1002 <li>fixed a small configure portability problem</li>
1003 <li>fixed an inversion of SYSTEM and PUBLIC identifier in HTML document</li>
1004</ul>
1005
Daniel Veillarda265af72001-05-14 11:13:58 +00001006<h3>1.8.13: May 14 2001</h3>
1007<ul>
1008 <li>bugfixes release of the old libxml1 branch used by Gnome</li>
1009</ul>
1010
Daniel Veillard3bbbe6f2001-05-03 11:15:37 +00001011<h3>2.3.8: May 3 2001</h3>
1012<ul>
1013 <li>Integrated an SGML DocBook parser for the Gnome project</li>
1014 <li>Fixed a few things in the HTML parser</li>
1015 <li>Fixed some XPath bugs raised by XSLT use, tried to fix the floating
1016 point portability issue</li>
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +00001017 <li>Speed improvement (8M/s for SAX, 3M/s for DOM, 1.5M/s for
1018 DOM+validation using the XML REC as input and a 700MHz celeron).</li>
Daniel Veillard3bbbe6f2001-05-03 11:15:37 +00001019 <li>incorporated more Windows cleanup</li>
1020 <li>added xmlSaveFormatFile()</li>
1021 <li>fixed problems in copying nodes with entities references (gdome)</li>
1022 <li>removed some troubles surrounding the new validation module</li>
1023</ul>
1024
Daniel Veillarda41123c2001-04-22 19:31:20 +00001025<h3>2.3.7: April 22 2001</h3>
1026<ul>
1027 <li>lots of small bug fixes, corrected XPointer</li>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00001028 <li>Non deterministic content model validation support</li>
Daniel Veillarda41123c2001-04-22 19:31:20 +00001029 <li>added xmlDocCopyNode for gdome2</li>
1030 <li>revamped the way the HTML parser handles end of tags</li>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00001031 <li>XPath: corrections of namespaces support and number formatting</li>
Daniel Veillarda41123c2001-04-22 19:31:20 +00001032 <li>Windows: Igor Zlatkovic patches for MSC compilation</li>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00001033 <li>HTML output fixes from P C Chow and William M. Brack</li>
Daniel Veillarda41123c2001-04-22 19:31:20 +00001034 <li>Improved validation speed sensible for DocBook</li>
1035 <li>fixed a big bug with ID declared in external parsed entities</li>
1036 <li>portability fixes, update of Trio from Bjorn Reese</li>
1037</ul>
1038
Daniel Veillardafc73112001-04-11 11:51:41 +00001039<h3>2.3.6: April 8 2001</h3>
1040<ul>
1041 <li>Code cleanup using extreme gcc compiler warning options, found and
1042 cleared half a dozen potential problem</li>
1043 <li>the Eazel team found an XML parser bug</li>
1044 <li>cleaned up the user of some of the string formatting function. used the
1045 trio library code to provide the one needed when the platform is missing
1046 them</li>
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +00001047 <li>xpath: removed a memory leak and fixed the predicate evaluation
1048 problem, extended the testsuite and cleaned up the result. XPointer seems
1049 broken ...</li>
Daniel Veillardafc73112001-04-11 11:51:41 +00001050</ul>
1051
Daniel Veillard56a4cb82001-03-24 17:00:36 +00001052<h3>2.3.5: Mar 23 2001</h3>
1053<ul>
1054 <li>Biggest change is separate parsing and evaluation of XPath expressions,
1055 there is some new APIs for this too</li>
1056 <li>included a number of bug fixes(XML push parser, 51876, notations,
1057 52299)</li>
1058 <li>Fixed some portability issues</li>
1059</ul>
1060
Daniel Veillarde356c282001-03-10 12:32:04 +00001061<h3>2.3.4: Mar 10 2001</h3>
1062<ul>
1063 <li>Fixed bugs #51860 and #51861</li>
1064 <li>Added a global variable xmlDefaultBufferSize to allow default buffer
1065 size to be application tunable.</li>
1066 <li>Some cleanup in the validation code, still a bug left and this part
1067 should probably be rewritten to support ambiguous content model :-\</li>
1068 <li>Fix a couple of serious bugs introduced or raised by changes in 2.3.3
1069 parser</li>
1070 <li>Fixed another bug in xmlNodeGetContent()</li>
1071 <li>Bjorn fixed XPath node collection and Number formatting</li>
1072 <li>Fixed a loop reported in the HTML parsing</li>
1073 <li>blank space are reported even if the Dtd content model proves that they
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00001074 are formatting spaces, this is for XML conformance</li>
Daniel Veillarde356c282001-03-10 12:32:04 +00001075</ul>
1076
Daniel Veillardb402c072001-03-01 17:28:58 +00001077<h3>2.3.3: Mar 1 2001</h3>
1078<ul>
1079 <li>small change in XPath for XSLT</li>
1080 <li>documentation cleanups</li>
1081 <li>fix in validation by Gary Pennington</li>
1082 <li>serious parsing performances improvements</li>
1083</ul>
1084
Daniel Veillardec70e912001-02-26 20:10:45 +00001085<h3>2.3.2: Feb 24 2001</h3>
Daniel Veillard71681102001-02-24 17:48:53 +00001086<ul>
1087 <li>chasing XPath bugs, found a bunch, completed some TODO</li>
1088 <li>fixed a Dtd parsing bug</li>
1089 <li>fixed a bug in xmlNodeGetContent</li>
1090 <li>ID/IDREF support partly rewritten by Gary Pennington</li>
1091</ul>
1092
Daniel Veillardec70e912001-02-26 20:10:45 +00001093<h3>2.3.1: Feb 15 2001</h3>
Daniel Veillard6e6a6cc2001-02-15 15:55:44 +00001094<ul>
1095 <li>some XPath and HTML bug fixes for XSLT</li>
1096 <li>small extension of the hash table interfaces for DOM gdome2
1097 implementation</li>
1098 <li>A few bug fixes</li>
1099</ul>
1100
Daniel Veillardec70e912001-02-26 20:10:45 +00001101<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 +00001102<ul>
1103 <li>Lots of XPath bug fixes</li>
1104 <li>Add a mode with Dtd lookup but without validation error reporting for
1105 XSLT</li>
1106 <li>Add support for text node without escaping (XSLT)</li>
1107 <li>bug fixes for xmlCheckFilename</li>
1108 <li>validation code bug fixes from Gary Pennington</li>
1109 <li>Patch from Paul D. Smith correcting URI path normalization</li>
1110 <li>Patch to allow simultaneous install of libxml-devel and
1111 libxml2-devel</li>
1112 <li>the example Makefile is now fixed</li>
1113 <li>added HTML to the RPM packages</li>
1114 <li>tree copying bugfixes</li>
1115 <li>updates to Windows makefiles</li>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00001116 <li>optimization patch from Bjorn Reese</li>
Daniel Veillard6e6a6cc2001-02-15 15:55:44 +00001117</ul>
1118
Daniel Veillardec70e912001-02-26 20:10:45 +00001119<h3>2.2.11: Jan 4 2001</h3>
Daniel Veillard503b8932001-01-05 06:36:31 +00001120<ul>
1121 <li>bunch of bug fixes (memory I/O, xpath, ftp/http, ...)</li>
1122 <li>added htmlHandleOmittedElem()</li>
1123 <li>Applied Bjorn Reese's IPV6 first patch</li>
1124 <li>Applied Paul D. Smith patches for validation of XInclude results</li>
Daniel Veillard82687162001-01-22 15:32:01 +00001125 <li>added XPointer xmlns() new scheme support</li>
Daniel Veillard503b8932001-01-05 06:36:31 +00001126</ul>
1127
Daniel Veillard2ddd23d2000-11-25 10:42:19 +00001128<h3>2.2.10: Nov 25 2000</h3>
Daniel Veillard9d343c42000-11-25 10:12:43 +00001129<ul>
1130 <li>Fix the Windows problems of 2.2.8</li>
1131 <li>integrate OpenVMS patches</li>
1132 <li>better handling of some nasty HTML input</li>
1133 <li>Improved the XPointer implementation</li>
1134 <li>integrate a number of provided patches</li>
1135</ul>
1136
Daniel Veillard2ddd23d2000-11-25 10:42:19 +00001137<h3>2.2.9: Nov 25 2000</h3>
1138<ul>
1139 <li>erroneous release :-(</li>
1140</ul>
1141
Daniel Veillard28929b22000-11-13 18:22:49 +00001142<h3>2.2.8: Nov 13 2000</h3>
1143<ul>
1144 <li>First version of <a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xinclude">XInclude</a>
1145 support</li>
1146 <li>Patch in conditional section handling</li>
1147 <li>updated MS compiler project</li>
1148 <li>fixed some XPath problems</li>
1149 <li>added an URI escaping function</li>
1150 <li>some other bug fixes</li>
1151</ul>
1152
1153<h3>2.2.7: Oct 31 2000</h3>
1154<ul>
1155 <li>added message redirection</li>
1156 <li>XPath improvements (thanks TOM !)</li>
1157 <li>xmlIOParseDTD() added</li>
1158 <li>various small fixes in the HTML, URI, HTTP and XPointer support</li>
1159 <li>some cleanup of the Makefile, autoconf and the distribution content</li>
1160</ul>
1161
Daniel Veillard29a11cc2000-10-25 13:32:39 +00001162<h3>2.2.6: Oct 25 2000:</h3>
1163<ul>
1164 <li>Added an hash table module, migrated a number of internal structure to
1165 those</li>
1166 <li>Fixed a posteriori validation problems</li>
1167 <li>HTTP module cleanups</li>
1168 <li>HTML parser improvements (tag errors, script/style handling, attribute
1169 normalization)</li>
1170 <li>coalescing of adjacent text nodes</li>
1171 <li>couple of XPath bug fixes, exported the internal API</li>
1172</ul>
1173
Daniel Veillardab8500d2000-10-15 21:06:19 +00001174<h3>2.2.5: Oct 15 2000:</h3>
Daniel Veillard4c3a2031999-11-19 17:46:26 +00001175<ul>
Daniel Veillard189446d2000-10-13 10:23:06 +00001176 <li>XPointer implementation and testsuite</li>
1177 <li>Lot of XPath fixes, added variable and functions registration, more
1178 tests</li>
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +00001179 <li>Portability fixes, lots of enhancements toward an easy Windows build
1180 and release</li>
Daniel Veillard189446d2000-10-13 10:23:06 +00001181 <li>Late validation fixes</li>
1182 <li>Integrated a lot of contributed patches</li>
1183 <li>added memory management docs</li>
Daniel Veillardab8500d2000-10-15 21:06:19 +00001184 <li>a performance problem when using large buffer seems fixed</li>
Daniel Veillard189446d2000-10-13 10:23:06 +00001185</ul>
1186
1187<h3>2.2.4: Oct 1 2000:</h3>
1188<ul>
1189 <li>main XPath problem fixed</li>
1190 <li>Integrated portability patches for Windows</li>
1191 <li>Serious bug fixes on the URI and HTML code</li>
Daniel Veillard361d8452000-04-03 19:48:13 +00001192</ul>
1193
Daniel Veillardd5f97f82000-09-17 16:38:14 +00001194<h3>2.2.3: Sep 17 2000</h3>
1195<ul>
1196 <li>bug fixes</li>
1197 <li>cleanup of entity handling code</li>
1198 <li>overall review of all loops in the parsers, all sprintf usage has been
1199 checked too</li>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00001200 <li>Far better handling of larges Dtd. Validating against DocBook XML Dtd
Daniel Veillardd5f97f82000-09-17 16:38:14 +00001201 works smoothly now.</li>
1202</ul>
1203
1204<h3>1.8.10: Sep 6 2000</h3>
1205<ul>
1206 <li>bug fix release for some Gnome projects</li>
1207</ul>
1208
1209<h3>2.2.2: August 12 2000</h3>
Daniel Veillard786d7c82000-08-12 23:38:57 +00001210<ul>
1211 <li>mostly bug fixes</li>
Daniel Veillardec78c0f2000-08-25 10:25:23 +00001212 <li>started adding routines to access xml parser context options</li>
Daniel Veillard786d7c82000-08-12 23:38:57 +00001213</ul>
1214
Daniel Veillardd5f97f82000-09-17 16:38:14 +00001215<h3>2.2.1: July 21 2000</h3>
Daniel Veillarda2679fa2000-07-22 02:38:15 +00001216<ul>
1217 <li>a purely bug fixes release</li>
1218 <li>fixed an encoding support problem when parsing from a memory block</li>
1219 <li>fixed a DOCTYPE parsing problem</li>
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +00001220 <li>removed a bug in the function allowing to override the memory
1221 allocation routines</li>
Daniel Veillarda2679fa2000-07-22 02:38:15 +00001222</ul>
1223
Daniel Veillardd5f97f82000-09-17 16:38:14 +00001224<h3>2.2.0: July 14 2000</h3>
Daniel Veillard94e90602000-07-17 14:38:19 +00001225<ul>
1226 <li>applied a lot of portability fixes</li>
1227 <li>better encoding support/cleanup and saving (content is now always
1228 encoded in UTF-8)</li>
1229 <li>the HTML parser now correctly handles encodings</li>
1230 <li>added xmlHasProp()</li>
1231 <li>fixed a serious problem with &amp;#38;</li>
1232 <li>propagated the fix to FTP client</li>
1233 <li>cleanup, bugfixes, etc ...</li>
1234 <li>Added a page about <a href="encoding.html">libxml Internationalization
1235 support</a></li>
1236</ul>
1237
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00001238<h3>1.8.9: July 9 2000</h3>
1239<ul>
1240 <li>fixed the spec the RPMs should be better</li>
1241 <li>fixed a serious bug in the FTP implementation, released 1.8.9 to solve
1242 rpmfind users problem</li>
1243</ul>
1244
Daniel Veillard6388e172000-07-03 16:07:19 +00001245<h3>2.1.1: July 1 2000</h3>
1246<ul>
1247 <li>fixes a couple of bugs in the 2.1.0 packaging</li>
1248 <li>improvements on the HTML parser</li>
1249</ul>
1250
Daniel Veillard3f6f7f62000-06-30 17:58:25 +00001251<h3>2.1.0 and 1.8.8: June 29 2000</h3>
1252<ul>
Daniel Veillardc0801af2002-05-28 16:28:42 +00001253 <li>1.8.8 is mostly a commodity package for upgrading to libxml2 according
1254 to <a href="upgrade.html">new instructions</a>. It fixes a nasty problem
Daniel Veillard3f6f7f62000-06-30 17:58:25 +00001255 about &amp;#38; charref parsing</li>
1256 <li>2.1.0 also ease the upgrade from libxml v1 to the recent version. it
1257 also contains numerous fixes and enhancements:
1258 <ul>
1259 <li>added xmlStopParser() to stop parsing</li>
1260 <li>improved a lot parsing speed when there is large CDATA blocs</li>
1261 <li>includes XPath patches provided by Picdar Technology</li>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00001262 <li>tried to fix as much as possible DTD validation and namespace
Daniel Veillard3f6f7f62000-06-30 17:58:25 +00001263 related problems</li>
1264 <li>output to a given encoding has been added/tested</li>
1265 <li>lot of various fixes</li>
1266 </ul>
1267 </li>
1268</ul>
1269
Daniel Veillarde0aed302000-04-16 08:52:20 +00001270<h3>2.0.0: Apr 12 2000</h3>
Daniel Veillard361d8452000-04-03 19:48:13 +00001271<ul>
1272 <li>First public release of libxml2. If you are using libxml, it's a good
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00001273 idea to check the 1.x to 2.x upgrade instructions. NOTE: while initially
1274 scheduled for Apr 3 the release occurred only on Apr 12 due to massive
Daniel Veillarde0aed302000-04-16 08:52:20 +00001275 workload.</li>
Daniel Veillard361d8452000-04-03 19:48:13 +00001276 <li>The include are now located under $prefix/include/libxml (instead of
Daniel Veillarde0aed302000-04-16 08:52:20 +00001277 $prefix/include/gnome-xml), they also are referenced by
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00001278 <pre>#include &lt;libxml/xxx.h&gt;</pre>
Daniel Veillarde0aed302000-04-16 08:52:20 +00001279 <p>instead of</p>
Daniel Veillard361d8452000-04-03 19:48:13 +00001280 <pre>#include "xxx.h"</pre>
1281 </li>
Daniel Veillard8f621982000-03-20 13:07:15 +00001282 <li>a new URI module for parsing URIs and following strictly RFC 2396</li>
1283 <li>the memory allocation routines used by libxml can now be overloaded
1284 dynamically by using xmlMemSetup()</li>
Daniel Veillard361d8452000-04-03 19:48:13 +00001285 <li>The previously CVS only tool tester has been renamed
1286 <strong>xmllint</strong> and is now installed as part of the libxml2
1287 package</li>
Daniel Veillarde0aed302000-04-16 08:52:20 +00001288 <li>The I/O interface has been revamped. There is now ways to plug in
1289 specific I/O modules, either at the URI scheme detection level using
1290 xmlRegisterInputCallbacks() or by passing I/O functions when creating a
1291 parser context using xmlCreateIOParserCtxt()</li>
1292 <li>there is a C preprocessor macro LIBXML_VERSION providing the version
1293 number of the libxml module in use</li>
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +00001294 <li>a number of optional features of libxml can now be excluded at
1295 configure time (FTP/HTTP/HTML/XPath/Debug)</li>
Daniel Veillardedfb29b2000-03-14 19:59:05 +00001296</ul>
1297
1298<h3>2.0.0beta: Mar 14 2000</h3>
1299<ul>
1300 <li>This is a first Beta release of libxml version 2</li>
Daniel Veillarde356c282001-03-10 12:32:04 +00001301 <li>It's available only from<a href="ftp://xmlsoft.org/">xmlsoft.org
1302 FTP</a>, it's packaged as libxml2-2.0.0beta and available as tar and
1303 RPMs</li>
Daniel Veillardedfb29b2000-03-14 19:59:05 +00001304 <li>This version is now the head in the Gnome CVS base, the old one is
1305 available under the tag LIB_XML_1_X</li>
Daniel Veillardc0801af2002-05-28 16:28:42 +00001306 <li>This includes a very large set of changes. From a programmatic point
1307 of view applications should not have to be modified too much, check the
1308 <a href="upgrade.html">upgrade page</a></li>
Daniel Veillardedfb29b2000-03-14 19:59:05 +00001309 <li>Some interfaces may changes (especially a bit about encoding).</li>
1310 <li>the updates includes:
Daniel Veillard6c8b1172000-03-01 00:40:41 +00001311 <ul>
Daniel Veillardedfb29b2000-03-14 19:59:05 +00001312 <li>fix I18N support. ISO-Latin-x/UTF-8/UTF-16 (nearly) seems correctly
1313 handled now</li>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00001314 <li>Better handling of entities, especially well-formedness checking
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +00001315 and proper PEref extensions in external subsets</li>
Daniel Veillard6c8b1172000-03-01 00:40:41 +00001316 <li>DTD conditional sections</li>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00001317 <li>Validation now correctly handle entities content</li>
Daniel Veillard6c8b1172000-03-01 00:40:41 +00001318 <li><a href="http://rpmfind.net/tools/gdome/messages/0039.html">change
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00001319 structures to accommodate DOM</a></li>
Daniel Veillard6c8b1172000-03-01 00:40:41 +00001320 </ul>
1321 </li>
Daniel Veillardedfb29b2000-03-14 19:59:05 +00001322 <li>Serious progress were made toward compliance, <a
1323 href="conf/result.html">here are the result of the test</a> against the
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00001324 OASIS testsuite (except the Japanese tests since I don't support that
Daniel Veillardedfb29b2000-03-14 19:59:05 +00001325 encoding yet). This URL is rebuilt every couple of hours using the CVS
1326 head version.</li>
Daniel Veillarde41f2b72000-01-30 20:00:07 +00001327</ul>
1328
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +00001329<h3>1.8.7: Mar 6 2000</h3>
1330<ul>
1331 <li>This is a bug fix release:</li>
1332 <li>It is possible to disable the ignorable blanks heuristic used by
1333 libxml-1.x, a new function xmlKeepBlanksDefault(0) will allow this. Note
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +00001334 that for adherence to XML spec, this behaviour will be disabled by
1335 default in 2.x . The same function will allow to keep compatibility for
1336 old code.</li>
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00001337 <li>Blanks in &lt;a&gt; &lt;/a&gt; constructs are not ignored anymore,
1338 avoiding heuristic is really the Right Way :-\</li>
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +00001339 <li>The unchecked use of snprintf which was breaking libxml-1.8.6
1340 compilation on some platforms has been fixed</li>
1341 <li>nanoftp.c nanohttp.c: Fixed '#' and '?' stripping when processing
1342 URIs</li>
1343</ul>
1344
Daniel Veillarde41f2b72000-01-30 20:00:07 +00001345<h3>1.8.6: Jan 31 2000</h3>
1346<ul>
1347 <li>added a nanoFTP transport module, debugged until the new version of <a
1348 href="http://rpmfind.net/linux/rpm2html/rpmfind.html">rpmfind</a> can use
1349 it without troubles</li>
Daniel Veillardda07c342000-01-25 18:31:22 +00001350</ul>
1351
1352<h3>1.8.5: Jan 21 2000</h3>
1353<ul>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +00001354 <li>adding APIs to parse a well balanced chunk of XML (production <a
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +00001355 href="http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml#NT-content">[43] content</a> of the
1356 XML spec)</li>
Daniel Veillard461a66c2000-01-18 18:01:01 +00001357 <li>fixed a hideous bug in xmlGetProp pointed by Rune.Djurhuus@fast.no</li>
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00001358 <li>Jody Goldberg &lt;jgoldberg@home.com&gt; provided another patch trying
1359 to solve the zlib checks problems</li>
Daniel Veillard461a66c2000-01-18 18:01:01 +00001360 <li>The current state in gnome CVS base is expected to ship as 1.8.5 with
1361 gnumeric soon</li>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +00001362</ul>
1363
1364<h3>1.8.4: Jan 13 2000</h3>
1365<ul>
1366 <li>bug fixes, reintroduced xmlNewGlobalNs(), fixed xmlNewNs()</li>
1367 <li>all exit() call should have been removed from libxml</li>
1368 <li>fixed a problem with INCLUDE_WINSOCK on WIN32 platform</li>
1369 <li>added newDocFragment()</li>
Daniel Veillardf84f71f2000-01-05 19:54:23 +00001370</ul>
1371
1372<h3>1.8.3: Jan 5 2000</h3>
1373<ul>
1374 <li>a Push interface for the XML and HTML parsers</li>
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +00001375 <li>a shell-like interface to the document tree (try tester --shell :-)</li>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00001376 <li>lots of bug fixes and improvement added over XMas holidays</li>
Daniel Veillard437b87b2000-01-03 17:30:46 +00001377 <li>fixed the DTD parsing code to work with the xhtml DTD</li>
Daniel Veillardf84f71f2000-01-05 19:54:23 +00001378 <li>added xmlRemoveProp(), xmlRemoveID() and xmlRemoveRef()</li>
1379 <li>Fixed bugs in xmlNewNs()</li>
Daniel Veillard437b87b2000-01-03 17:30:46 +00001380 <li>External entity loading code has been revamped, now it uses
Daniel Veillardf84f71f2000-01-05 19:54:23 +00001381 xmlLoadExternalEntity(), some fix on entities processing were added</li>
Daniel Veillard437b87b2000-01-03 17:30:46 +00001382 <li>cleaned up WIN32 includes of socket stuff</li>
Daniel Veillard5cb5ab81999-12-21 15:35:29 +00001383</ul>
1384
1385<h3>1.8.2: Dec 21 1999</h3>
1386<ul>
Daniel Veillardb24054a1999-12-18 15:32:46 +00001387 <li>I got another problem with includes and C++, I hope this issue is fixed
1388 for good this time</li>
Daniel Veillard5cb5ab81999-12-21 15:35:29 +00001389 <li>Added a few tree modification functions: xmlReplaceNode,
1390 xmlAddPrevSibling, xmlAddNextSibling, xmlNodeSetName and
1391 xmlDocSetRootElement</li>
1392 <li>Tried to improve the HTML output with help from <a
1393 href="mailto:clahey@umich.edu">Chris Lahey</a></li>
Daniel Veillarde4e51311999-12-18 15:32:46 +00001394</ul>
Daniel Veillardb24054a1999-12-18 15:32:46 +00001395
Daniel Veillarde4e51311999-12-18 15:32:46 +00001396<h3>1.8.1: Dec 18 1999</h3>
1397<ul>
1398 <li>various patches to avoid troubles when using libxml with C++ compilers
1399 the "namespace" keyword and C escaping in include files</li>
1400 <li>a problem in one of the core macros IS_CHAR was corrected</li>
1401 <li>fixed a bug introduced in 1.8.0 breaking default namespace processing,
1402 and more specifically the Dia application</li>
Daniel Veillard944b5ff1999-12-15 19:08:24 +00001403 <li>fixed a posteriori validation (validation after parsing, or by using a
1404 Dtd not specified in the original document)</li>
Daniel Veillardb24054a1999-12-18 15:32:46 +00001405 <li>fixed a bug in</li>
Daniel Veillard10a2c651999-12-12 13:03:50 +00001406</ul>
1407
1408<h3>1.8.0: Dec 12 1999</h3>
1409<ul>
1410 <li>cleanup, especially memory wise</li>
1411 <li>the parser should be more reliable, especially the HTML one, it should
1412 not crash, whatever the input !</li>
1413 <li>Integrated various patches, especially a speedup improvement for large
1414 dataset from <a href="mailto:cnygard@bellatlantic.net">Carl Nygard</a>,
1415 configure with --with-buffers to enable them.</li>
1416 <li>attribute normalization, oops should have been added long ago !</li>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00001417 <li>attributes defaulted from DTDs should be available, xmlSetProp() now
1418 does entities escaping by default.</li>
Daniel Veillard4c3a2031999-11-19 17:46:26 +00001419</ul>
Daniel Veillard35008381999-10-25 13:15:52 +00001420
1421<h3>1.7.4: Oct 25 1999</h3>
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +00001422<ul>
Daniel Veillard35008381999-10-25 13:15:52 +00001423 <li>Lots of HTML improvement</li>
1424 <li>Fixed some errors when saving both XML and HTML</li>
1425 <li>More examples, the regression tests should now look clean</li>
1426 <li>Fixed a bug with contiguous charref</li>
1427</ul>
1428
1429<h3>1.7.3: Sep 29 1999</h3>
1430<ul>
1431 <li>portability problems fixed</li>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00001432 <li>snprintf was used unconditionally, leading to link problems on system
Daniel Veillard35008381999-10-25 13:15:52 +00001433 were it's not available, fixed</li>
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +00001434</ul>
1435
1436<h3>1.7.1: Sep 24 1999</h3>
1437<ul>
1438 <li>The basic type for strings manipulated by libxml has been renamed in
1439 1.7.1 from <strong>CHAR</strong> to <strong>xmlChar</strong>. The reason
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +00001440 is that CHAR was conflicting with a predefined type on Windows. However
1441 on non WIN32 environment, compatibility is provided by the way of a
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +00001442 <strong>#define </strong>.</li>
1443 <li>Changed another error : the use of a structure field called errno, and
1444 leading to troubles on platforms where it's a macro</li>
1445</ul>
1446
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00001447<h3>1.7.0: Sep 23 1999</h3>
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +00001448<ul>
1449 <li>Added the ability to fetch remote DTD or parsed entities, see the <a
Daniel Veillard9cb5ff42001-01-29 08:22:21 +00001450 href="html/libxml-nanohttp.html">nanohttp</a> module.</li>
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +00001451 <li>Added an errno to report errors by another mean than a simple printf
1452 like callback</li>
1453 <li>Finished ID/IDREF support and checking when validation</li>
1454 <li>Serious memory leaks fixed (there is now a <a
Daniel Veillard9cb5ff42001-01-29 08:22:21 +00001455 href="html/libxml-xmlmemory.html">memory wrapper</a> module)</li>
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +00001456 <li>Improvement of <a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xpath">XPath</a>
1457 implementation</li>
1458 <li>Added an HTML parser front-end</li>
1459</ul>
1460
1461<h2><a name="XML">XML</a></h2>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00001462
Daniel Veillard402e8c82000-02-29 22:57:47 +00001463<p><a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml">XML is a standard</a> for
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +00001464markup-based structured documents. Here is <a name="example">an example XML
1465document</a>:</p>
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00001466<pre>&lt;?xml version="1.0"?&gt;
1467&lt;EXAMPLE prop1="gnome is great" prop2="&amp;amp; linux too"&gt;
1468 &lt;head&gt;
1469 &lt;title&gt;Welcome to Gnome&lt;/title&gt;
1470 &lt;/head&gt;
1471 &lt;chapter&gt;
1472 &lt;title&gt;The Linux adventure&lt;/title&gt;
1473 &lt;p&gt;bla bla bla ...&lt;/p&gt;
1474 &lt;image href="linus.gif"/&gt;
1475 &lt;p&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;
1476 &lt;/chapter&gt;
1477&lt;/EXAMPLE&gt;</pre>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00001478
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +00001479<p>The first line specifies that it is an XML document and gives useful
Daniel Veillard42766c02002-08-22 20:52:17 +00001480information about its encoding. Then the rest of the document is a text
1481format whose structure is specified by tags between brackets. <strong>Each
1482tag opened has to be closed</strong>. XML is pedantic about this. However, if
1483a tag is empty (no content), a single tag can serve as both the opening and
1484closing tag if it ends with <code>/&gt;</code> rather than with
1485<code>&gt;</code>. Note that, for example, the image tag has no content (just
1486an attribute) and is closed by ending the tag with <code>/&gt;</code>.</p>
Daniel Veillardccb09631998-10-27 06:21:04 +00001487
Daniel Veillard42766c02002-08-22 20:52:17 +00001488<p>XML can be applied successfully to a wide range of tasks, ranging from
1489long term structured document maintenance (where it follows the steps of
1490SGML) to simple data encoding mechanisms like configuration file formatting
1491(glade), spreadsheets (gnumeric), or even shorter lived documents such as
1492WebDAV where it is used to encode remote calls between a client and a
1493server.</p>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00001494
Daniel Veillard82687162001-01-22 15:32:01 +00001495<h2><a name="XSLT">XSLT</a></h2>
1496
Daniel Veillard6e6a6cc2001-02-15 15:55:44 +00001497<p>Check <a href="http://xmlsoft.org/XSLT">the separate libxslt page</a></p>
1498
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +00001499<p><a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xslt">XSL Transformations</a>, is a
1500language for transforming XML documents into other XML documents (or
1501HTML/textual output).</p>
Daniel Veillard82687162001-01-22 15:32:01 +00001502
Daniel Veillard42766c02002-08-22 20:52:17 +00001503<p>A separate library called libxslt is being developed on top of libxml2.
1504This module "libxslt" too can be found in the Gnome CVS base.</p>
Daniel Veillard82687162001-01-22 15:32:01 +00001505
Daniel Veillard383b1472001-01-23 11:39:52 +00001506<p>You can check the <a
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +00001507href="http://cvs.gnome.org/lxr/source/libxslt/FEATURES">features</a>
1508supported and the progresses on the <a
Daniel Veillard6dbcaf82002-02-20 14:37:47 +00001509href="http://cvs.gnome.org/lxr/source/libxslt/ChangeLog"
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +00001510name="Changelog">Changelog</a>.</p>
Daniel Veillard6dbcaf82002-02-20 14:37:47 +00001511
1512<h2><a name="Python">Python and bindings</a></h2>
1513
Daniel Veillard42766c02002-08-22 20:52:17 +00001514<p>There are a number of language bindings and wrappers available for
1515libxml2, the list below is not exhaustive. Please contact the <a
Daniel Veillard6dbcaf82002-02-20 14:37:47 +00001516href="http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/xml-bindings">xml-bindings@gnome.org</a>
1517(<a href="http://mail.gnome.org/archives/xml-bindings/">archives</a>) in
1518order to get updates to this list or to discuss the specific topic of libxml2
1519or libxslt wrappers or bindings:</p>
1520<ul>
Daniel Veillardc14401e2002-11-20 14:28:17 +00001521 <li><a href="http://libxmlplusplus.sourceforge.net/">Libxml++</a> seems the
1522 most up-to-date C++ bindings for libxml2, check the <a
1523 href="http://libxmlplusplus.sourceforge.net/reference/html/hierarchy.html">documentation</a>
1524 and the <a
1525 href="http://cvs.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/libxmlplusplus/libxml%2b%2b/examples/">examples</a>.</li>
Daniel Veillard6dbcaf82002-02-20 14:37:47 +00001526 <li>There is another <a href="http://libgdome-cpp.berlios.de/">C++ wrapper
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +00001527 based on the gdome2 bindings</a> maintained by Tobias Peters.</li>
Daniel Veillard9b6fd302002-05-13 12:06:47 +00001528 <li>and a third C++ wrapper by Peter Jones &lt;pjones@pmade.org&gt;
1529 <p>Website: <a
1530 href="http://pmade.org/pjones/software/xmlwrapp/">http://pmade.org/pjones/software/xmlwrapp/</a></p>
1531 </li>
Daniel Veillard6dbcaf82002-02-20 14:37:47 +00001532 <li><a
1533 href="http://mail.gnome.org/archives/xml/2001-March/msg00014.html">Matt
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00001534 Sergeant</a> developed <a
1535 href="http://axkit.org/download/">XML::LibXSLT</a>, a Perl wrapper for
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +00001536 libxml2/libxslt as part of the <a href="http://axkit.com/">AxKit XML
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +00001537 application server</a>.</li>
Daniel Veillard21473672002-06-17 07:29:22 +00001538 <li><a href="mailto:dkuhlman@cutter.rexx.com">Dave Kuhlman</a> provides an
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +00001539 earlier version of the libxml/libxslt <a
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +00001540 href="http://www.rexx.com/~dkuhlman">wrappers for Python</a>.</li>
Daniel Veillard21473672002-06-17 07:29:22 +00001541 <li>Gopal.V and Peter Minten develop <a
1542 href="http://savannah.gnu.org/projects/libxmlsharp">libxml#</a>, a set of
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +00001543 C# libxml2 bindings.</li>
Daniel Veillard6dbcaf82002-02-20 14:37:47 +00001544 <li>Petr Kozelka provides <a
1545 href="http://sourceforge.net/projects/libxml2-pas">Pascal units to glue
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +00001546 libxml2</a> with Kylix, Delphi and other Pascal compilers.</li>
Daniel Veillardb2fb8ed2002-04-01 09:33:12 +00001547 <li>Uwe Fechner also provides <a
1548 href="http://sourceforge.net/projects/idom2-pas/">idom2</a>, a DOM2
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +00001549 implementation for Kylix2/D5/D6 from Borland.</li>
Daniel Veillard6dbcaf82002-02-20 14:37:47 +00001550 <li>Wai-Sun "Squidster" Chia provides <a
1551 href="http://www.rubycolor.org/arc/redist/">bindings for Ruby</a> and
1552 libxml2 bindings are also available in Ruby through the <a
1553 href="http://libgdome-ruby.berlios.de/">libgdome-ruby</a> module
1554 maintained by Tobias Peters.</li>
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +00001555 <li>Steve Ball and contributors maintains <a
1556 href="http://tclxml.sourceforge.net/">libxml2 and libxslt bindings for
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +00001557 Tcl</a>.</li>
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +00001558 <li>There is support for libxml2 in the DOM module of PHP.</li>
Daniel Veillard6dbcaf82002-02-20 14:37:47 +00001559</ul>
1560
Daniel Veillardc0801af2002-05-28 16:28:42 +00001561<p>The distribution includes a set of Python bindings, which are guaranteed
1562to be maintained as part of the library in the future, though the Python
Daniel Veillard0b79dfe2002-02-23 13:02:31 +00001563interface have not yet reached the maturity of the C API.</p>
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +00001564
1565<p>To install the Python bindings there are 2 options:</p>
Daniel Veillard0b79dfe2002-02-23 13:02:31 +00001566<ul>
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +00001567 <li>If you use an RPM based distribution, simply install the <a
1568 href="http://rpmfind.net/linux/rpm2html/search.php?query=libxml2-python">libxml2-python
1569 RPM</a> (and if needed the <a
1570 href="http://rpmfind.net/linux/rpm2html/search.php?query=libxslt-python">libxslt-python
1571 RPM</a>).</li>
1572 <li>Otherwise use the <a href="ftp://xmlsoft.org/python/">libxml2-python
1573 module distribution</a> corresponding to your installed version of
1574 libxml2 and libxslt. Note that to install it you will need both libxml2
1575 and libxslt installed and run "python setup.py build install" in the
1576 module tree.</li>
Daniel Veillard0b79dfe2002-02-23 13:02:31 +00001577</ul>
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +00001578
1579<p>The distribution includes a set of examples and regression tests for the
1580python bindings in the <code>python/tests</code> directory. Here are some
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +00001581excerpts from those tests:</p>
Daniel Veillard6dbcaf82002-02-20 14:37:47 +00001582
1583<h3>tst.py:</h3>
1584
1585<p>This is a basic test of the file interface and DOM navigation:</p>
1586<pre>import libxml2
1587
1588doc = libxml2.parseFile("tst.xml")
1589if doc.name != "tst.xml":
1590 print "doc.name failed"
1591 sys.exit(1)
1592root = doc.children
1593if root.name != "doc":
1594 print "root.name failed"
1595 sys.exit(1)
1596child = root.children
1597if child.name != "foo":
1598 print "child.name failed"
1599 sys.exit(1)
1600doc.freeDoc()</pre>
1601
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +00001602<p>The Python module is called libxml2; parseFile is the equivalent of
Daniel Veillard6dbcaf82002-02-20 14:37:47 +00001603xmlParseFile (most of the bindings are automatically generated, and the xml
1604prefix is removed and the casing convention are kept). All node seen at the
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00001605binding level share the same subset of accessors:</p>
Daniel Veillard6dbcaf82002-02-20 14:37:47 +00001606<ul>
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +00001607 <li><code>name</code> : returns the node name</li>
Daniel Veillardc0801af2002-05-28 16:28:42 +00001608 <li><code>type</code> : returns a string indicating the node type</li>
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +00001609 <li><code>content</code> : returns the content of the node, it is based on
1610 xmlNodeGetContent() and hence is recursive.</li>
1611 <li><code>parent</code> , <code>children</code>, <code>last</code>,
1612 <code>next</code>, <code>prev</code>, <code>doc</code>,
1613 <code>properties</code>: pointing to the associated element in the tree,
1614 those may return None in case no such link exists.</li>
Daniel Veillard6dbcaf82002-02-20 14:37:47 +00001615</ul>
1616
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00001617<p>Also note the need to explicitly deallocate documents with freeDoc() .
Daniel Veillard6dbcaf82002-02-20 14:37:47 +00001618Reference counting for libxml2 trees would need quite a lot of work to
1619function properly, and rather than risk memory leaks if not implemented
1620correctly it sounds safer to have an explicit function to free a tree. The
1621wrapper python objects like doc, root or child are them automatically garbage
1622collected.</p>
1623
1624<h3>validate.py:</h3>
1625
1626<p>This test check the validation interfaces and redirection of error
1627messages:</p>
1628<pre>import libxml2
1629
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00001630#deactivate error messages from the validation
Daniel Veillard6dbcaf82002-02-20 14:37:47 +00001631def noerr(ctx, str):
1632 pass
1633
1634libxml2.registerErrorHandler(noerr, None)
1635
1636ctxt = libxml2.createFileParserCtxt("invalid.xml")
1637ctxt.validate(1)
1638ctxt.parseDocument()
1639doc = ctxt.doc()
1640valid = ctxt.isValid()
1641doc.freeDoc()
1642if valid != 0:
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00001643 print "validity check failed"</pre>
Daniel Veillard6dbcaf82002-02-20 14:37:47 +00001644
1645<p>The first thing to notice is the call to registerErrorHandler(), it
1646defines a new error handler global to the library. It is used to avoid seeing
1647the error messages when trying to validate the invalid document.</p>
1648
1649<p>The main interest of that test is the creation of a parser context with
1650createFileParserCtxt() and how the behaviour can be changed before calling
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00001651parseDocument() . Similarly the informations resulting from the parsing phase
Daniel Veillard6dbcaf82002-02-20 14:37:47 +00001652are also available using context methods.</p>
1653
1654<p>Contexts like nodes are defined as class and the libxml2 wrappers maps the
1655C function interfaces in terms of objects method as much as possible. The
1656best to get a complete view of what methods are supported is to look at the
1657libxml2.py module containing all the wrappers.</p>
1658
1659<h3>push.py:</h3>
1660
1661<p>This test show how to activate the push parser interface:</p>
1662<pre>import libxml2
1663
1664ctxt = libxml2.createPushParser(None, "&lt;foo", 4, "test.xml")
1665ctxt.parseChunk("/&gt;", 2, 1)
1666doc = ctxt.doc()
1667
1668doc.freeDoc()</pre>
1669
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00001670<p>The context is created with a special call based on the
Daniel Veillard6dbcaf82002-02-20 14:37:47 +00001671xmlCreatePushParser() from the C library. The first argument is an optional
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00001672SAX callback object, then the initial set of data, the length and the name of
Daniel Veillard6dbcaf82002-02-20 14:37:47 +00001673the resource in case URI-References need to be computed by the parser.</p>
1674
1675<p>Then the data are pushed using the parseChunk() method, the last call
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00001676setting the third argument terminate to 1.</p>
Daniel Veillard6dbcaf82002-02-20 14:37:47 +00001677
1678<h3>pushSAX.py:</h3>
1679
1680<p>this test show the use of the event based parsing interfaces. In this case
1681the parser does not build a document, but provides callback information as
1682the parser makes progresses analyzing the data being provided:</p>
1683<pre>import libxml2
1684log = ""
1685
1686class callback:
1687 def startDocument(self):
1688 global log
1689 log = log + "startDocument:"
1690
1691 def endDocument(self):
1692 global log
1693 log = log + "endDocument:"
1694
1695 def startElement(self, tag, attrs):
1696 global log
1697 log = log + "startElement %s %s:" % (tag, attrs)
1698
1699 def endElement(self, tag):
1700 global log
1701 log = log + "endElement %s:" % (tag)
1702
1703 def characters(self, data):
1704 global log
1705 log = log + "characters: %s:" % (data)
1706
1707 def warning(self, msg):
1708 global log
1709 log = log + "warning: %s:" % (msg)
1710
1711 def error(self, msg):
1712 global log
1713 log = log + "error: %s:" % (msg)
1714
1715 def fatalError(self, msg):
1716 global log
1717 log = log + "fatalError: %s:" % (msg)
1718
1719handler = callback()
1720
1721ctxt = libxml2.createPushParser(handler, "&lt;foo", 4, "test.xml")
1722chunk = " url='tst'&gt;b"
1723ctxt.parseChunk(chunk, len(chunk), 0)
1724chunk = "ar&lt;/foo&gt;"
1725ctxt.parseChunk(chunk, len(chunk), 1)
1726
Daniel Veillardfcbfa2d2002-02-21 17:54:27 +00001727reference = "startDocument:startElement foo {'url': 'tst'}:" + \
1728 "characters: bar:endElement foo:endDocument:"
Daniel Veillard6dbcaf82002-02-20 14:37:47 +00001729if log != reference:
1730 print "Error got: %s" % log
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00001731 print "Expected: %s" % reference</pre>
Daniel Veillard6dbcaf82002-02-20 14:37:47 +00001732
1733<p>The key object in that test is the handler, it provides a number of entry
1734points which can be called by the parser as it makes progresses to indicate
1735the information set obtained. The full set of callback is larger than what
1736the callback class in that specific example implements (see the SAX
1737definition for a complete list). The wrapper will only call those supplied by
1738the object when activated. The startElement receives the names of the element
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00001739and a dictionary containing the attributes carried by this element.</p>
Daniel Veillard6dbcaf82002-02-20 14:37:47 +00001740
1741<p>Also note that the reference string generated from the callback shows a
1742single character call even though the string "bar" is passed to the parser
1743from 2 different call to parseChunk()</p>
1744
1745<h3>xpath.py:</h3>
1746
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00001747<p>This is a basic test of XPath wrappers support</p>
Daniel Veillard6dbcaf82002-02-20 14:37:47 +00001748<pre>import libxml2
1749
1750doc = libxml2.parseFile("tst.xml")
1751ctxt = doc.xpathNewContext()
1752res = ctxt.xpathEval("//*")
1753if len(res) != 2:
1754 print "xpath query: wrong node set size"
1755 sys.exit(1)
1756if res[0].name != "doc" or res[1].name != "foo":
1757 print "xpath query: wrong node set value"
1758 sys.exit(1)
1759doc.freeDoc()
1760ctxt.xpathFreeContext()</pre>
1761
1762<p>This test parses a file, then create an XPath context to evaluate XPath
1763expression on it. The xpathEval() method execute an XPath query and returns
1764the result mapped in a Python way. String and numbers are natively converted,
1765and node sets are returned as a tuple of libxml2 Python nodes wrappers. Like
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00001766the document, the XPath context need to be freed explicitly, also not that
Daniel Veillard6dbcaf82002-02-20 14:37:47 +00001767the result of the XPath query may point back to the document tree and hence
1768the document must be freed after the result of the query is used.</p>
1769
1770<h3>xpathext.py:</h3>
1771
1772<p>This test shows how to extend the XPath engine with functions written in
1773python:</p>
1774<pre>import libxml2
1775
1776def foo(ctx, x):
1777 return x + 1
1778
1779doc = libxml2.parseFile("tst.xml")
1780ctxt = doc.xpathNewContext()
1781libxml2.registerXPathFunction(ctxt._o, "foo", None, foo)
1782res = ctxt.xpathEval("foo(1)")
1783if res != 2:
1784 print "xpath extension failure"
1785doc.freeDoc()
1786ctxt.xpathFreeContext()</pre>
1787
1788<p>Note how the extension function is registered with the context (but that
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00001789part is not yet finalized, this may change slightly in the future).</p>
Daniel Veillard6dbcaf82002-02-20 14:37:47 +00001790
1791<h3>tstxpath.py:</h3>
1792
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00001793<p>This test is similar to the previous one but shows how the extension
Daniel Veillard6dbcaf82002-02-20 14:37:47 +00001794function can access the XPath evaluation context:</p>
1795<pre>def foo(ctx, x):
1796 global called
1797
1798 #
1799 # test that access to the XPath evaluation contexts
1800 #
1801 pctxt = libxml2.xpathParserContext(_obj=ctx)
1802 ctxt = pctxt.context()
1803 called = ctxt.function()
1804 return x + 1</pre>
1805
1806<p>All the interfaces around the XPath parser(or rather evaluation) context
1807are not finalized, but it should be sufficient to do contextual work at the
1808evaluation point.</p>
1809
1810<h3>Memory debugging:</h3>
1811
1812<p>last but not least, all tests starts with the following prologue:</p>
1813<pre>#memory debug specific
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +00001814libxml2.debugMemory(1)</pre>
Daniel Veillard6dbcaf82002-02-20 14:37:47 +00001815
1816<p>and ends with the following epilogue:</p>
1817<pre>#memory debug specific
1818libxml2.cleanupParser()
1819if libxml2.debugMemory(1) == 0:
1820 print "OK"
1821else:
1822 print "Memory leak %d bytes" % (libxml2.debugMemory(1))
1823 libxml2.dumpMemory()</pre>
1824
1825<p>Those activate the memory debugging interface of libxml2 where all
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00001826allocated block in the library are tracked. The prologue then cleans up the
Daniel Veillard6dbcaf82002-02-20 14:37:47 +00001827library state and checks that all allocated memory has been freed. If not it
1828calls dumpMemory() which saves that list in a <code>.memdump</code> file.</p>
Daniel Veillard82687162001-01-22 15:32:01 +00001829
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00001830<h2><a name="architecture">libxml architecture</a></h2>
Daniel Veillard4540be42000-08-19 16:40:28 +00001831
Daniel Veillardec70e912001-02-26 20:10:45 +00001832<p>Libxml is made of multiple components; some of them are optional, and most
1833of the block interfaces are public. The main components are:</p>
Daniel Veillard4540be42000-08-19 16:40:28 +00001834<ul>
1835 <li>an Input/Output layer</li>
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +00001836 <li>FTP and HTTP client layers (optional)</li>
Daniel Veillard4540be42000-08-19 16:40:28 +00001837 <li>an Internationalization layer managing the encodings support</li>
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +00001838 <li>a URI module</li>
Daniel Veillard4540be42000-08-19 16:40:28 +00001839 <li>the XML parser and its basic SAX interface</li>
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +00001840 <li>an HTML parser using the same SAX interface (optional)</li>
Daniel Veillard4540be42000-08-19 16:40:28 +00001841 <li>a SAX tree module to build an in-memory DOM representation</li>
1842 <li>a tree module to manipulate the DOM representation</li>
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +00001843 <li>a validation module using the DOM representation (optional)</li>
Daniel Veillard4540be42000-08-19 16:40:28 +00001844 <li>an XPath module for global lookup in a DOM representation
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +00001845 (optional)</li>
1846 <li>a debug module (optional)</li>
Daniel Veillard4540be42000-08-19 16:40:28 +00001847</ul>
1848
1849<p>Graphically this gives the following:</p>
1850
1851<p><img src="libxml.gif" alt="a graphical view of the various"></p>
1852
1853<p></p>
1854
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +00001855<h2><a name="tree">The tree output</a></h2>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00001856
1857<p>The parser returns a tree built during the document analysis. The value
Daniel Veillard402e8c82000-02-29 22:57:47 +00001858returned is an <strong>xmlDocPtr</strong> (i.e., a pointer to an
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +00001859<strong>xmlDoc</strong> structure). This structure contains information such
Daniel Veillard306be992000-07-03 12:38:45 +00001860as the file name, the document type, and a <strong>children</strong> pointer
1861which is the root of the document (or more exactly the first child under the
1862root which is the document). The tree is made of <strong>xmlNode</strong>s,
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +00001863chained in double-linked lists of siblings and with a children&lt;-&gt;parent
Daniel Veillard306be992000-07-03 12:38:45 +00001864relationship. An xmlNode can also carry properties (a chain of xmlAttr
1865structures). An attribute may have a value which is a list of TEXT or
1866ENTITY_REF nodes.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00001867
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00001868<p>Here is an example (erroneous with respect to the XML spec since there
1869should be only one ELEMENT under the root):</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00001870
1871<p><img src="structure.gif" alt=" structure.gif "></p>
1872
1873<p>In the source package there is a small program (not installed by default)
Daniel Veillard361d8452000-04-03 19:48:13 +00001874called <strong>xmllint</strong> which parses XML files given as argument and
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +00001875prints them back as parsed. This is useful for detecting errors both in XML
1876code and in the XML parser itself. It has an option <strong>--debug</strong>
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +00001877which prints the actual in-memory structure of the document; here is the
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +00001878result with the <a href="#example">example</a> given before:</p>
Daniel Veillard10c6a8f1998-10-28 01:00:12 +00001879<pre>DOCUMENT
1880version=1.0
1881standalone=true
1882 ELEMENT EXAMPLE
1883 ATTRIBUTE prop1
1884 TEXT
1885 content=gnome is great
1886 ATTRIBUTE prop2
1887 ENTITY_REF
1888 TEXT
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +00001889 content= linux too
Daniel Veillard402e8c82000-02-29 22:57:47 +00001890 ELEMENT head
Daniel Veillard10c6a8f1998-10-28 01:00:12 +00001891 ELEMENT title
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +00001892 TEXT
1893 content=Welcome to Gnome
Daniel Veillard10c6a8f1998-10-28 01:00:12 +00001894 ELEMENT chapter
1895 ELEMENT title
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +00001896 TEXT
1897 content=The Linux adventure
Daniel Veillard10c6a8f1998-10-28 01:00:12 +00001898 ELEMENT p
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +00001899 TEXT
1900 content=bla bla bla ...
Daniel Veillard10c6a8f1998-10-28 01:00:12 +00001901 ELEMENT image
1902 ATTRIBUTE href
1903 TEXT
1904 content=linus.gif
1905 ELEMENT p
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +00001906 TEXT
1907 content=...</pre>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00001908
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00001909<p>This should be useful for learning the internal representation model.</p>
Daniel Veillardccb09631998-10-27 06:21:04 +00001910
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +00001911<h2><a name="interface">The SAX interface</a></h2>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00001912
Daniel Veillard402e8c82000-02-29 22:57:47 +00001913<p>Sometimes the DOM tree output is just too large to fit reasonably into
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00001914memory. In that case (and if you don't expect to save back the XML document
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +00001915loaded using libxml), it's better to use the SAX interface of libxml. SAX is
1916a <strong>callback-based interface</strong> to the parser. Before parsing,
1917the application layer registers a customized set of callbacks which are
1918called by the library as it progresses through the XML input.</p>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00001919
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00001920<p>To get more detailed step-by-step guidance on using the SAX interface of
Daniel Veillard4540be42000-08-19 16:40:28 +00001921libxml, see the <a
1922href="http://www.daa.com.au/~james/gnome/xml-sax/xml-sax.html">nice
1923documentation</a>.written by <a href="mailto:james@daa.com.au">James
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00001924Henstridge</a>.</p>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00001925
1926<p>You can debug the SAX behaviour by using the <strong>testSAX</strong>
1927program located in the gnome-xml module (it's usually not shipped in the
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00001928binary packages of libxml, but you can find it in the tar source
Daniel Veillard402e8c82000-02-29 22:57:47 +00001929distribution). Here is the sequence of callbacks that would be reported by
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00001930testSAX when parsing the example XML document shown earlier:</p>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00001931<pre>SAX.setDocumentLocator()
1932SAX.startDocument()
1933SAX.getEntity(amp)
1934SAX.startElement(EXAMPLE, prop1='gnome is great', prop2='&amp;amp; linux too')
1935SAX.characters( , 3)
1936SAX.startElement(head)
1937SAX.characters( , 4)
1938SAX.startElement(title)
1939SAX.characters(Welcome to Gnome, 16)
1940SAX.endElement(title)
1941SAX.characters( , 3)
1942SAX.endElement(head)
1943SAX.characters( , 3)
1944SAX.startElement(chapter)
1945SAX.characters( , 4)
1946SAX.startElement(title)
1947SAX.characters(The Linux adventure, 19)
1948SAX.endElement(title)
1949SAX.characters( , 4)
1950SAX.startElement(p)
1951SAX.characters(bla bla bla ..., 15)
1952SAX.endElement(p)
1953SAX.characters( , 4)
1954SAX.startElement(image, href='linus.gif')
1955SAX.endElement(image)
1956SAX.characters( , 4)
1957SAX.startElement(p)
1958SAX.characters(..., 3)
1959SAX.endElement(p)
1960SAX.characters( , 3)
1961SAX.endElement(chapter)
1962SAX.characters( , 1)
1963SAX.endElement(EXAMPLE)
1964SAX.endDocument()</pre>
1965
Daniel Veillardec70e912001-02-26 20:10:45 +00001966<p>Most of the other interfaces of libxml are based on the DOM tree-building
1967facility, so nearly everything up to the end of this document presupposes the
1968use of the standard DOM tree build. Note that the DOM tree itself is built by
1969a set of registered default callbacks, without internal specific
1970interface.</p>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00001971
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00001972<h2><a name="Validation">Validation &amp; DTDs</a></h2>
1973
1974<p>Table of Content:</p>
1975<ol>
1976 <li><a href="#General5">General overview</a></li>
1977 <li><a href="#definition">The definition</a></li>
1978 <li><a href="#Simple">Simple rules</a>
1979 <ol>
Daniel Veillard9c466822001-10-25 12:03:39 +00001980 <li><a href="#reference">How to reference a DTD from a document</a></li>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00001981 <li><a href="#Declaring">Declaring elements</a></li>
1982 <li><a href="#Declaring1">Declaring attributes</a></li>
1983 </ol>
1984 </li>
1985 <li><a href="#Some">Some examples</a></li>
1986 <li><a href="#validate">How to validate</a></li>
1987 <li><a href="#Other">Other resources</a></li>
1988</ol>
1989
1990<h3><a name="General5">General overview</a></h3>
1991
1992<p>Well what is validation and what is a DTD ?</p>
1993
1994<p>DTD is the acronym for Document Type Definition. This is a description of
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00001995the content for a family of XML files. This is part of the XML 1.0
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +00001996specification, and allows one to describe and verify that a given document
1997instance conforms to the set of rules detailing its structure and content.</p>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00001998
1999<p>Validation is the process of checking a document against a DTD (more
2000generally against a set of construction rules).</p>
2001
2002<p>The validation process and building DTDs are the two most difficult parts
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +00002003of the XML life cycle. Briefly a DTD defines all the possible elements to be
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002004found within your document, what is the formal shape of your document tree
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +00002005(by defining the allowed content of an element; either text, a regular
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002006expression for the allowed list of children, or mixed content i.e. both text
Daniel Veillard42766c02002-08-22 20:52:17 +00002007and children). The DTD also defines the valid attributes for all elements and
2008the types of those attributes.</p>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002009
2010<h3><a name="definition1">The definition</a></h3>
2011
2012<p>The <a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml">W3C XML Recommendation</a> (<a
2013href="http://www.xml.com/axml/axml.html">Tim Bray's annotated version of
2014Rev1</a>):</p>
2015<ul>
2016 <li><a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml#elemdecls">Declaring
2017 elements</a></li>
2018 <li><a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml#attdecls">Declaring
2019 attributes</a></li>
2020</ul>
2021
2022<p>(unfortunately) all this is inherited from the SGML world, the syntax is
2023ancient...</p>
2024
2025<h3><a name="Simple1">Simple rules</a></h3>
2026
Daniel Veillard42766c02002-08-22 20:52:17 +00002027<p>Writing DTDs can be done in many ways. The rules to build them if you need
2028something permanent or something which can evolve over time can be radically
2029different. Really complex DTDs like DocBook ones are flexible but quite
2030harder to design. I will just focus on DTDs for a formats with a fixed simple
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002031structure. It is just a set of basic rules, and definitely not exhaustive nor
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00002032usable for complex DTD design.</p>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002033
2034<h4><a name="reference1">How to reference a DTD from a document</a>:</h4>
2035
2036<p>Assuming the top element of the document is <code>spec</code> and the dtd
2037is placed in the file <code>mydtd</code> in the subdirectory
2038<code>dtds</code> of the directory from where the document were loaded:</p>
2039
2040<p><code>&lt;!DOCTYPE spec SYSTEM "dtds/mydtd"&gt;</code></p>
2041
2042<p>Notes:</p>
2043<ul>
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +00002044 <li>The system string is actually an URI-Reference (as defined in <a
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002045 href="http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2396.txt">RFC 2396</a>) so you can use a
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +00002046 full URL string indicating the location of your DTD on the Web. This is a
2047 really good thing to do if you want others to validate your document.</li>
2048 <li>It is also possible to associate a <code>PUBLIC</code> identifier (a
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00002049 magic string) so that the DTD is looked up in catalogs on the client side
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +00002050 without having to locate it on the web.</li>
2051 <li>A DTD contains a set of element and attribute declarations, but they
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00002052 don't define what the root of the document should be. This is explicitly
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002053 told to the parser/validator as the first element of the
2054 <code>DOCTYPE</code> declaration.</li>
2055</ul>
2056
2057<h4><a name="Declaring2">Declaring elements</a>:</h4>
2058
2059<p>The following declares an element <code>spec</code>:</p>
2060
2061<p><code>&lt;!ELEMENT spec (front, body, back?)&gt;</code></p>
2062
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +00002063<p>It also expresses that the spec element contains one <code>front</code>,
Daniel Veillardc0801af2002-05-28 16:28:42 +00002064one <code>body</code> and one optional <code>back</code> children elements in
2065this order. The declaration of one element of the structure and its content
2066are done in a single declaration. Similarly the following declares
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002067<code>div1</code> elements:</p>
2068
Daniel Veillard51737272002-01-23 23:10:38 +00002069<p><code>&lt;!ELEMENT div1 (head, (p | list | note)*, div2?)&gt;</code></p>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002070
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +00002071<p>which means div1 contains one <code>head</code> then a series of optional
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002072<code>p</code>, <code>list</code>s and <code>note</code>s and then an
2073optional <code>div2</code>. And last but not least an element can contain
2074text:</p>
2075
2076<p><code>&lt;!ELEMENT b (#PCDATA)&gt;</code></p>
2077
2078<p><code>b</code> contains text or being of mixed content (text and elements
2079in no particular order):</p>
2080
2081<p><code>&lt;!ELEMENT p (#PCDATA|a|ul|b|i|em)*&gt;</code></p>
2082
2083<p><code>p </code>can contain text or <code>a</code>, <code>ul</code>,
2084<code>b</code>, <code>i </code>or <code>em</code> elements in no particular
2085order.</p>
2086
2087<h4><a name="Declaring1">Declaring attributes</a>:</h4>
2088
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +00002089<p>Again the attributes declaration includes their content definition:</p>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002090
2091<p><code>&lt;!ATTLIST termdef name CDATA #IMPLIED&gt;</code></p>
2092
2093<p>means that the element <code>termdef</code> can have a <code>name</code>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00002094attribute containing text (<code>CDATA</code>) and which is optional
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002095(<code>#IMPLIED</code>). The attribute value can also be defined within a
2096set:</p>
2097
2098<p><code>&lt;!ATTLIST list type (bullets|ordered|glossary)
2099"ordered"&gt;</code></p>
2100
2101<p>means <code>list</code> element have a <code>type</code> attribute with 3
2102allowed values "bullets", "ordered" or "glossary" and which default to
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00002103"ordered" if the attribute is not explicitly specified.</p>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002104
2105<p>The content type of an attribute can be text (<code>CDATA</code>),
2106anchor/reference/references
2107(<code>ID</code>/<code>IDREF</code>/<code>IDREFS</code>), entity(ies)
2108(<code>ENTITY</code>/<code>ENTITIES</code>) or name(s)
2109(<code>NMTOKEN</code>/<code>NMTOKENS</code>). The following defines that a
2110<code>chapter</code> element can have an optional <code>id</code> attribute
2111of type <code>ID</code>, usable for reference from attribute of type
2112IDREF:</p>
2113
2114<p><code>&lt;!ATTLIST chapter id ID #IMPLIED&gt;</code></p>
2115
2116<p>The last value of an attribute definition can be <code>#REQUIRED
2117</code>meaning that the attribute has to be given, <code>#IMPLIED</code>
2118meaning that it is optional, or the default value (possibly prefixed by
2119<code>#FIXED</code> if it is the only allowed).</p>
2120
2121<p>Notes:</p>
2122<ul>
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +00002123 <li>Usually the attributes pertaining to a given element are declared in a
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002124 single expression, but it is just a convention adopted by a lot of DTD
2125 writers:
2126 <pre>&lt;!ATTLIST termdef
2127 id ID #REQUIRED
2128 name CDATA #IMPLIED&gt;</pre>
2129 <p>The previous construct defines both <code>id</code> and
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +00002130 <code>name</code> attributes for the element <code>termdef</code>.</p>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002131 </li>
2132</ul>
2133
2134<h3><a name="Some1">Some examples</a></h3>
2135
2136<p>The directory <code>test/valid/dtds/</code> in the libxml distribution
Daniel Veillard42766c02002-08-22 20:52:17 +00002137contains some complex DTD examples. The example in the file
2138<code>test/valid/dia.xml</code> shows an XML file where the simple DTD is
2139directly included within the document.</p>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002140
2141<h3><a name="validate1">How to validate</a></h3>
2142
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +00002143<p>The simplest way is to use the xmllint program included with libxml. The
2144<code>--valid</code> option turns-on validation of the files given as input.
2145For example the following validates a copy of the first revision of the XML
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +000021461.0 specification:</p>
2147
2148<p><code>xmllint --valid --noout test/valid/REC-xml-19980210.xml</code></p>
2149
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +00002150<p>the -- noout is used to disable output of the resulting tree.</p>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002151
Daniel Veillard42766c02002-08-22 20:52:17 +00002152<p>The <code>--dtdvalid dtd</code> allows validation of the document(s)
2153against a given DTD.</p>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002154
2155<p>Libxml exports an API to handle DTDs and validation, check the <a
2156href="http://xmlsoft.org/html/libxml-valid.html">associated
2157description</a>.</p>
2158
2159<h3><a name="Other1">Other resources</a></h3>
2160
2161<p>DTDs are as old as SGML. So there may be a number of examples on-line, I
2162will just list one for now, others pointers welcome:</p>
2163<ul>
2164 <li><a href="http://www.xml101.com:8081/dtd/">XML-101 DTD</a></li>
2165</ul>
2166
2167<p>I suggest looking at the examples found under test/valid/dtd and any of
2168the large number of books available on XML. The dia example in test/valid
2169should be both simple and complete enough to allow you to build your own.</p>
2170
2171<p></p>
2172
2173<h2><a name="Memory">Memory Management</a></h2>
2174
2175<p>Table of Content:</p>
2176<ol>
2177 <li><a href="#General3">General overview</a></li>
Daniel Veillard9c466822001-10-25 12:03:39 +00002178 <li><a href="#setting">Setting libxml set of memory routines</a></li>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002179 <li><a href="#cleanup">Cleaning up after parsing</a></li>
2180 <li><a href="#Debugging">Debugging routines</a></li>
2181 <li><a href="#General4">General memory requirements</a></li>
2182</ol>
2183
2184<h3><a name="General3">General overview</a></h3>
2185
2186<p>The module <code><a
2187href="http://xmlsoft.org/html/libxml-xmlmemory.html">xmlmemory.h</a></code>
2188provides the interfaces to the libxml memory system:</p>
2189<ul>
2190 <li>libxml does not use the libc memory allocator directly but xmlFree(),
2191 xmlMalloc() and xmlRealloc()</li>
2192 <li>those routines can be reallocated to a specific set of routine, by
2193 default the libc ones i.e. free(), malloc() and realloc()</li>
2194 <li>the xmlmemory.c module includes a set of debugging routine</li>
2195</ul>
2196
2197<h3><a name="setting">Setting libxml set of memory routines</a></h3>
2198
2199<p>It is sometimes useful to not use the default memory allocator, either for
2200debugging, analysis or to implement a specific behaviour on memory management
2201(like on embedded systems). Two function calls are available to do so:</p>
2202<ul>
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +00002203 <li><a href="http://xmlsoft.org/html/libxml-xmlmemory.html">xmlMemGet
2204 ()</a> which return the current set of functions in use by the parser</li>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002205 <li><a
2206 href="http://xmlsoft.org/html/libxml-xmlmemory.html">xmlMemSetup()</a>
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +00002207 which allow to set up a new set of memory allocation functions</li>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002208</ul>
2209
2210<p>Of course a call to xmlMemSetup() should probably be done before calling
2211any other libxml routines (unless you are sure your allocations routines are
2212compatibles).</p>
2213
2214<h3><a name="cleanup">Cleaning up after parsing</a></h3>
2215
2216<p>Libxml is not stateless, there is a few set of memory structures needing
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00002217allocation before the parser is fully functional (some encoding structures
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002218for example). This also mean that once parsing is finished there is a tiny
2219amount of memory (a few hundred bytes) which can be recollected if you don't
2220reuse the parser immediately:</p>
2221<ul>
2222 <li><a href="http://xmlsoft.org/html/libxml-parser.html">xmlCleanupParser
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +00002223 ()</a> is a centralized routine to free the parsing states. Note that it
2224 won't deallocate any produced tree if any (use the xmlFreeDoc() and
2225 related routines for this).</li>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002226 <li><a href="http://xmlsoft.org/html/libxml-parser.html">xmlInitParser
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +00002227 ()</a> is the dual routine allowing to preallocate the parsing state
2228 which can be useful for example to avoid initialization reentrancy
2229 problems when using libxml in multithreaded applications</li>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002230</ul>
2231
2232<p>Generally xmlCleanupParser() is safe, if needed the state will be rebuild
2233at the next invocation of parser routines, but be careful of the consequences
2234in multithreaded applications.</p>
2235
2236<h3><a name="Debugging">Debugging routines</a></h3>
2237
2238<p>When configured using --with-mem-debug flag (off by default), libxml uses
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00002239a set of memory allocation debugging routines keeping track of all allocated
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002240blocks and the location in the code where the routine was called. A couple of
2241other debugging routines allow to dump the memory allocated infos to a file
2242or call a specific routine when a given block number is allocated:</p>
2243<ul>
2244 <li><a
2245 href="http://xmlsoft.org/html/libxml-xmlmemory.html">xmlMallocLoc()</a>
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +00002246 <a
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002247 href="http://xmlsoft.org/html/libxml-xmlmemory.html">xmlReallocLoc()</a>
2248 and <a
2249 href="http://xmlsoft.org/html/libxml-xmlmemory.html">xmlMemStrdupLoc()</a>
2250 are the memory debugging replacement allocation routines</li>
2251 <li><a href="http://xmlsoft.org/html/libxml-xmlmemory.html">xmlMemoryDump
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +00002252 ()</a> dumps all the informations about the allocated memory block lefts
2253 in the <code>.memdump</code> file</li>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002254</ul>
2255
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00002256<p>When developing libxml memory debug is enabled, the tests programs call
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002257xmlMemoryDump () and the "make test" regression tests will check for any
2258memory leak during the full regression test sequence, this helps a lot
2259ensuring that libxml does not leak memory and bullet proof memory
2260allocations use (some libc implementations are known to be far too permissive
2261resulting in major portability problems!).</p>
2262
2263<p>If the .memdump reports a leak, it displays the allocation function and
2264also tries to give some informations about the content and structure of the
2265allocated blocks left. This is sufficient in most cases to find the culprit,
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00002266but not always. Assuming the allocation problem is reproducible, it is
2267possible to find more easily:</p>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002268<ol>
2269 <li>write down the block number xxxx not allocated</li>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00002270 <li>export the environment variable XML_MEM_BREAKPOINT=xxxx , the easiest
Daniel Veillard75794822002-04-11 16:24:32 +00002271 when using GDB is to simply give the command
2272 <p><code>set environment XML_MEM_BREAKPOINT xxxx</code></p>
2273 <p>before running the program.</p>
2274 </li>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002275 <li>run the program under a debugger and set a breakpoint on
2276 xmlMallocBreakpoint() a specific function called when this precise block
2277 is allocated</li>
2278 <li>when the breakpoint is reached you can then do a fine analysis of the
2279 allocation an step to see the condition resulting in the missing
2280 deallocation.</li>
2281</ol>
2282
2283<p>I used to use a commercial tool to debug libxml memory problems but after
2284noticing that it was not detecting memory leaks that simple mechanism was
Daniel Veillard75794822002-04-11 16:24:32 +00002285used and proved extremely efficient until now. Lately I have also used <a
2286href="http://developer.kde.org/~sewardj/">valgrind</a> with quite some
2287success, it is tied to the i386 architecture since it works by emulating the
2288processor and instruction set, it is slow but extremely efficient, i.e. it
2289spot memory usage errors in a very precise way.</p>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002290
2291<h3><a name="General4">General memory requirements</a></h3>
2292
2293<p>How much libxml memory require ? It's hard to tell in average it depends
2294of a number of things:</p>
2295<ul>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00002296 <li>the parser itself should work in a fixed amount of memory, except for
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002297 information maintained about the stacks of names and entities locations.
2298 The I/O and encoding handlers will probably account for a few KBytes.
2299 This is true for both the XML and HTML parser (though the HTML parser
2300 need more state).</li>
2301 <li>If you are generating the DOM tree then memory requirements will grow
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00002302 nearly linear with the size of the data. In general for a balanced
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002303 textual document the internal memory requirement is about 4 times the
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00002304 size of the UTF8 serialization of this document (example the XML-1.0
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002305 recommendation is a bit more of 150KBytes and takes 650KBytes of main
2306 memory when parsed). Validation will add a amount of memory required for
2307 maintaining the external Dtd state which should be linear with the
2308 complexity of the content model defined by the Dtd</li>
2309 <li>If you don't care about the advanced features of libxml like
2310 validation, DOM, XPath or XPointer, but really need to work fixed memory
2311 requirements, then the SAX interface should be used.</li>
2312</ul>
2313
2314<p></p>
2315
2316<h2><a name="Encodings">Encodings support</a></h2>
2317
2318<p>Table of Content:</p>
2319<ol>
2320 <li><a href="encoding.html#What">What does internationalization support
2321 mean ?</a></li>
2322 <li><a href="encoding.html#internal">The internal encoding, how and
2323 why</a></li>
2324 <li><a href="encoding.html#implemente">How is it implemented ?</a></li>
2325 <li><a href="encoding.html#Default">Default supported encodings</a></li>
2326 <li><a href="encoding.html#extend">How to extend the existing
2327 support</a></li>
2328</ol>
2329
2330<h3><a name="What">What does internationalization support mean ?</a></h3>
2331
2332<p>XML was designed from the start to allow the support of any character set
2333by using Unicode. Any conformant XML parser has to support the UTF-8 and
2334UTF-16 default encodings which can both express the full unicode ranges. UTF8
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00002335is a variable length encoding whose greatest points are to reuse the same
2336encoding for ASCII and to save space for Western encodings, but it is a bit
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002337more complex to handle in practice. UTF-16 use 2 bytes per characters (and
2338sometimes combines two pairs), it makes implementation easier, but looks a
2339bit overkill for Western languages encoding. Moreover the XML specification
2340allows document to be encoded in other encodings at the condition that they
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00002341are clearly labeled as such. For example the following is a wellformed XML
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002342document encoded in ISO-8859 1 and using accentuated letter that we French
2343likes for both markup and content:</p>
2344<pre>&lt;?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?&gt;
2345&lt;très&gt;là&lt;/très&gt;</pre>
2346
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00002347<p>Having internationalization support in libxml means the following:</p>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002348<ul>
2349 <li>the document is properly parsed</li>
2350 <li>informations about it's encoding are saved</li>
2351 <li>it can be modified</li>
2352 <li>it can be saved in its original encoding</li>
2353 <li>it can also be saved in another encoding supported by libxml (for
2354 example straight UTF8 or even an ASCII form)</li>
2355</ul>
2356
2357<p>Another very important point is that the whole libxml API, with the
2358exception of a few routines to read with a specific encoding or save to a
2359specific encoding, is completely agnostic about the original encoding of the
2360document.</p>
2361
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00002362<p>It should be noted too that the HTML parser embedded in libxml now obey
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002363the same rules too, the following document will be (as of 2.2.2) handled in
2364an internationalized fashion by libxml too:</p>
2365<pre>&lt;!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN"
2366 "http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd"&gt;
2367&lt;html lang="fr"&gt;
2368&lt;head&gt;
2369 &lt;META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Type" CONTENT="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1"&gt;
2370&lt;/head&gt;
2371&lt;body&gt;
2372&lt;p&gt;W3C crée des standards pour le Web.&lt;/body&gt;
2373&lt;/html&gt;</pre>
2374
2375<h3><a name="internal">The internal encoding, how and why</a></h3>
2376
2377<p>One of the core decision was to force all documents to be converted to a
2378default internal encoding, and that encoding to be UTF-8, here are the
2379rationale for those choices:</p>
2380<ul>
2381 <li>keeping the native encoding in the internal form would force the libxml
2382 users (or the code associated) to be fully aware of the encoding of the
2383 original document, for examples when adding a text node to a document,
2384 the content would have to be provided in the document encoding, i.e. the
2385 client code would have to check it before hand, make sure it's conformant
2386 to the encoding, etc ... Very hard in practice, though in some specific
2387 cases this may make sense.</li>
2388 <li>the second decision was which encoding. From the XML spec only UTF8 and
2389 UTF16 really makes sense as being the two only encodings for which there
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00002390 is mandatory support. UCS-4 (32 bits fixed size encoding) could be
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002391 considered an intelligent choice too since it's a direct Unicode mapping
2392 support. I selected UTF-8 on the basis of efficiency and compatibility
2393 with surrounding software:
2394 <ul>
2395 <li>UTF-8 while a bit more complex to convert from/to (i.e. slightly
2396 more costly to import and export CPU wise) is also far more compact
2397 than UTF-16 (and UCS-4) for a majority of the documents I see it used
2398 for right now (RPM RDF catalogs, advogato data, various configuration
2399 file formats, etc.) and the key point for today's computer
2400 architecture is efficient uses of caches. If one nearly double the
2401 memory requirement to store the same amount of data, this will trash
2402 caches (main memory/external caches/internal caches) and my take is
2403 that this harms the system far more than the CPU requirements needed
2404 for the conversion to UTF-8</li>
2405 <li>Most of libxml version 1 users were using it with straight ASCII
2406 most of the time, doing the conversion with an internal encoding
2407 requiring all their code to be rewritten was a serious show-stopper
2408 for using UTF-16 or UCS-4.</li>
2409 <li>UTF-8 is being used as the de-facto internal encoding standard for
2410 related code like the <a href="http://www.pango.org/">pango</a>
2411 upcoming Gnome text widget, and a lot of Unix code (yep another place
2412 where Unix programmer base takes a different approach from Microsoft
2413 - they are using UTF-16)</li>
2414 </ul>
2415 </li>
2416</ul>
2417
2418<p>What does this mean in practice for the libxml user:</p>
2419<ul>
2420 <li>xmlChar, the libxml data type is a byte, those bytes must be assembled
2421 as UTF-8 valid strings. The proper way to terminate an xmlChar * string
2422 is simply to append 0 byte, as usual.</li>
2423 <li>One just need to make sure that when using chars outside the ASCII set,
2424 the values has been properly converted to UTF-8</li>
2425</ul>
2426
2427<h3><a name="implemente">How is it implemented ?</a></h3>
2428
2429<p>Let's describe how all this works within libxml, basically the I18N
2430(internationalization) support get triggered only during I/O operation, i.e.
2431when reading a document or saving one. Let's look first at the reading
2432sequence:</p>
2433<ol>
2434 <li>when a document is processed, we usually don't know the encoding, a
2435 simple heuristic allows to detect UTF-18 and UCS-4 from whose where the
2436 ASCII range (0-0x7F) maps with ASCII</li>
2437 <li>the xml declaration if available is parsed, including the encoding
2438 declaration. At that point, if the autodetected encoding is different
2439 from the one declared a call to xmlSwitchEncoding() is issued.</li>
2440 <li>If there is no encoding declaration, then the input has to be in either
2441 UTF-8 or UTF-16, if it is not then at some point when processing the
2442 input, the converter/checker of UTF-8 form will raise an encoding error.
2443 You may end-up with a garbled document, or no document at all ! Example:
2444 <pre>~/XML -&gt; ./xmllint err.xml
2445err.xml:1: error: Input is not proper UTF-8, indicate encoding !
2446&lt;très&gt;là&lt;/très&gt;
2447 ^
2448err.xml:1: error: Bytes: 0xE8 0x73 0x3E 0x6C
2449&lt;très&gt;là&lt;/très&gt;
2450 ^</pre>
2451 </li>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00002452 <li>xmlSwitchEncoding() does an encoding name lookup, canonicalize it, and
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002453 then search the default registered encoding converters for that encoding.
2454 If it's not within the default set and iconv() support has been compiled
2455 it, it will ask iconv for such an encoder. If this fails then the parser
2456 will report an error and stops processing:
2457 <pre>~/XML -&gt; ./xmllint err2.xml
2458err2.xml:1: error: Unsupported encoding UnsupportedEnc
2459&lt;?xml version="1.0" encoding="UnsupportedEnc"?&gt;
2460 ^</pre>
2461 </li>
Daniel Veillard46c5c1d2002-05-20 07:15:54 +00002462 <li>From that point the encoder processes progressively the input (it is
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002463 plugged as a front-end to the I/O module) for that entity. It captures
2464 and convert on-the-fly the document to be parsed to UTF-8. The parser
2465 itself just does UTF-8 checking of this input and process it
2466 transparently. The only difference is that the encoding information has
2467 been added to the parsing context (more precisely to the input
2468 corresponding to this entity).</li>
2469 <li>The result (when using DOM) is an internal form completely in UTF-8
2470 with just an encoding information on the document node.</li>
2471</ol>
2472
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00002473<p>Ok then what happens when saving the document (assuming you
2474collected/built an xmlDoc DOM like structure) ? It depends on the function
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002475called, xmlSaveFile() will just try to save in the original encoding, while
2476xmlSaveFileTo() and xmlSaveFileEnc() can optionally save to a given
2477encoding:</p>
2478<ol>
2479 <li>if no encoding is given, libxml will look for an encoding value
2480 associated to the document and if it exists will try to save to that
2481 encoding,
2482 <p>otherwise everything is written in the internal form, i.e. UTF-8</p>
2483 </li>
2484 <li>so if an encoding was specified, either at the API level or on the
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00002485 document, libxml will again canonicalize the encoding name, lookup for a
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002486 converter in the registered set or through iconv. If not found the
2487 function will return an error code</li>
2488 <li>the converter is placed before the I/O buffer layer, as another kind of
2489 buffer, then libxml will simply push the UTF-8 serialization to through
2490 that buffer, which will then progressively be converted and pushed onto
2491 the I/O layer.</li>
2492 <li>It is possible that the converter code fails on some input, for example
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00002493 trying to push an UTF-8 encoded Chinese character through the UTF-8 to
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002494 ISO-8859-1 converter won't work. Since the encoders are progressive they
2495 will just report the error and the number of bytes converted, at that
2496 point libxml will decode the offending character, remove it from the
2497 buffer and replace it with the associated charRef encoding &amp;#123; and
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00002498 resume the conversion. This guarantees that any document will be saved
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002499 without losses (except for markup names where this is not legal, this is
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00002500 a problem in the current version, in practice avoid using non-ascii
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002501 characters for tags or attributes names @@). A special "ascii" encoding
2502 name is used to save documents to a pure ascii form can be used when
2503 portability is really crucial</li>
2504</ol>
2505
2506<p>Here is a few examples based on the same test document:</p>
2507<pre>~/XML -&gt; ./xmllint isolat1
2508&lt;?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?&gt;
2509&lt;très&gt;là&lt;/très&gt;
2510~/XML -&gt; ./xmllint --encode UTF-8 isolat1
2511&lt;?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?&gt;
2512&lt;très&gt;là  &lt;/très&gt;
2513~/XML -&gt; </pre>
2514
2515<p>The same processing is applied (and reuse most of the code) for HTML I18N
2516processing. Looking up and modifying the content encoding is a bit more
2517difficult since it is located in a &lt;meta&gt; tag under the &lt;head&gt;,
2518so a couple of functions htmlGetMetaEncoding() and htmlSetMetaEncoding() have
2519been provided. The parser also attempts to switch encoding on the fly when
2520detecting such a tag on input. Except for that the processing is the same
2521(and again reuses the same code).</p>
2522
2523<h3><a name="Default">Default supported encodings</a></h3>
2524
2525<p>libxml has a set of default converters for the following encodings
2526(located in encoding.c):</p>
2527<ol>
2528 <li>UTF-8 is supported by default (null handlers)</li>
2529 <li>UTF-16, both little and big endian</li>
2530 <li>ISO-Latin-1 (ISO-8859-1) covering most western languages</li>
2531 <li>ASCII, useful mostly for saving</li>
2532 <li>HTML, a specific handler for the conversion of UTF-8 to ASCII with HTML
2533 predefined entities like &amp;copy; for the Copyright sign.</li>
2534</ol>
2535
Daniel Veillardc0801af2002-05-28 16:28:42 +00002536<p>More over when compiled on an Unix platform with iconv support the full
2537set of encodings supported by iconv can be instantly be used by libxml. On a
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002538linux machine with glibc-2.1 the list of supported encodings and aliases fill
25393 full pages, and include UCS-4, the full set of ISO-Latin encodings, and the
2540various Japanese ones.</p>
2541
2542<h4>Encoding aliases</h4>
2543
2544<p>From 2.2.3, libxml has support to register encoding names aliases. The
2545goal is to be able to parse document whose encoding is supported but where
2546the name differs (for example from the default set of names accepted by
2547iconv). The following functions allow to register and handle new aliases for
2548existing encodings. Once registered libxml will automatically lookup the
2549aliases when handling a document:</p>
2550<ul>
2551 <li>int xmlAddEncodingAlias(const char *name, const char *alias);</li>
2552 <li>int xmlDelEncodingAlias(const char *alias);</li>
2553 <li>const char * xmlGetEncodingAlias(const char *alias);</li>
2554 <li>void xmlCleanupEncodingAliases(void);</li>
2555</ul>
2556
2557<h3><a name="extend">How to extend the existing support</a></h3>
2558
2559<p>Well adding support for new encoding, or overriding one of the encoders
2560(assuming it is buggy) should not be hard, just write an input and output
2561conversion routines to/from UTF-8, and register them using
2562xmlNewCharEncodingHandler(name, xxxToUTF8, UTF8Toxxx), and they will be
2563called automatically if the parser(s) encounter such an encoding name
2564(register it uppercase, this will help). The description of the encoders,
2565their arguments and expected return values are described in the encoding.h
2566header.</p>
2567
2568<p>A quick note on the topic of subverting the parser to use a different
2569internal encoding than UTF-8, in some case people will absolutely want to
2570keep the internal encoding different, I think it's still possible (but the
2571encoding must be compliant with ASCII on the same subrange) though I didn't
2572tried it. The key is to override the default conversion routines (by
2573registering null encoders/decoders for your charsets), and bypass the UTF-8
2574checking of the parser by setting the parser context charset
2575(ctxt-&gt;charset) to something different than XML_CHAR_ENCODING_UTF8, but
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00002576there is no guarantee that this will work. You may also have some troubles
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002577saving back.</p>
2578
2579<p>Basically proper I18N support is important, this requires at least
2580libxml-2.0.0, but a lot of features and corrections are really available only
2581starting 2.2.</p>
2582
2583<h2><a name="IO">I/O Interfaces</a></h2>
2584
2585<p>Table of Content:</p>
2586<ol>
2587 <li><a href="#General1">General overview</a></li>
2588 <li><a href="#basic">The basic buffer type</a></li>
2589 <li><a href="#Input">Input I/O handlers</a></li>
2590 <li><a href="#Output">Output I/O handlers</a></li>
2591 <li><a href="#entities">The entities loader</a></li>
2592 <li><a href="#Example2">Example of customized I/O</a></li>
2593</ol>
2594
2595<h3><a name="General1">General overview</a></h3>
2596
2597<p>The module <code><a
2598href="http://xmlsoft.org/html/libxml-xmlio.html">xmlIO.h</a></code> provides
2599the interfaces to the libxml I/O system. This consists of 4 main parts:</p>
2600<ul>
2601 <li>Entities loader, this is a routine which tries to fetch the entities
2602 (files) based on their PUBLIC and SYSTEM identifiers. The default loader
2603 don't look at the public identifier since libxml do not maintain a
2604 catalog. You can redefine you own entity loader by using
2605 <code>xmlGetExternalEntityLoader()</code> and
Daniel Veillard9c466822001-10-25 12:03:39 +00002606 <code>xmlSetExternalEntityLoader()</code>. <a href="#entities">Check the
2607 example</a>.</li>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002608 <li>Input I/O buffers which are a commodity structure used by the parser(s)
2609 input layer to handle fetching the informations to feed the parser. This
2610 provides buffering and is also a placeholder where the encoding
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00002611 converters to UTF8 are piggy-backed.</li>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002612 <li>Output I/O buffers are similar to the Input ones and fulfill similar
2613 task but when generating a serialization from a tree.</li>
2614 <li>A mechanism to register sets of I/O callbacks and associate them with
2615 specific naming schemes like the protocol part of the URIs.
2616 <p>This affect the default I/O operations and allows to use specific I/O
2617 handlers for certain names.</p>
2618 </li>
2619</ul>
2620
2621<p>The general mechanism used when loading http://rpmfind.net/xml.html for
2622example in the HTML parser is the following:</p>
2623<ol>
2624 <li>The default entity loader calls <code>xmlNewInputFromFile()</code> with
2625 the parsing context and the URI string.</li>
2626 <li>the URI string is checked against the existing registered handlers
2627 using their match() callback function, if the HTTP module was compiled
2628 in, it is registered and its match() function will succeeds</li>
2629 <li>the open() function of the handler is called and if successful will
2630 return an I/O Input buffer</li>
2631 <li>the parser will the start reading from this buffer and progressively
2632 fetch information from the resource, calling the read() function of the
2633 handler until the resource is exhausted</li>
2634 <li>if an encoding change is detected it will be installed on the input
2635 buffer, providing buffering and efficient use of the conversion
2636 routines</li>
2637 <li>once the parser has finished, the close() function of the handler is
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00002638 called once and the Input buffer and associated resources are
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002639 deallocated.</li>
2640</ol>
2641
2642<p>The user defined callbacks are checked first to allow overriding of the
2643default libxml I/O routines.</p>
2644
2645<h3><a name="basic">The basic buffer type</a></h3>
2646
2647<p>All the buffer manipulation handling is done using the
2648<code>xmlBuffer</code> type define in <code><a
2649href="http://xmlsoft.org/html/libxml-tree.html">tree.h</a> </code>which is a
2650resizable memory buffer. The buffer allocation strategy can be selected to be
2651either best-fit or use an exponential doubling one (CPU vs. memory use
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00002652trade-off). The values are <code>XML_BUFFER_ALLOC_EXACT</code> and
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002653<code>XML_BUFFER_ALLOC_DOUBLEIT</code>, and can be set individually or on a
2654system wide basis using <code>xmlBufferSetAllocationScheme()</code>. A number
2655of functions allows to manipulate buffers with names starting with the
2656<code>xmlBuffer...</code> prefix.</p>
2657
2658<h3><a name="Input">Input I/O handlers</a></h3>
2659
2660<p>An Input I/O handler is a simple structure
2661<code>xmlParserInputBuffer</code> containing a context associated to the
2662resource (file descriptor, or pointer to a protocol handler), the read() and
2663close() callbacks to use and an xmlBuffer. And extra xmlBuffer and a charset
2664encoding handler are also present to support charset conversion when
2665needed.</p>
2666
2667<h3><a name="Output">Output I/O handlers</a></h3>
2668
2669<p>An Output handler <code>xmlOutputBuffer</code> is completely similar to an
2670Input one except the callbacks are write() and close().</p>
2671
2672<h3><a name="entities">The entities loader</a></h3>
2673
2674<p>The entity loader resolves requests for new entities and create inputs for
2675the parser. Creating an input from a filename or an URI string is done
2676through the xmlNewInputFromFile() routine. The default entity loader do not
2677handle the PUBLIC identifier associated with an entity (if any). So it just
2678calls xmlNewInputFromFile() with the SYSTEM identifier (which is mandatory in
2679XML).</p>
2680
2681<p>If you want to hook up a catalog mechanism then you simply need to
2682override the default entity loader, here is an example:</p>
2683<pre>#include &lt;libxml/xmlIO.h&gt;
2684
2685xmlExternalEntityLoader defaultLoader = NULL;
2686
2687xmlParserInputPtr
2688xmlMyExternalEntityLoader(const char *URL, const char *ID,
2689 xmlParserCtxtPtr ctxt) {
2690 xmlParserInputPtr ret;
2691 const char *fileID = NULL;
2692 /* lookup for the fileID depending on ID */
2693
2694 ret = xmlNewInputFromFile(ctxt, fileID);
2695 if (ret != NULL)
2696 return(ret);
2697 if (defaultLoader != NULL)
2698 ret = defaultLoader(URL, ID, ctxt);
2699 return(ret);
2700}
2701
2702int main(..) {
2703 ...
2704
2705 /*
2706 * Install our own entity loader
2707 */
2708 defaultLoader = xmlGetExternalEntityLoader();
2709 xmlSetExternalEntityLoader(xmlMyExternalEntityLoader);
2710
2711 ...
2712}</pre>
2713
2714<h3><a name="Example2">Example of customized I/O</a></h3>
2715
2716<p>This example come from <a href="http://xmlsoft.org/messages/0708.html">a
2717real use case</a>, xmlDocDump() closes the FILE * passed by the application
2718and this was a problem. The <a
2719href="http://xmlsoft.org/messages/0711.html">solution</a> was to redefine a
2720new output handler with the closing call deactivated:</p>
2721<ol>
Daniel Veillardc0801af2002-05-28 16:28:42 +00002722 <li>First define a new I/O output allocator where the output don't close
2723 the file:
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002724 <pre>xmlOutputBufferPtr
2725xmlOutputBufferCreateOwn(FILE *file, xmlCharEncodingHandlerPtr encoder) {
2726    xmlOutputBufferPtr ret;
2727    
2728    if (xmlOutputCallbackInitialized == 0)
2729        xmlRegisterDefaultOutputCallbacks();
2730
2731    if (file == NULL) return(NULL);
2732    ret = xmlAllocOutputBuffer(encoder);
2733    if (ret != NULL) {
2734        ret-&gt;context = file;
2735        ret-&gt;writecallback = xmlFileWrite;
2736        ret-&gt;closecallback = NULL; /* No close callback */
2737    }
2738    return(ret); <br>
Daniel Veillard1eb24242002-03-18 11:33:03 +00002739
Daniel Veillard34ce8be2002-03-18 19:37:11 +00002740
2741
Daniel Veillard19274092002-03-25 16:48:03 +00002742
Daniel Veillardb2fb8ed2002-04-01 09:33:12 +00002743
Daniel Veillard75794822002-04-11 16:24:32 +00002744
Daniel Veillarda7084cd2002-04-15 17:12:47 +00002745
Daniel Veillard0bfbb422002-04-26 09:21:45 +00002746
Daniel Veillard93d3a472002-04-26 14:04:55 +00002747
Daniel Veillardcf27f7c2002-04-30 07:12:39 +00002748
Daniel Veillarde6d8e202002-05-02 06:11:10 +00002749
Daniel Veillard9b6fd302002-05-13 12:06:47 +00002750
Daniel Veillardc0801af2002-05-28 16:28:42 +00002751
Daniel Veillard21473672002-06-17 07:29:22 +00002752
Daniel Veillard782afda2002-07-08 15:12:49 +00002753
Daniel Veillard42766c02002-08-22 20:52:17 +00002754
Daniel Veillarde1662542002-08-28 11:50:59 +00002755
Daniel Veillarde16b5742002-09-26 17:50:03 +00002756
Daniel Veillard321be0c2002-10-08 21:26:42 +00002757
Daniel Veillard48267432002-10-18 11:21:38 +00002758
Daniel Veillarddad3f682002-11-17 16:47:27 +00002759
Daniel Veillardc14401e2002-11-20 14:28:17 +00002760
Daniel Veillardf9c4cad2002-11-22 15:57:07 +00002761
Daniel Veillard9b4bb4d2002-12-11 19:28:47 +00002762
Daniel Veillardc1eed322002-12-12 11:01:32 +00002763
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002764} </pre>
2765 </li>
2766 <li>And then use it to save the document:
2767 <pre>FILE *f;
2768xmlOutputBufferPtr output;
2769xmlDocPtr doc;
2770int res;
2771
2772f = ...
2773doc = ....
2774
2775output = xmlOutputBufferCreateOwn(f, NULL);
2776res = xmlSaveFileTo(output, doc, NULL);
2777 </pre>
2778 </li>
2779</ol>
2780
2781<h2><a name="Catalog">Catalog support</a></h2>
2782
2783<p>Table of Content:</p>
2784<ol>
2785 <li><a href="General2">General overview</a></li>
2786 <li><a href="#definition">The definition</a></li>
2787 <li><a href="#Simple">Using catalogs</a></li>
2788 <li><a href="#Some">Some examples</a></li>
2789 <li><a href="#reference">How to tune catalog usage</a></li>
2790 <li><a href="#validate">How to debug catalog processing</a></li>
2791 <li><a href="#Declaring">How to create and maintain catalogs</a></li>
2792 <li><a href="#implemento">The implementor corner quick review of the
2793 API</a></li>
2794 <li><a href="#Other">Other resources</a></li>
2795</ol>
2796
2797<h3><a name="General2">General overview</a></h3>
2798
2799<p>What is a catalog? Basically it's a lookup mechanism used when an entity
2800(a file or a remote resource) references another entity. The catalog lookup
2801is inserted between the moment the reference is recognized by the software
2802(XML parser, stylesheet processing, or even images referenced for inclusion
2803in a rendering) and the time where loading that resource is actually
2804started.</p>
2805
2806<p>It is basically used for 3 things:</p>
2807<ul>
2808 <li>mapping from "logical" names, the public identifiers and a more
2809 concrete name usable for download (and URI). For example it can associate
2810 the logical name
2811 <p>"-//OASIS//DTD DocBook XML V4.1.2//EN"</p>
2812 <p>of the DocBook 4.1.2 XML DTD with the actual URL where it can be
2813 downloaded</p>
2814 <p>http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/xml/4.1.2/docbookx.dtd</p>
2815 </li>
2816 <li>remapping from a given URL to another one, like an HTTP indirection
2817 saying that
2818 <p>"http://www.oasis-open.org/committes/tr.xsl"</p>
2819 <p>should really be looked at</p>
2820 <p>"http://www.oasis-open.org/committes/entity/stylesheets/base/tr.xsl"</p>
2821 </li>
2822 <li>providing a local cache mechanism allowing to load the entities
2823 associated to public identifiers or remote resources, this is a really
2824 important feature for any significant deployment of XML or SGML since it
2825 allows to avoid the aleas and delays associated to fetching remote
2826 resources.</li>
2827</ul>
2828
2829<h3><a name="definition">The definitions</a></h3>
2830
2831<p>Libxml, as of 2.4.3 implements 2 kind of catalogs:</p>
2832<ul>
2833 <li>the older SGML catalogs, the official spec is SGML Open Technical
2834 Resolution TR9401:1997, but is better understood by reading <a
2835 href="http://www.jclark.com/sp/catalog.htm">the SP Catalog page</a> from
2836 James Clark. This is relatively old and not the preferred mode of
2837 operation of libxml.</li>
2838 <li><a href="http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/entity/spec.html">XML
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +00002839 Catalogs</a> is far more flexible, more recent, uses an XML syntax and
2840 should scale quite better. This is the default option of libxml.</li>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002841</ul>
2842
2843<p></p>
2844
2845<h3><a name="Simple">Using catalog</a></h3>
2846
2847<p>In a normal environment libxml will by default check the presence of a
2848catalog in /etc/xml/catalog, and assuming it has been correctly populated,
2849the processing is completely transparent to the document user. To take a
2850concrete example, suppose you are authoring a DocBook document, this one
2851starts with the following DOCTYPE definition:</p>
2852<pre>&lt;?xml version='1.0'?&gt;
2853&lt;!DOCTYPE book PUBLIC "-//Norman Walsh//DTD DocBk XML V3.1.4//EN"
2854 "http://nwalsh.com/docbook/xml/3.1.4/db3xml.dtd"&gt;</pre>
2855
2856<p>When validating the document with libxml, the catalog will be
2857automatically consulted to lookup the public identifier "-//Norman Walsh//DTD
2858DocBk XML V3.1.4//EN" and the system identifier
2859"http://nwalsh.com/docbook/xml/3.1.4/db3xml.dtd", and if these entities have
2860been installed on your system and the catalogs actually point to them, libxml
2861will fetch them from the local disk.</p>
2862
2863<p style="font-size: 10pt"><strong>Note</strong>: Really don't use this
2864DOCTYPE example it's a really old version, but is fine as an example.</p>
2865
2866<p>Libxml will check the catalog each time that it is requested to load an
2867entity, this includes DTD, external parsed entities, stylesheets, etc ... If
2868your system is correctly configured all the authoring phase and processing
2869should use only local files, even if your document stays portable because it
2870uses the canonical public and system ID, referencing the remote document.</p>
2871
2872<h3><a name="Some">Some examples:</a></h3>
2873
2874<p>Here is a couple of fragments from XML Catalogs used in libxml early
2875regression tests in <code>test/catalogs</code> :</p>
2876<pre>&lt;?xml version="1.0"?&gt;
2877&lt;!DOCTYPE catalog PUBLIC
2878 "-//OASIS//DTD Entity Resolution XML Catalog V1.0//EN"
2879 "http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/entity/release/1.0/catalog.dtd"&gt;
2880&lt;catalog xmlns="urn:oasis:names:tc:entity:xmlns:xml:catalog"&gt;
2881 &lt;public publicId="-//OASIS//DTD DocBook XML V4.1.2//EN"
2882 uri="http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/xml/4.1.2/docbookx.dtd"/&gt;
2883...</pre>
2884
2885<p>This is the beginning of a catalog for DocBook 4.1.2, XML Catalogs are
2886written in XML, there is a specific namespace for catalog elements
2887"urn:oasis:names:tc:entity:xmlns:xml:catalog". The first entry in this
2888catalog is a <code>public</code> mapping it allows to associate a Public
2889Identifier with an URI.</p>
2890<pre>...
2891 &lt;rewriteSystem systemIdStartString="http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/"
2892 rewritePrefix="file:///usr/share/xml/docbook/"/&gt;
2893...</pre>
2894
2895<p>A <code>rewriteSystem</code> is a very powerful instruction, it says that
2896any URI starting with a given prefix should be looked at another URI
2897constructed by replacing the prefix with an new one. In effect this acts like
2898a cache system for a full area of the Web. In practice it is extremely useful
2899with a file prefix if you have installed a copy of those resources on your
2900local system.</p>
2901<pre>...
2902&lt;delegatePublic publicIdStartString="-//OASIS//DTD XML Catalog //"
2903 catalog="file:///usr/share/xml/docbook.xml"/&gt;
2904&lt;delegatePublic publicIdStartString="-//OASIS//ENTITIES DocBook XML"
2905 catalog="file:///usr/share/xml/docbook.xml"/&gt;
2906&lt;delegatePublic publicIdStartString="-//OASIS//DTD DocBook XML"
2907 catalog="file:///usr/share/xml/docbook.xml"/&gt;
2908&lt;delegateSystem systemIdStartString="http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/"
2909 catalog="file:///usr/share/xml/docbook.xml"/&gt;
2910&lt;delegateURI uriStartString="http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/"
2911 catalog="file:///usr/share/xml/docbook.xml"/&gt;
2912...</pre>
2913
2914<p>Delegation is the core features which allows to build a tree of catalogs,
2915easier to maintain than a single catalog, based on Public Identifier, System
2916Identifier or URI prefixes it instructs the catalog software to look up
2917entries in another resource. This feature allow to build hierarchies of
2918catalogs, the set of entries presented should be sufficient to redirect the
2919resolution of all DocBook references to the specific catalog in
2920<code>/usr/share/xml/docbook.xml</code> this one in turn could delegate all
2921references for DocBook 4.2.1 to a specific catalog installed at the same time
2922as the DocBook resources on the local machine.</p>
2923
2924<h3><a name="reference">How to tune catalog usage:</a></h3>
2925
2926<p>The user can change the default catalog behaviour by redirecting queries
2927to its own set of catalogs, this can be done by setting the
2928<code>XML_CATALOG_FILES</code> environment variable to a list of catalogs, an
2929empty one should deactivate loading the default <code>/etc/xml/catalog</code>
2930default catalog</p>
2931
2932<h3><a name="validate">How to debug catalog processing:</a></h3>
2933
2934<p>Setting up the <code>XML_DEBUG_CATALOG</code> environment variable will
2935make libxml output debugging informations for each catalog operations, for
2936example:</p>
2937<pre>orchis:~/XML -&gt; xmllint --memory --noout test/ent2
2938warning: failed to load external entity "title.xml"
2939orchis:~/XML -&gt; export XML_DEBUG_CATALOG=
2940orchis:~/XML -&gt; xmllint --memory --noout test/ent2
2941Failed to parse catalog /etc/xml/catalog
2942Failed to parse catalog /etc/xml/catalog
2943warning: failed to load external entity "title.xml"
2944Catalogs cleanup
2945orchis:~/XML -&gt; </pre>
2946
2947<p>The test/ent2 references an entity, running the parser from memory makes
2948the base URI unavailable and the the "title.xml" entity cannot be loaded.
2949Setting up the debug environment variable allows to detect that an attempt is
2950made to load the <code>/etc/xml/catalog</code> but since it's not present the
2951resolution fails.</p>
2952
2953<p>But the most advanced way to debug XML catalog processing is to use the
2954<strong>xmlcatalog</strong> command shipped with libxml2, it allows to load
2955catalogs and make resolution queries to see what is going on. This is also
2956used for the regression tests:</p>
2957<pre>orchis:~/XML -&gt; ./xmlcatalog test/catalogs/docbook.xml \
2958 "-//OASIS//DTD DocBook XML V4.1.2//EN"
2959http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/xml/4.1.2/docbookx.dtd
2960orchis:~/XML -&gt; </pre>
2961
2962<p>For debugging what is going on, adding one -v flags increase the verbosity
2963level to indicate the processing done (adding a second flag also indicate
2964what elements are recognized at parsing):</p>
2965<pre>orchis:~/XML -&gt; ./xmlcatalog -v test/catalogs/docbook.xml \
2966 "-//OASIS//DTD DocBook XML V4.1.2//EN"
2967Parsing catalog test/catalogs/docbook.xml's content
2968Found public match -//OASIS//DTD DocBook XML V4.1.2//EN
2969http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/xml/4.1.2/docbookx.dtd
2970Catalogs cleanup
2971orchis:~/XML -&gt; </pre>
2972
2973<p>A shell interface is also available to debug and process multiple queries
2974(and for regression tests):</p>
2975<pre>orchis:~/XML -&gt; ./xmlcatalog -shell test/catalogs/docbook.xml \
2976 "-//OASIS//DTD DocBook XML V4.1.2//EN"
2977&gt; help
2978Commands available:
2979public PublicID: make a PUBLIC identifier lookup
2980system SystemID: make a SYSTEM identifier lookup
2981resolve PublicID SystemID: do a full resolver lookup
2982add 'type' 'orig' 'replace' : add an entry
2983del 'values' : remove values
2984dump: print the current catalog state
2985debug: increase the verbosity level
2986quiet: decrease the verbosity level
2987exit: quit the shell
2988&gt; public "-//OASIS//DTD DocBook XML V4.1.2//EN"
2989http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/xml/4.1.2/docbookx.dtd
2990&gt; quit
2991orchis:~/XML -&gt; </pre>
2992
2993<p>This should be sufficient for most debugging purpose, this was actually
2994used heavily to debug the XML Catalog implementation itself.</p>
2995
2996<h3><a name="Declaring">How to create and maintain</a> catalogs:</h3>
2997
2998<p>Basically XML Catalogs are XML files, you can either use XML tools to
2999manage them or use <strong>xmlcatalog</strong> for this. The basic step is
3000to create a catalog the -create option provide this facility:</p>
3001<pre>orchis:~/XML -&gt; ./xmlcatalog --create tst.xml
3002&lt;?xml version="1.0"?&gt;
3003&lt;!DOCTYPE catalog PUBLIC "-//OASIS//DTD Entity Resolution XML Catalog V1.0//EN"
3004 "http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/entity/release/1.0/catalog.dtd"&gt;
3005&lt;catalog xmlns="urn:oasis:names:tc:entity:xmlns:xml:catalog"/&gt;
3006orchis:~/XML -&gt; </pre>
3007
3008<p>By default xmlcatalog does not overwrite the original catalog and save the
3009result on the standard output, this can be overridden using the -noout
3010option. The <code>-add</code> command allows to add entries in the
3011catalog:</p>
3012<pre>orchis:~/XML -&gt; ./xmlcatalog --noout --create --add "public" \
3013 "-//OASIS//DTD DocBook XML V4.1.2//EN" \
3014 http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/xml/4.1.2/docbookx.dtd tst.xml
3015orchis:~/XML -&gt; cat tst.xml
3016&lt;?xml version="1.0"?&gt;
3017&lt;!DOCTYPE catalog PUBLIC "-//OASIS//DTD Entity Resolution XML Catalog V1.0//EN" \
3018 "http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/entity/release/1.0/catalog.dtd"&gt;
3019&lt;catalog xmlns="urn:oasis:names:tc:entity:xmlns:xml:catalog"&gt;
3020&lt;public publicId="-//OASIS//DTD DocBook XML V4.1.2//EN"
3021 uri="http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/xml/4.1.2/docbookx.dtd"/&gt;
3022&lt;/catalog&gt;
3023orchis:~/XML -&gt; </pre>
3024
3025<p>The <code>-add</code> option will always take 3 parameters even if some of
3026the XML Catalog constructs (like nextCatalog) will have only a single
3027argument, just pass a third empty string, it will be ignored.</p>
3028
3029<p>Similarly the <code>-del</code> option remove matching entries from the
3030catalog:</p>
3031<pre>orchis:~/XML -&gt; ./xmlcatalog --del \
3032 "http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/xml/4.1.2/docbookx.dtd" tst.xml
3033&lt;?xml version="1.0"?&gt;
3034&lt;!DOCTYPE catalog PUBLIC "-//OASIS//DTD Entity Resolution XML Catalog V1.0//EN"
3035 "http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/entity/release/1.0/catalog.dtd"&gt;
3036&lt;catalog xmlns="urn:oasis:names:tc:entity:xmlns:xml:catalog"/&gt;
3037orchis:~/XML -&gt; </pre>
3038
3039<p>The catalog is now empty. Note that the matching of <code>-del</code> is
3040exact and would have worked in a similar fashion with the Public ID
3041string.</p>
3042
3043<p>This is rudimentary but should be sufficient to manage a not too complex
3044catalog tree of resources.</p>
3045
3046<h3><a name="implemento">The implementor corner quick review of the
3047API:</a></h3>
3048
3049<p>First, and like for every other module of libxml, there is an
3050automatically generated <a href="html/libxml-catalog.html">API page for
3051catalog support</a>.</p>
3052
3053<p>The header for the catalog interfaces should be included as:</p>
3054<pre>#include &lt;libxml/catalog.h&gt;</pre>
3055
3056<p>The API is voluntarily kept very simple. First it is not obvious that
3057applications really need access to it since it is the default behaviour of
3058libxml (Note: it is possible to completely override libxml default catalog by
3059using <a href="html/libxml-parser.html">xmlSetExternalEntityLoader</a> to
3060plug an application specific resolver).</p>
3061
3062<p>Basically libxml support 2 catalog lists:</p>
3063<ul>
3064 <li>the default one, global shared by all the application</li>
3065 <li>a per-document catalog, this one is built if the document uses the
3066 <code>oasis-xml-catalog</code> PIs to specify its own catalog list, it is
3067 associated to the parser context and destroyed when the parsing context
3068 is destroyed.</li>
3069</ul>
3070
3071<p>the document one will be used first if it exists.</p>
3072
3073<h4>Initialization routines:</h4>
3074
3075<p>xmlInitializeCatalog(), xmlLoadCatalog() and xmlLoadCatalogs() should be
3076used at startup to initialize the catalog, if the catalog should be
3077initialized with specific values xmlLoadCatalog() or xmlLoadCatalogs()
3078should be called before xmlInitializeCatalog() which would otherwise do a
3079default initialization first.</p>
3080
3081<p>The xmlCatalogAddLocal() call is used by the parser to grow the document
3082own catalog list if needed.</p>
3083
3084<h4>Preferences setup:</h4>
3085
3086<p>The XML Catalog spec requires the possibility to select default
3087preferences between public and system delegation,
3088xmlCatalogSetDefaultPrefer() allows this, xmlCatalogSetDefaults() and
3089xmlCatalogGetDefaults() allow to control if XML Catalogs resolution should
3090be forbidden, allowed for global catalog, for document catalog or both, the
3091default is to allow both.</p>
3092
3093<p>And of course xmlCatalogSetDebug() allows to generate debug messages
3094(through the xmlGenericError() mechanism).</p>
3095
3096<h4>Querying routines:</h4>
3097
3098<p>xmlCatalogResolve(), xmlCatalogResolveSystem(), xmlCatalogResolvePublic()
3099and xmlCatalogResolveURI() are relatively explicit if you read the XML
3100Catalog specification they correspond to section 7 algorithms, they should
3101also work if you have loaded an SGML catalog with a simplified semantic.</p>
3102
3103<p>xmlCatalogLocalResolve() and xmlCatalogLocalResolveURI() are the same but
3104operate on the document catalog list</p>
3105
3106<h4>Cleanup and Miscellaneous:</h4>
3107
3108<p>xmlCatalogCleanup() free-up the global catalog, xmlCatalogFreeLocal() is
3109the per-document equivalent.</p>
3110
3111<p>xmlCatalogAdd() and xmlCatalogRemove() are used to dynamically modify the
3112first catalog in the global list, and xmlCatalogDump() allows to dump a
3113catalog state, those routines are primarily designed for xmlcatalog, I'm not
3114sure that exposing more complex interfaces (like navigation ones) would be
3115really useful.</p>
3116
3117<p>The xmlParseCatalogFile() is a function used to load XML Catalog files,
3118it's similar as xmlParseFile() except it bypass all catalog lookups, it's
3119provided because this functionality may be useful for client tools.</p>
3120
3121<h4>threaded environments:</h4>
3122
3123<p>Since the catalog tree is built progressively, some care has been taken to
3124try to avoid troubles in multithreaded environments. The code is now thread
3125safe assuming that the libxml library has been compiled with threads
3126support.</p>
3127
3128<p></p>
3129
3130<h3><a name="Other">Other resources</a></h3>
3131
3132<p>The XML Catalog specification is relatively recent so there isn't much
3133literature to point at:</p>
3134<ul>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00003135 <li>You can find a good rant from Norm Walsh about <a
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00003136 href="http://www.arbortext.com/Think_Tank/XML_Resources/Issue_Three/issue_three.html">the
3137 need for catalogs</a>, it provides a lot of context informations even if
Daniel Veillard93d3a472002-04-26 14:04:55 +00003138 I don't agree with everything presented. Norm also wrote a more recent
3139 article <a
3140 href="http://wwws.sun.com/software/xml/developers/resolver/article/">XML
3141 entities and URI resolvers</a> describing them.</li>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00003142 <li>An <a href="http://home.ccil.org/~cowan/XML/XCatalog.html">old XML
3143 catalog proposal</a> from John Cowan</li>
3144 <li>The <a href="http://www.rddl.org/">Resource Directory Description
3145 Language</a> (RDDL) another catalog system but more oriented toward
3146 providing metadata for XML namespaces.</li>
3147 <li>the page from the OASIS Technical <a
3148 href="http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/entity/">Committee on Entity
3149 Resolution</a> who maintains XML Catalog, you will find pointers to the
3150 specification update, some background and pointers to others tools
3151 providing XML Catalog support</li>
Daniel Veillard35e937a2002-01-19 22:21:54 +00003152 <li>Here is a <a href="buildDocBookCatalog">shell script</a> to generate
3153 XML Catalogs for DocBook 4.1.2 . If it can write to the /etc/xml/
3154 directory, it will set-up /etc/xml/catalog and /etc/xml/docbook based on
3155 the resources found on the system. Otherwise it will just create
3156 ~/xmlcatalog and ~/dbkxmlcatalog and doing:
Daniel Veillardc575b992002-02-08 13:28:40 +00003157 <p><code>export XMLCATALOG=$HOME/xmlcatalog</code></p>
Daniel Veillard35e937a2002-01-19 22:21:54 +00003158 <p>should allow to process DocBook documentations without requiring
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00003159 network accesses for the DTD or stylesheets</p>
Daniel Veillard35e937a2002-01-19 22:21:54 +00003160 </li>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00003161 <li>I have uploaded <a href="ftp://xmlsoft.org/test/dbk412catalog.tar.gz">a
Daniel Veillard35e937a2002-01-19 22:21:54 +00003162 small tarball</a> containing XML Catalogs for DocBook 4.1.2 which seems
3163 to work fine for me too</li>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00003164 <li>The <a href="http://www.xmlsoft.org/xmlcatalog_man.html">xmlcatalog
3165 manual page</a></li>
3166</ul>
3167
3168<p>If you have suggestions for corrections or additions, simply contact
3169me:</p>
3170
3171<h2><a name="library">The parser interfaces</a></h2>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003172
3173<p>This section is directly intended to help programmers getting bootstrapped
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +00003174using the XML library from the C language. It is not intended to be
3175extensive. I hope the automatically generated documents will provide the
3176completeness required, but as a separate set of documents. The interfaces of
3177the XML library are by principle low level, there is nearly zero abstraction.
3178Those interested in a higher level API should <a href="#DOM">look at
3179DOM</a>.</p>
Daniel Veillardccb09631998-10-27 06:21:04 +00003180
Daniel Veillard9cb5ff42001-01-29 08:22:21 +00003181<p>The <a href="html/libxml-parser.html">parser interfaces for XML</a> are
3182separated from the <a href="html/libxml-htmlparser.html">HTML parser
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00003183interfaces</a>. Let's have a look at how the XML parser can be called:</p>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +00003184
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00003185<h3><a name="Invoking">Invoking the parser : the pull method</a></h3>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003186
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00003187<p>Usually, the first thing to do is to read an XML input. The parser accepts
3188documents either from in-memory strings or from files. The functions are
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003189defined in "parser.h":</p>
Daniel Veillard10c6a8f1998-10-28 01:00:12 +00003190<dl>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003191 <dt><code>xmlDocPtr xmlParseMemory(char *buffer, int size);</code></dt>
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00003192 <dd><p>Parse a null-terminated string containing the document.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003193 </dd>
Daniel Veillard10c6a8f1998-10-28 01:00:12 +00003194</dl>
3195<dl>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003196 <dt><code>xmlDocPtr xmlParseFile(const char *filename);</code></dt>
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +00003197 <dd><p>Parse an XML document contained in a (possibly compressed)
3198 file.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003199 </dd>
Daniel Veillard10c6a8f1998-10-28 01:00:12 +00003200</dl>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003201
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00003202<p>The parser returns a pointer to the document structure (or NULL in case of
Daniel Veillard10c6a8f1998-10-28 01:00:12 +00003203failure).</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003204
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00003205<h3 id="Invoking1">Invoking the parser: the push method</h3>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +00003206
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +00003207<p>In order for the application to keep the control when the document is
3208being fetched (which is common for GUI based programs) libxml provides a push
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00003209interface, too, as of version 1.8.3. Here are the interface functions:</p>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +00003210<pre>xmlParserCtxtPtr xmlCreatePushParserCtxt(xmlSAXHandlerPtr sax,
3211 void *user_data,
3212 const char *chunk,
3213 int size,
3214 const char *filename);
3215int xmlParseChunk (xmlParserCtxtPtr ctxt,
3216 const char *chunk,
3217 int size,
3218 int terminate);</pre>
3219
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00003220<p>and here is a simple example showing how to use the interface:</p>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +00003221<pre> FILE *f;
3222
3223 f = fopen(filename, "r");
3224 if (f != NULL) {
3225 int res, size = 1024;
3226 char chars[1024];
3227 xmlParserCtxtPtr ctxt;
3228
3229 res = fread(chars, 1, 4, f);
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00003230 if (res &gt; 0) {
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +00003231 ctxt = xmlCreatePushParserCtxt(NULL, NULL,
3232 chars, res, filename);
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00003233 while ((res = fread(chars, 1, size, f)) &gt; 0) {
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +00003234 xmlParseChunk(ctxt, chars, res, 0);
3235 }
3236 xmlParseChunk(ctxt, chars, 0, 1);
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00003237 doc = ctxt-&gt;myDoc;
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +00003238 xmlFreeParserCtxt(ctxt);
3239 }
3240 }</pre>
3241
Daniel Veillardec70e912001-02-26 20:10:45 +00003242<p>The HTML parser embedded into libxml also has a push interface; the
3243functions are just prefixed by "html" rather than "xml".</p>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +00003244
3245<h3 id="Invoking2">Invoking the parser: the SAX interface</h3>
3246
Daniel Veillardec70e912001-02-26 20:10:45 +00003247<p>The tree-building interface makes the parser memory-hungry, first loading
3248the document in memory and then building the tree itself. Reading a document
3249without building the tree is possible using the SAX interfaces (see SAX.h and
3250<a href="http://www.daa.com.au/~james/gnome/xml-sax/xml-sax.html">James
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00003251Henstridge's documentation</a>). Note also that the push interface can be
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +00003252limited to SAX: just use the two first arguments of
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +00003253<code>xmlCreatePushParserCtxt()</code>.</p>
Daniel Veillardccb09631998-10-27 06:21:04 +00003254
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +00003255<h3><a name="Building">Building a tree from scratch</a></h3>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003256
3257<p>The other way to get an XML tree in memory is by building it. Basically
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +00003258there is a set of functions dedicated to building new elements. (These are
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +00003259also described in &lt;libxml/tree.h&gt;.) For example, here is a piece of
3260code that produces the XML document used in the previous examples:</p>
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00003261<pre> #include &lt;libxml/tree.h&gt;
Daniel Veillard361d8452000-04-03 19:48:13 +00003262 xmlDocPtr doc;
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +00003263 xmlNodePtr tree, subtree;
3264
3265 doc = xmlNewDoc("1.0");
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00003266 doc-&gt;children = xmlNewDocNode(doc, NULL, "EXAMPLE", NULL);
3267 xmlSetProp(doc-&gt;children, "prop1", "gnome is great");
3268 xmlSetProp(doc-&gt;children, "prop2", "&amp; linux too");
3269 tree = xmlNewChild(doc-&gt;children, NULL, "head", NULL);
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +00003270 subtree = xmlNewChild(tree, NULL, "title", "Welcome to Gnome");
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00003271 tree = xmlNewChild(doc-&gt;children, NULL, "chapter", NULL);
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +00003272 subtree = xmlNewChild(tree, NULL, "title", "The Linux adventure");
3273 subtree = xmlNewChild(tree, NULL, "p", "bla bla bla ...");
3274 subtree = xmlNewChild(tree, NULL, "image", NULL);
3275 xmlSetProp(subtree, "href", "linus.gif");</pre>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003276
3277<p>Not really rocket science ...</p>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +00003278
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +00003279<h3><a name="Traversing">Traversing the tree</a></h3>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003280
Daniel Veillard9cb5ff42001-01-29 08:22:21 +00003281<p>Basically by <a href="html/libxml-tree.html">including "tree.h"</a> your
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +00003282code has access to the internal structure of all the elements of the tree.
3283The names should be somewhat simple like <strong>parent</strong>,
Daniel Veillard306be992000-07-03 12:38:45 +00003284<strong>children</strong>, <strong>next</strong>, <strong>prev</strong>,
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00003285<strong>properties</strong>, etc... For example, still with the previous
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +00003286example:</p>
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00003287<pre><code>doc-&gt;children-&gt;children-&gt;children</code></pre>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003288
3289<p>points to the title element,</p>
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +00003290<pre>doc-&gt;children-&gt;children-&gt;next-&gt;children-&gt;children</pre>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003291
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +00003292<p>points to the text node containing the chapter title "The Linux
3293adventure".</p>
Daniel Veillard10c6a8f1998-10-28 01:00:12 +00003294
Daniel Veillardb24054a1999-12-18 15:32:46 +00003295<p><strong>NOTE</strong>: XML allows <em>PI</em>s and <em>comments</em> to be
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00003296present before the document root, so <code>doc-&gt;children</code> may point
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +00003297to an element which is not the document Root Element; a function
Daniel Veillard5cb5ab81999-12-21 15:35:29 +00003298<code>xmlDocGetRootElement()</code> was added for this purpose.</p>
Daniel Veillardb24054a1999-12-18 15:32:46 +00003299
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +00003300<h3><a name="Modifying">Modifying the tree</a></h3>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003301
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00003302<p>Functions are provided for reading and writing the document content. Here
Daniel Veillard9cb5ff42001-01-29 08:22:21 +00003303is an excerpt from the <a href="html/libxml-tree.html">tree API</a>:</p>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +00003304<dl>
Daniel Veillarddd6b3671999-09-23 22:19:22 +00003305 <dt><code>xmlAttrPtr xmlSetProp(xmlNodePtr node, const xmlChar *name, const
3306 xmlChar *value);</code></dt>
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +00003307 <dd><p>This sets (or changes) an attribute carried by an ELEMENT node.
3308 The value can be NULL.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003309 </dd>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +00003310</dl>
3311<dl>
Daniel Veillarddd6b3671999-09-23 22:19:22 +00003312 <dt><code>const xmlChar *xmlGetProp(xmlNodePtr node, const xmlChar
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003313 *name);</code></dt>
Daniel Veillardc92c3042000-09-29 02:42:04 +00003314 <dd><p>This function returns a pointer to new copy of the property
3315 content. Note that the user must deallocate the result.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003316 </dd>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +00003317</dl>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003318
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +00003319<p>Two functions are provided for reading and writing the text associated
3320with elements:</p>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +00003321<dl>
Daniel Veillarddd6b3671999-09-23 22:19:22 +00003322 <dt><code>xmlNodePtr xmlStringGetNodeList(xmlDocPtr doc, const xmlChar
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003323 *value);</code></dt>
Daniel Veillardec70e912001-02-26 20:10:45 +00003324 <dd><p>This function takes an "external" string and converts it to one
3325 text node or possibly to a list of entity and text nodes. All
3326 non-predefined entity references like &amp;Gnome; will be stored
3327 internally as entity nodes, hence the result of the function may not be
3328 a single node.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003329 </dd>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +00003330</dl>
3331<dl>
Daniel Veillarddd6b3671999-09-23 22:19:22 +00003332 <dt><code>xmlChar *xmlNodeListGetString(xmlDocPtr doc, xmlNodePtr list, int
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003333 inLine);</code></dt>
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +00003334 <dd><p>This function is the inverse of
3335 <code>xmlStringGetNodeList()</code>. It generates a new string
3336 containing the content of the text and entity nodes. Note the extra
3337 argument inLine. If this argument is set to 1, the function will expand
3338 entity references. For example, instead of returning the &amp;Gnome;
3339 XML encoding in the string, it will substitute it with its value (say,
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +00003340 "GNU Network Object Model Environment").</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003341 </dd>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +00003342</dl>
Daniel Veillard10c6a8f1998-10-28 01:00:12 +00003343
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +00003344<h3><a name="Saving">Saving a tree</a></h3>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003345
3346<p>Basically 3 options are possible:</p>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +00003347<dl>
Daniel Veillarddd6b3671999-09-23 22:19:22 +00003348 <dt><code>void xmlDocDumpMemory(xmlDocPtr cur, xmlChar**mem, int
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003349 *size);</code></dt>
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00003350 <dd><p>Returns a buffer into which the document has been saved.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003351 </dd>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +00003352</dl>
3353<dl>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003354 <dt><code>extern void xmlDocDump(FILE *f, xmlDocPtr doc);</code></dt>
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00003355 <dd><p>Dumps a document to an open file descriptor.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003356 </dd>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +00003357</dl>
3358<dl>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003359 <dt><code>int xmlSaveFile(const char *filename, xmlDocPtr cur);</code></dt>
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +00003360 <dd><p>Saves the document to a file. In this case, the compression
3361 interface is triggered if it has been turned on.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003362 </dd>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +00003363</dl>
Daniel Veillard10c6a8f1998-10-28 01:00:12 +00003364
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +00003365<h3><a name="Compressio">Compression</a></h3>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003366
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00003367<p>The library transparently handles compression when doing file-based
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +00003368accesses. The level of compression on saves can be turned on either globally
3369or individually for one file:</p>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +00003370<dl>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003371 <dt><code>int xmlGetDocCompressMode (xmlDocPtr doc);</code></dt>
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00003372 <dd><p>Gets the document compression ratio (0-9).</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003373 </dd>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +00003374</dl>
3375<dl>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003376 <dt><code>void xmlSetDocCompressMode (xmlDocPtr doc, int mode);</code></dt>
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00003377 <dd><p>Sets the document compression ratio.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003378 </dd>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +00003379</dl>
3380<dl>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003381 <dt><code>int xmlGetCompressMode(void);</code></dt>
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00003382 <dd><p>Gets the default compression ratio.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003383 </dd>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +00003384</dl>
3385<dl>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003386 <dt><code>void xmlSetCompressMode(int mode);</code></dt>
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00003387 <dd><p>Sets the default compression ratio.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003388 </dd>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +00003389</dl>
3390
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +00003391<h2><a name="Entities">Entities or no entities</a></h2>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00003392
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00003393<p>Entities in principle are similar to simple C macros. An entity defines an
3394abbreviation for a given string that you can reuse many times throughout the
3395content of your document. Entities are especially useful when a given string
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +00003396may occur frequently within a document, or to confine the change needed to a
3397document to a restricted area in the internal subset of the document (at the
3398beginning). Example:</p>
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00003399<pre>1 &lt;?xml version="1.0"?&gt;
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +000034002 &lt;!DOCTYPE EXAMPLE SYSTEM "example.dtd" [
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +000034013 &lt;!ENTITY xml "Extensible Markup Language"&gt;
34024 ]&gt;
34035 &lt;EXAMPLE&gt;
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +000034046 &amp;xml;
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +000034057 &lt;/EXAMPLE&gt;</pre>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00003406
3407<p>Line 3 declares the xml entity. Line 6 uses the xml entity, by prefixing
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +00003408its name with '&amp;' and following it by ';' without any spaces added. There
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00003409are 5 predefined entities in libxml allowing you to escape characters with
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00003410predefined meaning in some parts of the xml document content:
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00003411<strong>&amp;lt;</strong> for the character '&lt;', <strong>&amp;gt;</strong>
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00003412for the character '&gt;', <strong>&amp;apos;</strong> for the character ''',
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00003413<strong>&amp;quot;</strong> for the character '"', and
3414<strong>&amp;amp;</strong> for the character '&amp;'.</p>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00003415
3416<p>One of the problems related to entities is that you may want the parser to
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +00003417substitute an entity's content so that you can see the replacement text in
3418your application. Or you may prefer to keep entity references as such in the
3419content to be able to save the document back without losing this usually
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +00003420precious information (if the user went through the pain of explicitly
3421defining entities, he may have a a rather negative attitude if you blindly
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00003422substitute them as saving time). The <a
Daniel Veillard9cb5ff42001-01-29 08:22:21 +00003423href="html/libxml-parser.html#XMLSUBSTITUTEENTITIESDEFAULT">xmlSubstituteEntitiesDefault()</a>
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00003424function allows you to check and change the behaviour, which is to not
3425substitute entities by default.</p>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00003426
3427<p>Here is the DOM tree built by libxml for the previous document in the
3428default case:</p>
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00003429<pre>/gnome/src/gnome-xml -&gt; ./xmllint --debug test/ent1
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00003430DOCUMENT
3431version=1.0
3432 ELEMENT EXAMPLE
3433 TEXT
3434 content=
3435 ENTITY_REF
3436 INTERNAL_GENERAL_ENTITY xml
3437 content=Extensible Markup Language
3438 TEXT
3439 content=</pre>
3440
3441<p>And here is the result when substituting entities:</p>
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00003442<pre>/gnome/src/gnome-xml -&gt; ./tester --debug --noent test/ent1
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00003443DOCUMENT
3444version=1.0
3445 ELEMENT EXAMPLE
3446 TEXT
3447 content= Extensible Markup Language</pre>
3448
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00003449<p>So, entities or no entities? Basically, it depends on your use case. I
3450suggest that you keep the non-substituting default behaviour and avoid using
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00003451entities in your XML document or data if you are not willing to handle the
3452entity references elements in the DOM tree.</p>
3453
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +00003454<p>Note that at save time libxml enforces the conversion of the predefined
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00003455entities where necessary to prevent well-formedness problems, and will also
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +00003456transparently replace those with chars (i.e. it will not generate entity
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00003457reference elements in the DOM tree or call the reference() SAX callback when
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00003458finding them in the input).</p>
3459
Daniel Veillard7b9c4b72000-08-25 16:26:50 +00003460<p><span style="background-color: #FF0000">WARNING</span>: handling entities
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +00003461on top of the libxml SAX interface is difficult!!! If you plan to use
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00003462non-predefined entities in your documents, then the learning curve to handle
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +00003463then using the SAX API may be long. If you plan to use complex documents, I
Daniel Veillard7b9c4b72000-08-25 16:26:50 +00003464strongly suggest you consider using the DOM interface instead and let libxml
Daniel Veillard8c6d6af2000-08-25 17:14:13 +00003465deal with the complexity rather than trying to do it yourself.</p>
Daniel Veillard7b9c4b72000-08-25 16:26:50 +00003466
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +00003467<h2><a name="Namespaces">Namespaces</a></h2>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00003468
Daniel Veillardec303412000-03-24 13:41:54 +00003469<p>The libxml library implements <a
3470href="http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml-names/">XML namespaces</a> support by
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00003471recognizing namespace constructs in the input, and does namespace lookup
Daniel Veillardec303412000-03-24 13:41:54 +00003472automatically when building the DOM tree. A namespace declaration is
3473associated with an in-memory structure and all elements or attributes within
3474that namespace point to it. Hence testing the namespace is a simple and fast
3475equality operation at the user level.</p>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00003476
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +00003477<p>I suggest that people using libxml use a namespace, and declare it in the
3478root element of their document as the default namespace. Then they don't need
3479to use the prefix in the content but we will have a basis for future semantic
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +00003480refinement and merging of data from different sources. This doesn't increase
Daniel Veillardec70e912001-02-26 20:10:45 +00003481the size of the XML output significantly, but significantly increases its
3482value in the long-term. Example:</p>
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00003483<pre>&lt;mydoc xmlns="http://mydoc.example.org/schemas/"&gt;
3484 &lt;elem1&gt;...&lt;/elem1&gt;
3485 &lt;elem2&gt;...&lt;/elem2&gt;
3486&lt;/mydoc&gt;</pre>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00003487
Daniel Veillardec70e912001-02-26 20:10:45 +00003488<p>The namespace value has to be an absolute URL, but the URL doesn't have to
3489point to any existing resource on the Web. It will bind all the element and
Daniel Veillardc0801af2002-05-28 16:28:42 +00003490attributes with that URL. I suggest to use an URL within a domain you
3491control, and that the URL should contain some kind of version information if
3492possible. For example, <code>"http://www.gnome.org/gnumeric/1.0/"</code> is a
3493good namespace scheme.</p>
Daniel Veillardec303412000-03-24 13:41:54 +00003494
3495<p>Then when you load a file, make sure that a namespace carrying the
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00003496version-independent prefix is installed on the root element of your document,
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00003497and if the version information don't match something you know, warn the user
3498and be liberal in what you accept as the input. Also do *not* try to base
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00003499namespace checking on the prefix value. &lt;foo:text&gt; may be exactly the
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +00003500same as &lt;bar:text&gt; in another document. What really matters is the URI
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00003501associated with the element or the attribute, not the prefix string (which is
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +00003502just a shortcut for the full URI). In libxml, element and attributes have an
Daniel Veillardec303412000-03-24 13:41:54 +00003503<code>ns</code> field pointing to an xmlNs structure detailing the namespace
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +00003504prefix and its URI.</p>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00003505
3506<p>@@Interfaces@@</p>
3507
3508<p>@@Examples@@</p>
3509
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +00003510<p>Usually people object to using namespaces together with validity checking.
3511I will try to make sure that using namespaces won't break validity checking,
3512so even if you plan to use or currently are using validation I strongly
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +00003513suggest adding namespaces to your document. A default namespace scheme
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00003514<code>xmlns="http://...."</code> should not break validity even on less
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +00003515flexible parsers. Using namespaces to mix and differentiate content coming
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +00003516from multiple DTDs will certainly break current validation schemes. I will
3517try to provide ways to do this, but this may not be portable or
3518standardized.</p>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00003519
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00003520<h2><a name="Upgrading">Upgrading 1.x code</a></h2>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00003521
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00003522<p>Incompatible changes:</p>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00003523
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00003524<p>Version 2 of libxml is the first version introducing serious backward
3525incompatible changes. The main goals were:</p>
3526<ul>
3527 <li>a general cleanup. A number of mistakes inherited from the very early
3528 versions couldn't be changed due to compatibility constraints. Example
3529 the "childs" element in the nodes.</li>
3530 <li>Uniformization of the various nodes, at least for their header and link
3531 parts (doc, parent, children, prev, next), the goal is a simpler
3532 programming model and simplifying the task of the DOM implementors.</li>
3533 <li>better conformances to the XML specification, for example version 1.x
3534 had an heuristic to try to detect ignorable white spaces. As a result the
3535 SAX event generated were ignorableWhitespace() while the spec requires
3536 character() in that case. This also mean that a number of DOM node
3537 containing blank text may populate the DOM tree which were not present
3538 before.</li>
3539</ul>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00003540
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00003541<h3>How to fix libxml-1.x code:</h3>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00003542
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00003543<p>So client code of libxml designed to run with version 1.x may have to be
3544changed to compile against version 2.x of libxml. Here is a list of changes
3545that I have collected, they may not be sufficient, so in case you find other
3546change which are required, <a href="mailto:Daniel.Ïeillardw3.org">drop me a
3547mail</a>:</p>
3548<ol>
3549 <li>The package name have changed from libxml to libxml2, the library name
3550 is now -lxml2 . There is a new xml2-config script which should be used to
3551 select the right parameters libxml2</li>
3552 <li>Node <strong>childs</strong> field has been renamed
3553 <strong>children</strong> so s/childs/children/g should be applied
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00003554 (probability of having "childs" anywhere else is close to 0+</li>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00003555 <li>The document don't have anymore a <strong>root</strong> element it has
3556 been replaced by <strong>children</strong> and usually you will get a
3557 list of element here. For example a Dtd element for the internal subset
3558 and it's declaration may be found in that list, as well as processing
3559 instructions or comments found before or after the document root element.
3560 Use <strong>xmlDocGetRootElement(doc)</strong> to get the root element of
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00003561 a document. Alternatively if you are sure to not reference DTDs nor have
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00003562 PIs or comments before or after the root element
3563 s/-&gt;root/-&gt;children/g will probably do it.</li>
3564 <li>The white space issue, this one is more complex, unless special case of
3565 validating parsing, the line breaks and spaces usually used for indenting
3566 and formatting the document content becomes significant. So they are
3567 reported by SAX and if your using the DOM tree, corresponding nodes are
3568 generated. Too approach can be taken:
3569 <ol>
3570 <li>lazy one, use the compatibility call
3571 <strong>xmlKeepBlanksDefault(0)</strong> but be aware that you are
3572 relying on a special (and possibly broken) set of heuristics of
3573 libxml to detect ignorable blanks. Don't complain if it breaks or
3574 make your application not 100% clean w.r.t. to it's input.</li>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00003575 <li>the Right Way: change you code to accept possibly insignificant
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00003576 blanks characters, or have your tree populated with weird blank text
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00003577 nodes. You can spot them using the commodity function
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00003578 <strong>xmlIsBlankNode(node)</strong> returning 1 for such blank
3579 nodes.</li>
3580 </ol>
3581 <p>Note also that with the new default the output functions don't add any
3582 extra indentation when saving a tree in order to be able to round trip
3583 (read and save) without inflating the document with extra formatting
3584 chars.</p>
3585 </li>
3586 <li>The include path has changed to $prefix/libxml/ and the includes
3587 themselves uses this new prefix in includes instructions... If you are
3588 using (as expected) the
3589 <pre>xml2-config --cflags</pre>
3590 <p>output to generate you compile commands this will probably work out of
3591 the box</p>
3592 </li>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00003593 <li>xmlDetectCharEncoding takes an extra argument indicating the length in
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00003594 byte of the head of the document available for character detection.</li>
3595</ol>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00003596
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00003597<h3>Ensuring both libxml-1.x and libxml-2.x compatibility</h3>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00003598
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00003599<p>Two new version of libxml (1.8.11) and libxml2 (2.3.4) have been released
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00003600to allow smooth upgrade of existing libxml v1code while retaining
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00003601compatibility. They offers the following:</p>
3602<ol>
3603 <li>similar include naming, one should use
3604 <strong>#include&lt;libxml/...&gt;</strong> in both cases.</li>
3605 <li>similar identifiers defined via macros for the child and root fields:
3606 respectively <strong>xmlChildrenNode</strong> and
3607 <strong>xmlRootNode</strong></li>
3608 <li>a new macro <strong>LIBXML_TEST_VERSION</strong> which should be
3609 inserted once in the client code</li>
3610</ol>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00003611
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00003612<p>So the roadmap to upgrade your existing libxml applications is the
3613following:</p>
3614<ol>
3615 <li>install the libxml-1.8.8 (and libxml-devel-1.8.8) packages</li>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00003616 <li>find all occurrences where the xmlDoc <strong>root</strong> field is
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00003617 used and change it to <strong>xmlRootNode</strong></li>
Daniel Veillardc0801af2002-05-28 16:28:42 +00003618 <li>similarly find all occurrences where the xmlNode
3619 <strong>childs</strong> field is used and change it to
3620 <strong>xmlChildrenNode</strong></li>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00003621 <li>add a <strong>LIBXML_TEST_VERSION</strong> macro somewhere in your
3622 <strong>main()</strong> or in the library init entry point</li>
3623 <li>Recompile, check compatibility, it should still work</li>
Daniel Veillardc0801af2002-05-28 16:28:42 +00003624 <li>Change your configure script to look first for xml2-config and fall
3625 back using xml-config . Use the --cflags and --libs output of the command
3626 as the Include and Linking parameters needed to use libxml.</li>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00003627 <li>install libxml2-2.3.x and libxml2-devel-2.3.x (libxml-1.8.y and
3628 libxml-devel-1.8.y can be kept simultaneously)</li>
3629 <li>remove your config.cache, relaunch your configuration mechanism, and
3630 recompile, if steps 2 and 3 were done right it should compile as-is</li>
3631 <li>Test that your application is still running correctly, if not this may
3632 be due to extra empty nodes due to formating spaces being kept in libxml2
3633 contrary to libxml1, in that case insert xmlKeepBlanksDefault(1) in your
3634 code before calling the parser (next to
3635 <strong>LIBXML_TEST_VERSION</strong> is a fine place).</li>
3636</ol>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00003637
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00003638<p>Following those steps should work. It worked for some of my own code.</p>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00003639
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00003640<p>Let me put some emphasis on the fact that there is far more changes from
3641libxml 1.x to 2.x than the ones you may have to patch for. The overall code
3642has been considerably cleaned up and the conformance to the XML specification
3643has been drastically improved too. Don't take those changes as an excuse to
3644not upgrade, it may cost a lot on the long term ...</p>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00003645
Daniel Veillard52dcab32001-10-30 12:51:17 +00003646<h2><a name="Thread">Thread safety</a></h2>
3647
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00003648<p>Starting with 2.4.7, libxml makes provisions to ensure that concurrent
Daniel Veillard52dcab32001-10-30 12:51:17 +00003649threads can safely work in parallel parsing different documents. There is
3650however a couple of things to do to ensure it:</p>
3651<ul>
3652 <li>configure the library accordingly using the --with-threads options</li>
3653 <li>call xmlInitParser() in the "main" thread before using any of the
3654 libxml API (except possibly selecting a different memory allocator)</li>
3655</ul>
3656
3657<p>Note that the thread safety cannot be ensured for multiple threads sharing
3658the same document, the locking must be done at the application level, libxml
3659exports a basic mutex and reentrant mutexes API in &lt;libxml/threads.h&gt;.
3660The parts of the library checked for thread safety are:</p>
3661<ul>
3662 <li>concurrent loading</li>
3663 <li>file access resolution</li>
3664 <li>catalog access</li>
3665 <li>catalog building</li>
3666 <li>entities lookup/accesses</li>
3667 <li>validation</li>
3668 <li>global variables per-thread override</li>
3669 <li>memory handling</li>
3670</ul>
3671
3672<p>XPath is supposed to be thread safe now, but this wasn't tested
3673seriously.</p>
3674
Daniel Veillard35008381999-10-25 13:15:52 +00003675<h2><a name="DOM"></a><a name="Principles">DOM Principles</a></h2>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003676
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +00003677<p><a href="http://www.w3.org/DOM/">DOM</a> stands for the <em>Document
3678Object Model</em>; this is an API for accessing XML or HTML structured
3679documents. Native support for DOM in Gnome is on the way (module gnome-dom),
3680and will be based on gnome-xml. This will be a far cleaner interface to
3681manipulate XML files within Gnome since it won't expose the internal
3682structure.</p>
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +00003683
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00003684<p>The current DOM implementation on top of libxml is the <a
Daniel Veillarda47fb3d2001-03-25 17:23:49 +00003685href="http://cvs.gnome.org/lxr/source/gdome2/">gdome2 Gnome module</a>, this
3686is a full DOM interface, thanks to Paolo Casarini, check the <a
3687href="http://www.cs.unibo.it/~casarini/gdome2/">Gdome2 homepage</a> for more
3688informations.</p>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00003689
Daniel Veillard35008381999-10-25 13:15:52 +00003690<h2><a name="Example"></a><a name="real">A real example</a></h2>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003691
3692<p>Here is a real size example, where the actual content of the application
3693data is not kept in the DOM tree but uses internal structures. It is based on
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +00003694a proposal to keep a database of jobs related to Gnome, with an XML based
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003695storage structure. Here is an <a href="gjobs.xml">XML encoded jobs
3696base</a>:</p>
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00003697<pre>&lt;?xml version="1.0"?&gt;
3698&lt;gjob:Helping xmlns:gjob="http://www.gnome.org/some-location"&gt;
3699 &lt;gjob:Jobs&gt;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +00003700
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00003701 &lt;gjob:Job&gt;
3702 &lt;gjob:Project ID="3"/&gt;
3703 &lt;gjob:Application&gt;GBackup&lt;/gjob:Application&gt;
3704 &lt;gjob:Category&gt;Development&lt;/gjob:Category&gt;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +00003705
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00003706 &lt;gjob:Update&gt;
3707 &lt;gjob:Status&gt;Open&lt;/gjob:Status&gt;
3708 &lt;gjob:Modified&gt;Mon, 07 Jun 1999 20:27:45 -0400 MET DST&lt;/gjob:Modified&gt;
3709 &lt;gjob:Salary&gt;USD 0.00&lt;/gjob:Salary&gt;
3710 &lt;/gjob:Update&gt;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +00003711
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00003712 &lt;gjob:Developers&gt;
3713 &lt;gjob:Developer&gt;
3714 &lt;/gjob:Developer&gt;
3715 &lt;/gjob:Developers&gt;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +00003716
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00003717 &lt;gjob:Contact&gt;
3718 &lt;gjob:Person&gt;Nathan Clemons&lt;/gjob:Person&gt;
3719 &lt;gjob:Email&gt;nathan@windsofstorm.net&lt;/gjob:Email&gt;
3720 &lt;gjob:Company&gt;
3721 &lt;/gjob:Company&gt;
3722 &lt;gjob:Organisation&gt;
3723 &lt;/gjob:Organisation&gt;
3724 &lt;gjob:Webpage&gt;
3725 &lt;/gjob:Webpage&gt;
3726 &lt;gjob:Snailmail&gt;
3727 &lt;/gjob:Snailmail&gt;
3728 &lt;gjob:Phone&gt;
3729 &lt;/gjob:Phone&gt;
3730 &lt;/gjob:Contact&gt;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +00003731
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00003732 &lt;gjob:Requirements&gt;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +00003733 The program should be released as free software, under the GPL.
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00003734 &lt;/gjob:Requirements&gt;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +00003735
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00003736 &lt;gjob:Skills&gt;
3737 &lt;/gjob:Skills&gt;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +00003738
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00003739 &lt;gjob:Details&gt;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +00003740 A GNOME based system that will allow a superuser to configure
3741 compressed and uncompressed files and/or file systems to be backed
3742 up with a supported media in the system. This should be able to
3743 perform via find commands generating a list of files that are passed
3744 to tar, dd, cpio, cp, gzip, etc., to be directed to the tape machine
3745 or via operations performed on the filesystem itself. Email
3746 notification and GUI status display very important.
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00003747 &lt;/gjob:Details&gt;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +00003748
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00003749 &lt;/gjob:Job&gt;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +00003750
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00003751 &lt;/gjob:Jobs&gt;
3752&lt;/gjob:Helping&gt;</pre>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003753
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +00003754<p>While loading the XML file into an internal DOM tree is a matter of
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00003755calling only a couple of functions, browsing the tree to gather the data and
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +00003756generate the internal structures is harder, and more error prone.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003757
3758<p>The suggested principle is to be tolerant with respect to the input
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +00003759structure. For example, the ordering of the attributes is not significant,
3760the XML specification is clear about it. It's also usually a good idea not to
Daniel Veillardec70e912001-02-26 20:10:45 +00003761depend on the order of the children of a given node, unless it really makes
3762things harder. Here is some code to parse the information for a person:</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003763<pre>/*
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +00003764 * A person record
3765 */
3766typedef struct person {
3767 char *name;
3768 char *email;
3769 char *company;
3770 char *organisation;
3771 char *smail;
3772 char *webPage;
3773 char *phone;
3774} person, *personPtr;
3775
3776/*
3777 * And the code needed to parse it
3778 */
3779personPtr parsePerson(xmlDocPtr doc, xmlNsPtr ns, xmlNodePtr cur) {
3780 personPtr ret = NULL;
3781
3782DEBUG("parsePerson\n");
3783 /*
3784 * allocate the struct
3785 */
3786 ret = (personPtr) malloc(sizeof(person));
3787 if (ret == NULL) {
3788 fprintf(stderr,"out of memory\n");
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003789 return(NULL);
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +00003790 }
3791 memset(ret, 0, sizeof(person));
3792
3793 /* We don't care what the top level element name is */
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00003794 cur = cur-&gt;xmlChildrenNode;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +00003795 while (cur != NULL) {
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00003796 if ((!strcmp(cur-&gt;name, "Person")) &amp;&amp; (cur-&gt;ns == ns))
3797 ret-&gt;name = xmlNodeListGetString(doc, cur-&gt;xmlChildrenNode, 1);
3798 if ((!strcmp(cur-&gt;name, "Email")) &amp;&amp; (cur-&gt;ns == ns))
3799 ret-&gt;email = xmlNodeListGetString(doc, cur-&gt;xmlChildrenNode, 1);
3800 cur = cur-&gt;next;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +00003801 }
3802
3803 return(ret);
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003804}</pre>
3805
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +00003806<p>Here are a couple of things to notice:</p>
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +00003807<ul>
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +00003808 <li>Usually a recursive parsing style is the more convenient one: XML data
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00003809 is by nature subject to repetitive constructs and usually exhibits highly
3810 structured patterns.</li>
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +00003811 <li>The two arguments of type <em>xmlDocPtr</em> and <em>xmlNsPtr</em>,
3812 i.e. the pointer to the global XML document and the namespace reserved to
3813 the application. Document wide information are needed for example to
3814 decode entities and it's a good coding practice to define a namespace for
3815 your application set of data and test that the element and attributes
3816 you're analyzing actually pertains to your application space. This is
3817 done by a simple equality test (cur-&gt;ns == ns).</li>
Daniel Veillardec70e912001-02-26 20:10:45 +00003818 <li>To retrieve text and attributes value, you can use the function
3819 <em>xmlNodeListGetString</em> to gather all the text and entity reference
3820 nodes generated by the DOM output and produce an single text string.</li>
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +00003821</ul>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003822
3823<p>Here is another piece of code used to parse another level of the
3824structure:</p>
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00003825<pre>#include &lt;libxml/tree.h&gt;
Daniel Veillard361d8452000-04-03 19:48:13 +00003826/*
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +00003827 * a Description for a Job
3828 */
3829typedef struct job {
3830 char *projectID;
3831 char *application;
3832 char *category;
3833 personPtr contact;
3834 int nbDevelopers;
3835 personPtr developers[100]; /* using dynamic alloc is left as an exercise */
3836} job, *jobPtr;
3837
3838/*
3839 * And the code needed to parse it
3840 */
3841jobPtr parseJob(xmlDocPtr doc, xmlNsPtr ns, xmlNodePtr cur) {
3842 jobPtr ret = NULL;
3843
3844DEBUG("parseJob\n");
3845 /*
3846 * allocate the struct
3847 */
3848 ret = (jobPtr) malloc(sizeof(job));
3849 if (ret == NULL) {
3850 fprintf(stderr,"out of memory\n");
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003851 return(NULL);
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +00003852 }
3853 memset(ret, 0, sizeof(job));
3854
3855 /* We don't care what the top level element name is */
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00003856 cur = cur-&gt;xmlChildrenNode;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +00003857 while (cur != NULL) {
3858
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00003859 if ((!strcmp(cur-&gt;name, "Project")) &amp;&amp; (cur-&gt;ns == ns)) {
3860 ret-&gt;projectID = xmlGetProp(cur, "ID");
3861 if (ret-&gt;projectID == NULL) {
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003862 fprintf(stderr, "Project has no ID\n");
3863 }
3864 }
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00003865 if ((!strcmp(cur-&gt;name, "Application")) &amp;&amp; (cur-&gt;ns == ns))
3866 ret-&gt;application = xmlNodeListGetString(doc, cur-&gt;xmlChildrenNode, 1);
3867 if ((!strcmp(cur-&gt;name, "Category")) &amp;&amp; (cur-&gt;ns == ns))
3868 ret-&gt;category = xmlNodeListGetString(doc, cur-&gt;xmlChildrenNode, 1);
3869 if ((!strcmp(cur-&gt;name, "Contact")) &amp;&amp; (cur-&gt;ns == ns))
3870 ret-&gt;contact = parsePerson(doc, ns, cur);
3871 cur = cur-&gt;next;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +00003872 }
3873
3874 return(ret);
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003875}</pre>
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +00003876
Daniel Veillardec70e912001-02-26 20:10:45 +00003877<p>Once you are used to it, writing this kind of code is quite simple, but
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00003878boring. Ultimately, it could be possible to write stubbers taking either C
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +00003879data structure definitions, a set of XML examples or an XML DTD and produce
3880the code needed to import and export the content between C data and XML
3881storage. This is left as an exercise to the reader :-)</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003882
Daniel Veillard6f0adb52000-07-03 11:41:26 +00003883<p>Feel free to use <a href="example/gjobread.c">the code for the full C
3884parsing example</a> as a template, it is also available with Makefile in the
3885Gnome CVS base under gnome-xml/example</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003886
Daniel Veillardc310d562000-06-23 18:32:15 +00003887<h2><a name="Contributi">Contributions</a></h2>
3888<ul>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00003889 <li>Bjorn Reese, William Brack and Thomas Broyer have provided a number of
3890 patches, Gary Pennington worked on the validation API, threading support
3891 and Solaris port.</li>
3892 <li>John Fleck helps maintaining the documentation and man pages.</li>
Daniel Veillardb2fb8ed2002-04-01 09:33:12 +00003893 <li><a href="mailto:igor@stud.fh-frankfurt.de">Igor Zlatkovic</a> is now
3894 the maintainer of the Windows port, <a
Daniel Veillard95189532001-07-26 18:30:26 +00003895 href="http://www.fh-frankfurt.de/~igor/projects/libxml/index.html">he
3896 provides binaries</a></li>
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +00003897 <li><a href="mailto:Gary.Pennington@sun.com">Gary Pennington</a> provides
3898 <a href="http://garypennington.net/libxml2/">Solaris binaries</a></li>
Daniel Veillarde356c282001-03-10 12:32:04 +00003899 <li><a
3900 href="http://mail.gnome.org/archives/xml/2001-March/msg00014.html">Matt
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00003901 Sergeant</a> developed <a
3902 href="http://axkit.org/download/">XML::LibXSLT</a>, a Perl wrapper for
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +00003903 libxml2/libxslt as part of the <a href="http://axkit.com/">AxKit XML
3904 application server</a></li>
3905 <li><a href="mailto:fnatter@gmx.net">Felix Natter</a> and <a
3906 href="mailto:geertk@ai.rug.nl">Geert Kloosterman</a> provide <a
Daniel Veillardca989762001-06-23 17:39:29 +00003907 href="libxml-doc.el">an emacs module</a> to lookup libxml(2) functions
Daniel Veillard3f6f7f62000-06-30 17:58:25 +00003908 documentation</li>
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +00003909 <li><a href="mailto:sherwin@nlm.nih.gov">Ziying Sherwin</a> provided <a
3910 href="http://xmlsoft.org/messages/0488.html">man pages</a></li>
Daniel Veillard5168dbf2001-07-07 00:18:23 +00003911 <li>there is a module for <a
3912 href="http://acs-misc.sourceforge.net/nsxml.html">libxml/libxslt support
3913 in OpenNSD/AOLServer</a></li>
Daniel Veillard2d347fa2002-03-17 10:34:11 +00003914 <li><a href="mailto:dkuhlman@cutter.rexx.com">Dave Kuhlman</a> provided the
3915 first version of libxml/libxslt <a
3916 href="http://www.rexx.com/~dkuhlman">wrappers for Python</a></li>
Daniel Veillard1aadc442001-11-28 13:10:32 +00003917 <li>Petr Kozelka provides <a
3918 href="http://sourceforge.net/projects/libxml2-pas">Pascal units to glue
3919 libxml2</a> with Kylix and Delphi and other Pascal compilers</li>
Daniel Veillard2d347fa2002-03-17 10:34:11 +00003920 <li><a href="mailto:aleksey@aleksey.com">Aleksey Sanin</a> implemented the
3921 <a href="http://www.w3.org/Signature/">XML Canonicalization and XML
3922 Digital Signature</a> <a
3923 href="http://www.aleksey.com/xmlsec/">implementations for libxml2</a></li>
Daniel Veillardc310d562000-06-23 18:32:15 +00003924</ul>
3925
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00003926<p></p>
Daniel Veillardccb09631998-10-27 06:21:04 +00003927</body>
3928</html>