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Daniel Veillard09ab7e12001-07-10 15:49:44 +0000[diff] [blame]1<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"
2 "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
Daniel Veillardccb09631998-10-27 06:21:04 +0000[diff] [blame]3<html>
4<head>
Daniel Veillardec78c0f2000-08-25 10:25:23 +0000[diff] [blame]5 <title>The XML C library for Gnome</title>
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame]6 <meta name="GENERATOR" content="amaya V5.0">
Daniel Veillardb24054a1999-12-18 15:32:46 +0000[diff] [blame]7 <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html">
Daniel Veillardccb09631998-10-27 06:21:04 +0000[diff] [blame]8</head>
Daniel Veillardccb09631998-10-27 06:21:04 +0000[diff] [blame]9
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]10<body bgcolor="#ffffff">
Daniel Veillardec78c0f2000-08-25 10:25:23 +0000[diff] [blame]11<h1 align="center">The XML C library for Gnome</h1>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]12
Daniel Veillardc9484202001-10-24 12:35:52 +0000[diff] [blame^]13<h1 style="text-align: center">libxml, a.k.a. gnome-xml</h1>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]14
15<p></p>
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000[diff] [blame]16<ul>
17 <li><a href="#Introducti">Introduction</a></li>
18 <li><a href="#Documentat">Documentation</a></li>
Daniel Veillardd5f97f82000-09-17 16:38:14 +0000[diff] [blame]19 <li><a href="#Reporting">Reporting bugs and getting help</a></li>
20 <li><a href="#help">how to help</a></li>
Daniel Veillard10a2c651999-12-12 13:03:50 +0000[diff] [blame]21 <li><a href="#Downloads">Downloads</a></li>
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000[diff] [blame]22 <li><a href="#News">News</a></li>
23 <li><a href="#XML">XML</a></li>
Daniel Veillard82687162001-01-22 15:32:01 +0000[diff] [blame]24 <li><a href="#XSLT">XSLT</a></li>
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000[diff] [blame]25 <li><a href="#tree">The tree output</a></li>
26 <li><a href="#interface">The SAX interface</a></li>
Daniel Veillardc9484202001-10-24 12:35:52 +0000[diff] [blame^]27 <li><a href="#library">The XML library interfaces</a></li>
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000[diff] [blame]28 <li><a href="#Entities">Entities or no entities</a></li>
29 <li><a href="#Namespaces">Namespaces</a></li>
30 <li><a href="#Validation">Validation</a></li>
31 <li><a href="#Principles">DOM principles</a></li>
32 <li><a href="#real">A real example</a></li>
Daniel Veillard96984452000-08-31 13:50:12 +0000[diff] [blame]33 <li><a href="#Contributi">Contributions</a></li>
34</ul>
35
36<p>Separate documents:</p>
37<ul>
38 <li><a href="upgrade.html">upgrade instructions for migrating to
39 libxml2</a></li>
40 <li><a href="encoding.html">libxml Internationalization support</a></li>
41 <li><a href="xmlio.html">libxml Input/Output interfaces</a></li>
Daniel Veillard189446d2000-10-13 10:23:06 +0000[diff] [blame]42 <li><a href="xmlmem.html">libxml Memory interfaces</a></li>
Daniel Veillarde7ead2d2001-08-22 23:44:09 +0000[diff] [blame]43 <li><a href="catalog.html">libxml Catalog support</a></li>
Daniel Veillard300f7d62000-11-24 13:04:04 +0000[diff] [blame]44 <li><a href="xmldtd.html">a short introduction about DTDs and
45 libxml</a></li>
Daniel Veillard6e6a6cc2001-02-15 15:55:44 +0000[diff] [blame]46 <li><a href="http://xmlsoft.org/XSLT/">the libxslt page</a></li>
Daniel Veillard7b06bcb2001-06-22 16:03:51 +0000[diff] [blame]47 <li><a href="http://www.cs.unibo.it/~casarini/gdome2/">the gdome2 page: a
48 standard DOM interface for libxml2</a></li>
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000[diff] [blame]49</ul>
50
51<h2><a name="Introducti">Introduction</a></h2>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]52
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +0000[diff] [blame]53<p>This document describes libxml, the <a
Daniel Veillardec78c0f2000-08-25 10:25:23 +0000[diff] [blame]54href="http://www.w3.org/XML/">XML</a> C library developped for the <a
55href="http://www.gnome.org/">Gnome</a> project. <a
56href="http://www.w3.org/XML/">XML is a standard</a> for building tag-based
57structured documents/data.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]58
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000[diff] [blame]59<p>Here are some key points about libxml:</p>
60<ul>
Daniel Veillard189446d2000-10-13 10:23:06 +0000[diff] [blame]61 <li>Libxml exports Push and Pull type parser interfaces for both XML and
62 HTML.</li>
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000[diff] [blame]63 <li>Libxml can do DTD validation at parse time, using a parsed document
64 instance, or with an arbitrary DTD.</li>
65 <li>Libxml now includes nearly complete <a
Daniel Veillard8c2ecaf2001-07-10 17:53:07 +0000[diff] [blame]66 href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xpath">XPath</a>, <a
67 href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xptr">XPointer</a> and <a
68 href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xinclude">XInclude</a> implementations.</li>
Daniel Veillardec78c0f2000-08-25 10:25:23 +0000[diff] [blame]69 <li>It is written in plain C, making as few assumptions as possible, and
Daniel Veillard189446d2000-10-13 10:23:06 +0000[diff] [blame]70 sticking closely to ANSI C/POSIX for easy embedding. Works on
Daniel Veillardab8500d2000-10-15 21:06:19 +0000[diff] [blame]71 Linux/Unix/Windows, ported to a number of other platforms.</li>
Daniel Veillardec70e912001-02-26 20:10:45 +0000[diff] [blame]72 <li>Basic support for HTTP and FTP client allowing aplications to fetch
73 remote resources</li>
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000[diff] [blame]74 <li>The design is modular, most of the extensions can be compiled out.</li>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000[diff] [blame]75 <li>The internal document repesentation is as close as possible to the <a
76 href="http://www.w3.org/DOM/">DOM</a> interfaces.</li>
77 <li>Libxml also has a <a href="http://www.megginson.com/SAX/index.html">SAX
Daniel Veillard402e8c82000-02-29 22:57:47 +0000[diff] [blame]78 like interface</a>; the interface is designed to be compatible with <a
79 href="http://www.jclark.com/xml/expat.html">Expat</a>.</li>
Daniel Veillardec303412000-03-24 13:41:54 +0000[diff] [blame]80 <li>This library is released both under the <a
81 href="http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Legal/copyright-software-19980720.html">W3C
Daniel Veillard189446d2000-10-13 10:23:06 +0000[diff] [blame]82 IPR</a> and the <a href="http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/lesser.html">GNU
83 LGPL</a>. Use either at your convenience, basically this should make
84 everybody happy, if not, drop me a mail.</li>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000[diff] [blame]85</ul>
Daniel Veillardccb09631998-10-27 06:21:04 +0000[diff] [blame]86
Daniel Veillarde0c1d722001-03-21 10:28:36 +0000[diff] [blame]87<p>Warning: unless you are forced to because your application links with a
88Gnome library requiring it, <strong><span
89style="background-color: #FF0000">Do Not Use libxml1</span></strong>, use
90libxml2</p>
91
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000[diff] [blame]92<h2><a name="Documentat">Documentation</a></h2>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]93
Daniel Veillard402e8c82000-02-29 22:57:47 +0000[diff] [blame]94<p>There are some on-line resources about using libxml:</p>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000[diff] [blame]95<ol>
Daniel Veillard365e13b2000-07-02 07:56:37 +0000[diff] [blame]96 <li>Check the <a href="FAQ.html">FAQ</a></li>
Daniel Veillardc19fccc2000-07-03 11:52:01 +0000[diff] [blame]97 <li>Check the <a href="http://xmlsoft.org/html/libxml-lib.html">extensive
Daniel Veillard8c6d6af2000-08-25 17:14:13 +0000[diff] [blame]98 documentation</a> automatically extracted from code comments (using <a
99 href="http://cvs.gnome.org/bonsai/rview.cgi?cvsroot=/cvs/gnome&amp;dir=gtk-doc">gtk
100 doc</a>).</li>
Daniel Veillard8d869642000-07-14 12:12:59 +0000[diff] [blame]101 <li>Look at the documentation about <a href="encoding.html">libxml
102 internationalization support</a></li>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000[diff] [blame]103 <li>This page provides a global overview and <a href="#real">some
Daniel Veillard402e8c82000-02-29 22:57:47 +0000[diff] [blame]104 examples</a> on how to use libxml.</li>
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame]105 <li><a href="mailto:james@daa.com.au">James Henstridge</a>
106 wrote <a
Daniel Veillard402e8c82000-02-29 22:57:47 +0000[diff] [blame]107 href="http://www.daa.com.au/~james/gnome/xml-sax/xml-sax.html">some nice
108 documentation</a> explaining how to use the libxml SAX interface.</li>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000[diff] [blame]109 <li>George Lebl wrote <a
110 href="http://www-4.ibm.com/software/developer/library/gnome3/">an article
Daniel Veillard402e8c82000-02-29 22:57:47 +0000[diff] [blame]111 for IBM developerWorks</a> about using libxml.</li>
Daniel Veillardec303412000-03-24 13:41:54 +0000[diff] [blame]112 <li>Check <a href="http://cvs.gnome.org/lxr/source/gnome-xml/TODO">the TODO
113 file</a></li>
114 <li>Read the <a href="upgrade.html">1.x to 2.x upgrade path</a>. If you are
115 starting a new project using libxml you should really use the 2.x
116 version.</li>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000[diff] [blame]117 <li>And don't forget to look at the <a href="/messages/">mailing-list
Daniel Veillardc310d562000-06-23 18:32:15 +0000[diff] [blame]118 archive</a>.</li>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000[diff] [blame]119</ol>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]120
Daniel Veillardd5f97f82000-09-17 16:38:14 +0000[diff] [blame]121<h2><a name="Reporting">Reporting bugs and getting help</a></h2>
Daniel Veillard4c3a2031999-11-19 17:46:26 +0000[diff] [blame]122
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame]123<p>Well, bugs or missing features are always possible, and I will make a
124point of fixing them in a timely fashion. The best way to report a bug is to
125use the <a href="http://bugzilla.gnome.org/buglist.cgi?product=libxml">Gnome
126bug tracking database</a> (make sure to use the "libxml" module name). I look
127at reports there regularly and it's good to have a reminder when a bug is
128still open. Check the <a
129href="http://bugzilla.gnome.org/bugwritinghelp.html">instructions on
130reporting bugs</a> and be sure to specify that the bug is for the package
131libxml.</p>
Daniel Veillard4c3a2031999-11-19 17:46:26 +0000[diff] [blame]132
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000[diff] [blame]133<p>There is also a mailing-list <a
Daniel Veillard3197f162001-04-04 00:40:08 +0000[diff] [blame]134href="mailto:xml@gnome.org">xml@gnome.org</a> for libxml, with an <a
135href="http://mail.gnome.org/archives/xml/">on-line archive</a> (<a
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame]136href="http://xmlsoft.org/messages">old</a>). To subscribe to this list,
137please visit the <a
138href="http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/xml">associated Web</a> page and
139follow the instructions. <strong>Do not send code, I won't debug it</strong>
140(but patches are really appreciated!).</p>
Daniel Veillard234547b2001-07-05 09:46:10 +0000[diff] [blame]141
Daniel Veillard008186f2001-09-13 14:24:44 +0000[diff] [blame]142<p>Check the following <strong><span style="color: #FF0000">before
143posting</span></strong>:</p>
Daniel Veillard234547b2001-07-05 09:46:10 +0000[diff] [blame]144<ul>
Daniel Veillarddadd0872001-09-15 09:21:44 +0000[diff] [blame]145 <li>read the <a href="FAQ.html">FAQ</a></li>
Daniel Veillard234547b2001-07-05 09:46:10 +0000[diff] [blame]146 <li>make sure you are <a href="ftp://xmlsoft.org/">using a recent
147 version</a>, and that the problem still shows up in those</li>
148 <li>check the <a href="http://mail.gnome.org/archives/xml/">list
149 archives</a> to see if the problem was reported already, in this case
Daniel Veillarde7ead2d2001-08-22 23:44:09 +0000[diff] [blame]150 there is probably a fix available, similary check the <a
151 href="http://bugzilla.gnome.org/buglist.cgi?product=libxml">registered
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame]152 open bugs</a></li>
Daniel Veillard234547b2001-07-05 09:46:10 +0000[diff] [blame]153 <li>make sure you can reproduce the bug with xmllint or one of the test
154 programs found in source in the distribution</li>
155 <li>Please send the command showing the error as well as the input (as an
156 attachement)</li>
157</ul>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000[diff] [blame]158
Daniel Veillarddadd0872001-09-15 09:21:44 +0000[diff] [blame]159<p>Then send the bug with associated informations to reproduce it to the <a
Daniel Veillard33a67802001-03-07 09:44:02 +0000[diff] [blame]160href="mailto:xml@gnome.org">xml@gnome.org</a> list; if it's really libxml
Daniel Veillard008186f2001-09-13 14:24:44 +0000[diff] [blame]161related I will approve it.. Please do not send me mail directly, it makes
162things really harder to track and in some cases I'm not the best person to
163answer a given question, ask the list instead.</p>
Daniel Veillard4c3a2031999-11-19 17:46:26 +0000[diff] [blame]164
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000[diff] [blame]165<p>Of course, bugs reported with a suggested patch for fixing them will
Daniel Veillardec303412000-03-24 13:41:54 +0000[diff] [blame]166probably be processed faster.</p>
167
168<p>If you're looking for help, a quick look at <a
Daniel Veillardf7ed3362001-08-17 12:01:21 +0000[diff] [blame]169href="http://mail.gnome.org/archives/xml/">the list archive</a> may actually
Daniel Veillardec303412000-03-24 13:41:54 +0000[diff] [blame]170provide the answer, I usually send source samples when answering libxml usage
Daniel Veillard6f0adb52000-07-03 11:41:26 +0000[diff] [blame]171questions. The <a href="http://xmlsoft.org/html/book1.html">auto-generated
Daniel Veillardec303412000-03-24 13:41:54 +0000[diff] [blame]172documentantion</a> is not as polished as I would like (i need to learn more
173about Docbook), but it's a good starting point.</p>
174
Daniel Veillardd5f97f82000-09-17 16:38:14 +0000[diff] [blame]175<h2><a name="help">How to help</a></h2>
176
177<p>You can help the project in various ways, the best thing to do first is to
178subscribe to the mailing-list as explained before, check the <a
Daniel Veillardf7ed3362001-08-17 12:01:21 +0000[diff] [blame]179href="http://mail.gnome.org/archives/xml/">archives </a>and the <a
180href="http://bugzilla.gnome.org/buglist.cgi?product=libxml">Gnome bug
Daniel Veillardd5f97f82000-09-17 16:38:14 +0000[diff] [blame]181database:</a>:</p>
182<ol>
183 <li>provide patches when you find problems</li>
Daniel Veillard189446d2000-10-13 10:23:06 +0000[diff] [blame]184 <li>provide the diffs when you port libxml to a new platform. They may not
Daniel Veillardab8500d2000-10-15 21:06:19 +0000[diff] [blame]185 be integrated in all cases but help pinpointing portability problems
186 and</li>
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000[diff] [blame]187 <li>provide documentation fixes (either as patches to the code comments or
Daniel Veillardd5f97f82000-09-17 16:38:14 +0000[diff] [blame]188 as HTML diffs).</li>
189 <li>provide new documentations pieces (translations, examples, etc ...)</li>
190 <li>Check the TODO file and try to close one of the items</li>
191 <li>take one of the points raised in the archive or the bug database and
Daniel Veillarde7ead2d2001-08-22 23:44:09 +0000[diff] [blame]192 provide a fix. <a href="mailto:daniel@veillard.com">Get in touch with me
193 </a>before to avoid synchronization problems and check that the suggested
194 fix will fit in nicely :-)</li>
Daniel Veillardd5f97f82000-09-17 16:38:14 +0000[diff] [blame]195</ol>
196
Daniel Veillard10a2c651999-12-12 13:03:50 +0000[diff] [blame]197<h2><a name="Downloads">Downloads</a></h2>
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000[diff] [blame]198
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]199<p>The latest versions of libxml can be found on <a
Daniel Veillard20c8cf22001-06-26 22:47:36 +0000[diff] [blame]200href="ftp://xmlsoft.org/">xmlsoft.org</a> (<a
201href="ftp://speakeasy.rpmfind.net/pub/libxml/">Seattle</a>, <a
202href="ftp://fr.rpmfind.net/pub/libxml/">France</a>) or on the <a
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000[diff] [blame]203href="ftp://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/MIRRORS.html">Gnome FTP server</a> either
Daniel Veillard10a2c651999-12-12 13:03:50 +0000[diff] [blame]204as a <a href="ftp://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/stable/sources/libxml/">source
Daniel Veillard306be992000-07-03 12:38:45 +0000[diff] [blame]205archive</a> or <a
Daniel Veillarda41123c2001-04-22 19:31:20 +0000[diff] [blame]206href="ftp://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/stable/redhat/i386/libxml/">RPM
207packages</a>. (NOTE that you need both the <a
Daniel Veillardc19fccc2000-07-03 11:52:01 +0000[diff] [blame]208href="http://rpmfind.net/linux/RPM/libxml2.html">libxml(2)</a> and <a
209href="http://rpmfind.net/linux/RPM/libxml2-devel.html">libxml(2)-devel</a>
Daniel Veillard95189532001-07-26 18:30:26 +0000[diff] [blame]210packages installed to compile applications using libxml.) <a
211href="mailto:izlatkovic@daenet.de">Igor Zlatkovic</a> is now the maintainer
212of the Windows port, <a
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame]213href="http://www.fh-frankfurt.de/~igor/projects/libxml/index.html">he
214provides binaries</a></p>
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000[diff] [blame]215
Daniel Veillard6c8b1172000-03-01 00:40:41 +0000[diff] [blame]216<p><a name="Snapshot">Snapshot:</a></p>
217<ul>
218 <li>Code from the W3C cvs base libxml <a
Daniel Veillard33a67802001-03-07 09:44:02 +0000[diff] [blame]219 href="ftp://xmlsoft.org/cvs-snapshot.tar.gz">cvs-snapshot.tar.gz</a></li>
Daniel Veillard6c8b1172000-03-01 00:40:41 +0000[diff] [blame]220 <li>Docs, content of the web site, the list archive included <a
Daniel Veillard33a67802001-03-07 09:44:02 +0000[diff] [blame]221 href="ftp://xmlsoft.org/libxml-docs.tar.gz">libxml-docs.tar.gz</a></li>
Daniel Veillard6c8b1172000-03-01 00:40:41 +0000[diff] [blame]222</ul>
223
224<p><a name="Contribs">Contribs:</a></p>
225
226<p>I do accept external contributions, especially if compiling on another
227platform, get in touch with me to upload the package. I will keep them in the
Daniel Veillard33a67802001-03-07 09:44:02 +0000[diff] [blame]228<a href="ftp://xmlsoft.org/contribs/">contrib directory</a></p>
Daniel Veillard6c8b1172000-03-01 00:40:41 +0000[diff] [blame]229
Daniel Veillard82687162001-01-22 15:32:01 +0000[diff] [blame]230<p>Libxml is also available from CVS:</p>
Daniel Veillard10a2c651999-12-12 13:03:50 +0000[diff] [blame]231<ul>
Daniel Veillard10a2c651999-12-12 13:03:50 +0000[diff] [blame]232 <li><p>The <a
233 href="http://cvs.gnome.org/bonsai/rview.cgi?cvsroot=/cvs/gnome&amp;dir=gnome-xml">Gnome
Daniel Veillard402e8c82000-02-29 22:57:47 +0000[diff] [blame]234 CVS base</a>. Check the <a
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame]235 href="http://developer.gnome.org/tools/cvs.html">Gnome CVS Tools</a>
236 page; the CVS module is <b>gnome-xml</b>.</p>
Daniel Veillard10a2c651999-12-12 13:03:50 +0000[diff] [blame]237 </li>
Daniel Veillard82687162001-01-22 15:32:01 +0000[diff] [blame]238 <li>The <strong>libxslt</strong> module is also present there</li>
Daniel Veillard10a2c651999-12-12 13:03:50 +0000[diff] [blame]239</ul>
240
241<h2><a name="News">News</a></h2>
242
Daniel Veillard944b5ff1999-12-15 19:08:24 +0000[diff] [blame]243<h3>CVS only : check the <a
244href="http://cvs.gnome.org/lxr/source/gnome-xml/ChangeLog">Changelog</a> file
Daniel Veillard189446d2000-10-13 10:23:06 +0000[diff] [blame]245for a really accurate description</h3>
Daniel Veillardab8500d2000-10-15 21:06:19 +0000[diff] [blame]246
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000[diff] [blame]247<p>Items floating around but not actively worked on, get in touch with me if
Daniel Veillardab8500d2000-10-15 21:06:19 +0000[diff] [blame]248you want to test those</p>
249<ul>
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame]250 <li>Implementing <a href="http://xmlsoft.org/XSLT">XSLT</a>, this is done
251 as a separate C library on top of libxml called libxslt</li>
Daniel Veillard28929b22000-11-13 18:22:49 +0000[diff] [blame]252 <li>Finishing up <a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xptr">XPointer</a> and <a
253 href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xinclude">XInclude</a></li>
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame]254 <li>(seeems working but delayed from release) parsing/import of Docbook
255 SGML docs</li>
256</ul>
257
Daniel Veillard60087f32001-10-10 09:45:09 +0000[diff] [blame]258<h3>2.4.6: Oct 10 2001</h3>
259<ul>
260 <li>added and updated man pages by John Fleck</li>
261 <li>portability and configure fixes</li>
262 <li>an infinite loop on the HTML parser was removed (William)</li>
263 <li>Windows makefile patches from Igor</li>
264 <li>fixed half a dozen bugs reported fof libxml or libxslt</li>
265 <li>updated xmlcatalog to be able to modify SGML super catalogs</li>
266</ul>
267
Daniel Veillarddadd0872001-09-15 09:21:44 +0000[diff] [blame]268<h3>2.4.5: Sep 14 2001</h3>
269<ul>
270 <li>Remove a few annoying bugs in 2.4.4</li>
271 <li>forces the HTML serializer to output decimal charrefs since some
272 version of Netscape can't handle hexadecimal ones</li>
273</ul>
274
275<h3>1.8.16: Sep 14 2001</h3>
276<ul>
277 <li>maintenance release of the old libxml1 branch, couple of bug and
278 portability fixes</li>
279</ul>
280
Daniel Veillard04382ae2001-09-12 18:51:30 +0000[diff] [blame]281<h3>2.4.4: Sep 12 2001</h3>
282<ul>
283 <li>added --convert to xmlcatalog, bug fixes and cleanups of XML
284 Catalog</li>
285 <li>a few bug fixes and some portability changes</li>
286 <li>some documentation cleanups</li>
287</ul>
288
Daniel Veillard39936902001-08-24 00:49:01 +0000[diff] [blame]289<h3>2.4.3: Aug 23 2001</h3>
290<ul>
291 <li>XML Catalog support see the doc</li>
292 <li>New NaN/Infinity floating point code</li>
293 <li>A few bug fixes</li>
294</ul>
295
296<h3>2.4.2: Aug 15 2001</h3>
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame]297<ul>
298 <li>adds xmlLineNumbersDefault() to control line number generation</li>
299 <li>lot of bug fixes</li>
300 <li>the Microsoft MSC projects files shuld now be up to date</li>
301 <li>inheritance of namespaces from DTD defaulted attributes</li>
302 <li>fixes a serious potential security bug</li>
303 <li>added a --format option to xmllint</li>
304</ul>
305
306<h3>2.4.1: July 24 2001</h3>
307<ul>
308 <li>possibility to keep line numbers in the tree</li>
309 <li>some computation NaN fixes</li>
310 <li>extension of the XPath API</li>
311 <li>cleanup for alpha and ia64 targets</li>
312 <li>patch to allow saving through HTTP PUT or POST</li>
Daniel Veillard09ab7e12001-07-10 15:49:44 +0000[diff] [blame]313</ul>
314
315<h3>2.4.0: July 10 2001</h3>
316<ul>
317 <li>Fixed a few bugs in XPath, validation, and tree handling.</li>
318 <li>Fixed XML Base implementation, added a coupel of examples to the
319 regression tests</li>
320 <li>A bit of cleanup</li>
Daniel Veillardab8500d2000-10-15 21:06:19 +0000[diff] [blame]321</ul>
322
Daniel Veillard5b43fde2001-07-05 23:31:40 +0000[diff] [blame]323<h3>2.3.14: July 5 2001</h3>
324<ul>
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame]325 <li>fixed some entities problems and reduce mem requirement when
326 substituing them</li>
Daniel Veillard5b43fde2001-07-05 23:31:40 +0000[diff] [blame]327 <li>lots of improvements in the XPath queries interpreter can be
328 substancially faster</li>
329 <li>Makefiles and configure cleanups</li>
330 <li>Fixes to XPath variable eval, and compare on empty node set</li>
331 <li>HTML tag closing bug fixed</li>
332 <li>Fixed an URI reference computating problem when validating</li>
333</ul>
334
Daniel Veillard2adbb512001-06-28 16:20:36 +0000[diff] [blame]335<h3>2.3.13: June 28 2001</h3>
336<ul>
337 <li>2.3.12 configure.in was broken as well as the push mode XML parser</li>
338 <li>a few more fixes for compilation on Windows MSC by Yon Derek</li>
339</ul>
340
341<h3>1.8.14: June 28 2001</h3>
342<ul>
343 <li>Zbigniew Chyla gave a patch to use the old XML parser in push mode</li>
344 <li>Small Makefile fix</li>
345</ul>
346
Daniel Veillard11648102001-06-26 16:08:24 +0000[diff] [blame]347<h3>2.3.12: June 26 2001</h3>
348<ul>
349 <li>lots of cleanup</li>
350 <li>a couple of validation fix</li>
351 <li>fixed line number counting</li>
352 <li>fixed serious problems in the XInclude processing</li>
353 <li>added support for UTF8 BOM at beginning of entities</li>
354 <li>fixed a strange gcc optimizer bugs in xpath handling of float, gcc-3.0
355 miscompile uri.c (William), Thomas Leitner provided a fix for the
356 optimizer on Tru64</li>
357 <li>incorporated Yon Derek and Igor Zlatkovic fixes and improvements for
358 compilation on Windows MSC</li>
359 <li>update of libxml-doc.el (Felix Natter)</li>
360 <li>fixed 2 bugs in URI normalization code</li>
361</ul>
362
Daniel Veillarde3c81b52001-06-17 14:50:34 +0000[diff] [blame]363<h3>2.3.11: June 17 2001</h3>
364<ul>
365 <li>updates to trio, Makefiles and configure should fix some portability
366 problems (alpha)</li>
367 <li>fixed some HTML serialization problems (pre, script, and block/inline
368 handling), added encoding aware APIs, cleanup of this code</li>
369 <li>added xmlHasNsProp()</li>
370 <li>implemented a specific PI for encoding support in the DocBook SGML
371 parser</li>
372 <li>some XPath fixes (-Infinity, / as a function parameter and namespaces
373 node selection)</li>
374 <li>fixed a performance problem and an error in the validation code</li>
375 <li>fixed XInclude routine to implement the recursive behaviour</li>
376 <li>fixed xmlFreeNode problem when libxml is included statically twice</li>
377 <li>added --version to xmllint for bug reports</li>
378</ul>
379
Daniel Veillard2e4f1882001-06-01 10:11:57 +0000[diff] [blame]380<h3>2.3.10: June 1 2001</h3>
381<ul>
382 <li>fixed the SGML catalog support</li>
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame]383 <li>a number of reported bugs got fixed, in XPath, iconv detection,
384 XInclude processing</li>
Daniel Veillard2e4f1882001-06-01 10:11:57 +0000[diff] [blame]385 <li>XPath string function should now handle unicode correctly</li>
386</ul>
387
Daniel Veillard4623acd2001-05-19 15:13:15 +0000[diff] [blame]388<h3>2.3.9: May 19 2001</h3>
389
390<p>Lots of bugfixes, and added a basic SGML catalog support:</p>
391<ul>
392 <li>HTML push bugfix #54891 and another patch from Jonas Borgström</li>
393 <li>some serious speed optimisation again</li>
394 <li>some documentation cleanups</li>
395 <li>trying to get better linking on solaris (-R)</li>
396 <li>XPath API cleanup from Thomas Broyer</li>
397 <li>Validation bug fixed #54631, added a patch from Gary Pennington, fixed
398 xmlValidGetValidElements()</li>
399 <li>Added an INSTALL file</li>
400 <li>Attribute removal added to API: #54433</li>
401 <li>added a basic support for SGML catalogs</li>
402 <li>fixed xmlKeepBlanksDefault(0) API</li>
403 <li>bugfix in xmlNodeGetLang()</li>
404 <li>fixed a small configure portability problem</li>
405 <li>fixed an inversion of SYSTEM and PUBLIC identifier in HTML document</li>
406</ul>
407
Daniel Veillarda265af72001-05-14 11:13:58 +0000[diff] [blame]408<h3>1.8.13: May 14 2001</h3>
409<ul>
410 <li>bugfixes release of the old libxml1 branch used by Gnome</li>
411</ul>
412
Daniel Veillard3bbbe6f2001-05-03 11:15:37 +0000[diff] [blame]413<h3>2.3.8: May 3 2001</h3>
414<ul>
415 <li>Integrated an SGML DocBook parser for the Gnome project</li>
416 <li>Fixed a few things in the HTML parser</li>
417 <li>Fixed some XPath bugs raised by XSLT use, tried to fix the floating
418 point portability issue</li>
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame]419 <li>Speed improvement (8M/s for SAX, 3M/s for DOM, 1.5M/s for
420 DOM+validation using the XML REC as input and a 700MHz celeron).</li>
Daniel Veillard3bbbe6f2001-05-03 11:15:37 +0000[diff] [blame]421 <li>incorporated more Windows cleanup</li>
422 <li>added xmlSaveFormatFile()</li>
423 <li>fixed problems in copying nodes with entities references (gdome)</li>
424 <li>removed some troubles surrounding the new validation module</li>
425</ul>
426
Daniel Veillarda41123c2001-04-22 19:31:20 +0000[diff] [blame]427<h3>2.3.7: April 22 2001</h3>
428<ul>
429 <li>lots of small bug fixes, corrected XPointer</li>
430 <li>Non determinist content model validation support</li>
431 <li>added xmlDocCopyNode for gdome2</li>
432 <li>revamped the way the HTML parser handles end of tags</li>
433 <li>XPath: corrctions of namespacessupport and number formatting</li>
434 <li>Windows: Igor Zlatkovic patches for MSC compilation</li>
435 <li>HTML ouput fixes from P C Chow and William M. Brack</li>
436 <li>Improved validation speed sensible for DocBook</li>
437 <li>fixed a big bug with ID declared in external parsed entities</li>
438 <li>portability fixes, update of Trio from Bjorn Reese</li>
439</ul>
440
Daniel Veillardafc73112001-04-11 11:51:41 +0000[diff] [blame]441<h3>2.3.6: April 8 2001</h3>
442<ul>
443 <li>Code cleanup using extreme gcc compiler warning options, found and
444 cleared half a dozen potential problem</li>
445 <li>the Eazel team found an XML parser bug</li>
446 <li>cleaned up the user of some of the string formatting function. used the
447 trio library code to provide the one needed when the platform is missing
448 them</li>
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame]449 <li>xpath: removed a memory leak and fixed the predicate evaluation
450 problem, extended the testsuite and cleaned up the result. XPointer seems
451 broken ...</li>
Daniel Veillardafc73112001-04-11 11:51:41 +0000[diff] [blame]452</ul>
453
Daniel Veillard56a4cb82001-03-24 17:00:36 +0000[diff] [blame]454<h3>2.3.5: Mar 23 2001</h3>
455<ul>
456 <li>Biggest change is separate parsing and evaluation of XPath expressions,
457 there is some new APIs for this too</li>
458 <li>included a number of bug fixes(XML push parser, 51876, notations,
459 52299)</li>
460 <li>Fixed some portability issues</li>
461</ul>
462
Daniel Veillarde356c282001-03-10 12:32:04 +0000[diff] [blame]463<h3>2.3.4: Mar 10 2001</h3>
464<ul>
465 <li>Fixed bugs #51860 and #51861</li>
466 <li>Added a global variable xmlDefaultBufferSize to allow default buffer
467 size to be application tunable.</li>
468 <li>Some cleanup in the validation code, still a bug left and this part
469 should probably be rewritten to support ambiguous content model :-\</li>
470 <li>Fix a couple of serious bugs introduced or raised by changes in 2.3.3
471 parser</li>
472 <li>Fixed another bug in xmlNodeGetContent()</li>
473 <li>Bjorn fixed XPath node collection and Number formatting</li>
474 <li>Fixed a loop reported in the HTML parsing</li>
475 <li>blank space are reported even if the Dtd content model proves that they
476 are formatting spaces, this is for XmL conformance</li>
477</ul>
478
Daniel Veillardb402c072001-03-01 17:28:58 +0000[diff] [blame]479<h3>2.3.3: Mar 1 2001</h3>
480<ul>
481 <li>small change in XPath for XSLT</li>
482 <li>documentation cleanups</li>
483 <li>fix in validation by Gary Pennington</li>
484 <li>serious parsing performances improvements</li>
485</ul>
486
Daniel Veillardec70e912001-02-26 20:10:45 +0000[diff] [blame]487<h3>2.3.2: Feb 24 2001</h3>
Daniel Veillard71681102001-02-24 17:48:53 +0000[diff] [blame]488<ul>
489 <li>chasing XPath bugs, found a bunch, completed some TODO</li>
490 <li>fixed a Dtd parsing bug</li>
491 <li>fixed a bug in xmlNodeGetContent</li>
492 <li>ID/IDREF support partly rewritten by Gary Pennington</li>
493</ul>
494
Daniel Veillardec70e912001-02-26 20:10:45 +0000[diff] [blame]495<h3>2.3.1: Feb 15 2001</h3>
Daniel Veillard6e6a6cc2001-02-15 15:55:44 +0000[diff] [blame]496<ul>
497 <li>some XPath and HTML bug fixes for XSLT</li>
498 <li>small extension of the hash table interfaces for DOM gdome2
499 implementation</li>
500 <li>A few bug fixes</li>
501</ul>
502
Daniel Veillardec70e912001-02-26 20:10:45 +0000[diff] [blame]503<h3>2.3.0: Feb 8 2001 (2.2.12 was on 25 Jan but I didn't kept track)</h3>
Daniel Veillard6e6a6cc2001-02-15 15:55:44 +0000[diff] [blame]504<ul>
505 <li>Lots of XPath bug fixes</li>
506 <li>Add a mode with Dtd lookup but without validation error reporting for
507 XSLT</li>
508 <li>Add support for text node without escaping (XSLT)</li>
509 <li>bug fixes for xmlCheckFilename</li>
510 <li>validation code bug fixes from Gary Pennington</li>
511 <li>Patch from Paul D. Smith correcting URI path normalization</li>
512 <li>Patch to allow simultaneous install of libxml-devel and
513 libxml2-devel</li>
514 <li>the example Makefile is now fixed</li>
515 <li>added HTML to the RPM packages</li>
516 <li>tree copying bugfixes</li>
517 <li>updates to Windows makefiles</li>
518 <li>optimisation patch from Bjorn Reese</li>
519</ul>
520
Daniel Veillardec70e912001-02-26 20:10:45 +0000[diff] [blame]521<h3>2.2.11: Jan 4 2001</h3>
Daniel Veillard503b8932001-01-05 06:36:31 +0000[diff] [blame]522<ul>
523 <li>bunch of bug fixes (memory I/O, xpath, ftp/http, ...)</li>
524 <li>added htmlHandleOmittedElem()</li>
525 <li>Applied Bjorn Reese's IPV6 first patch</li>
526 <li>Applied Paul D. Smith patches for validation of XInclude results</li>
Daniel Veillard82687162001-01-22 15:32:01 +0000[diff] [blame]527 <li>added XPointer xmlns() new scheme support</li>
Daniel Veillard503b8932001-01-05 06:36:31 +0000[diff] [blame]528</ul>
529
Daniel Veillard2ddd23d2000-11-25 10:42:19 +0000[diff] [blame]530<h3>2.2.10: Nov 25 2000</h3>
Daniel Veillard9d343c42000-11-25 10:12:43 +0000[diff] [blame]531<ul>
532 <li>Fix the Windows problems of 2.2.8</li>
533 <li>integrate OpenVMS patches</li>
534 <li>better handling of some nasty HTML input</li>
535 <li>Improved the XPointer implementation</li>
536 <li>integrate a number of provided patches</li>
537</ul>
538
Daniel Veillard2ddd23d2000-11-25 10:42:19 +0000[diff] [blame]539<h3>2.2.9: Nov 25 2000</h3>
540<ul>
541 <li>erroneous release :-(</li>
542</ul>
543
Daniel Veillard28929b22000-11-13 18:22:49 +0000[diff] [blame]544<h3>2.2.8: Nov 13 2000</h3>
545<ul>
546 <li>First version of <a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xinclude">XInclude</a>
547 support</li>
548 <li>Patch in conditional section handling</li>
549 <li>updated MS compiler project</li>
550 <li>fixed some XPath problems</li>
551 <li>added an URI escaping function</li>
552 <li>some other bug fixes</li>
553</ul>
554
555<h3>2.2.7: Oct 31 2000</h3>
556<ul>
557 <li>added message redirection</li>
558 <li>XPath improvements (thanks TOM !)</li>
559 <li>xmlIOParseDTD() added</li>
560 <li>various small fixes in the HTML, URI, HTTP and XPointer support</li>
561 <li>some cleanup of the Makefile, autoconf and the distribution content</li>
562</ul>
563
Daniel Veillard29a11cc2000-10-25 13:32:39 +0000[diff] [blame]564<h3>2.2.6: Oct 25 2000:</h3>
565<ul>
566 <li>Added an hash table module, migrated a number of internal structure to
567 those</li>
568 <li>Fixed a posteriori validation problems</li>
569 <li>HTTP module cleanups</li>
570 <li>HTML parser improvements (tag errors, script/style handling, attribute
571 normalization)</li>
572 <li>coalescing of adjacent text nodes</li>
573 <li>couple of XPath bug fixes, exported the internal API</li>
574</ul>
575
Daniel Veillardab8500d2000-10-15 21:06:19 +0000[diff] [blame]576<h3>2.2.5: Oct 15 2000:</h3>
Daniel Veillard4c3a2031999-11-19 17:46:26 +0000[diff] [blame]577<ul>
Daniel Veillard189446d2000-10-13 10:23:06 +0000[diff] [blame]578 <li>XPointer implementation and testsuite</li>
579 <li>Lot of XPath fixes, added variable and functions registration, more
580 tests</li>
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame]581 <li>Portability fixes, lots of enhancements toward an easy Windows build
582 and release</li>
Daniel Veillard189446d2000-10-13 10:23:06 +0000[diff] [blame]583 <li>Late validation fixes</li>
584 <li>Integrated a lot of contributed patches</li>
585 <li>added memory management docs</li>
Daniel Veillardab8500d2000-10-15 21:06:19 +0000[diff] [blame]586 <li>a performance problem when using large buffer seems fixed</li>
Daniel Veillard189446d2000-10-13 10:23:06 +0000[diff] [blame]587</ul>
588
589<h3>2.2.4: Oct 1 2000:</h3>
590<ul>
591 <li>main XPath problem fixed</li>
592 <li>Integrated portability patches for Windows</li>
593 <li>Serious bug fixes on the URI and HTML code</li>
Daniel Veillard361d8452000-04-03 19:48:13 +0000[diff] [blame]594</ul>
595
Daniel Veillardd5f97f82000-09-17 16:38:14 +0000[diff] [blame]596<h3>2.2.3: Sep 17 2000</h3>
597<ul>
598 <li>bug fixes</li>
599 <li>cleanup of entity handling code</li>
600 <li>overall review of all loops in the parsers, all sprintf usage has been
601 checked too</li>
602 <li>Far better handling of larges Dtd. Validating against Docbook XML Dtd
603 works smoothly now.</li>
604</ul>
605
606<h3>1.8.10: Sep 6 2000</h3>
607<ul>
608 <li>bug fix release for some Gnome projects</li>
609</ul>
610
611<h3>2.2.2: August 12 2000</h3>
Daniel Veillard786d7c82000-08-12 23:38:57 +0000[diff] [blame]612<ul>
613 <li>mostly bug fixes</li>
Daniel Veillardec78c0f2000-08-25 10:25:23 +0000[diff] [blame]614 <li>started adding routines to access xml parser context options</li>
Daniel Veillard786d7c82000-08-12 23:38:57 +0000[diff] [blame]615</ul>
616
Daniel Veillardd5f97f82000-09-17 16:38:14 +0000[diff] [blame]617<h3>2.2.1: July 21 2000</h3>
Daniel Veillarda2679fa2000-07-22 02:38:15 +0000[diff] [blame]618<ul>
619 <li>a purely bug fixes release</li>
620 <li>fixed an encoding support problem when parsing from a memory block</li>
621 <li>fixed a DOCTYPE parsing problem</li>
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame]622 <li>removed a bug in the function allowing to override the memory
623 allocation routines</li>
Daniel Veillarda2679fa2000-07-22 02:38:15 +0000[diff] [blame]624</ul>
625
Daniel Veillardd5f97f82000-09-17 16:38:14 +0000[diff] [blame]626<h3>2.2.0: July 14 2000</h3>
Daniel Veillard94e90602000-07-17 14:38:19 +0000[diff] [blame]627<ul>
628 <li>applied a lot of portability fixes</li>
629 <li>better encoding support/cleanup and saving (content is now always
630 encoded in UTF-8)</li>
631 <li>the HTML parser now correctly handles encodings</li>
632 <li>added xmlHasProp()</li>
633 <li>fixed a serious problem with &amp;#38;</li>
634 <li>propagated the fix to FTP client</li>
635 <li>cleanup, bugfixes, etc ...</li>
636 <li>Added a page about <a href="encoding.html">libxml Internationalization
637 support</a></li>
638</ul>
639
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]640<h3>1.8.9: July 9 2000</h3>
641<ul>
642 <li>fixed the spec the RPMs should be better</li>
643 <li>fixed a serious bug in the FTP implementation, released 1.8.9 to solve
644 rpmfind users problem</li>
645</ul>
646
Daniel Veillard6388e172000-07-03 16:07:19 +0000[diff] [blame]647<h3>2.1.1: July 1 2000</h3>
648<ul>
649 <li>fixes a couple of bugs in the 2.1.0 packaging</li>
650 <li>improvements on the HTML parser</li>
651</ul>
652
Daniel Veillard3f6f7f62000-06-30 17:58:25 +0000[diff] [blame]653<h3>2.1.0 and 1.8.8: June 29 2000</h3>
654<ul>
655 <li>1.8.8 is mostly a comodity package for upgrading to libxml2 accoding to
656 <a href="upgrade.html">new instructions</a>. It fixes a nasty problem
657 about &amp;#38; charref parsing</li>
658 <li>2.1.0 also ease the upgrade from libxml v1 to the recent version. it
659 also contains numerous fixes and enhancements:
660 <ul>
661 <li>added xmlStopParser() to stop parsing</li>
662 <li>improved a lot parsing speed when there is large CDATA blocs</li>
663 <li>includes XPath patches provided by Picdar Technology</li>
664 <li>tried to fix as much as possible DtD validation and namespace
665 related problems</li>
666 <li>output to a given encoding has been added/tested</li>
667 <li>lot of various fixes</li>
668 </ul>
669 </li>
670</ul>
671
Daniel Veillarde0aed302000-04-16 08:52:20 +0000[diff] [blame]672<h3>2.0.0: Apr 12 2000</h3>
Daniel Veillard361d8452000-04-03 19:48:13 +0000[diff] [blame]673<ul>
674 <li>First public release of libxml2. If you are using libxml, it's a good
Daniel Veillarde0aed302000-04-16 08:52:20 +0000[diff] [blame]675 idea to check the 1.x to 2.x upgrade instructions. NOTE: while initally
676 scheduled for Apr 3 the relase occured only on Apr 12 due to massive
677 workload.</li>
Daniel Veillard361d8452000-04-03 19:48:13 +0000[diff] [blame]678 <li>The include are now located under $prefix/include/libxml (instead of
Daniel Veillarde0aed302000-04-16 08:52:20 +0000[diff] [blame]679 $prefix/include/gnome-xml), they also are referenced by
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]680 <pre>#include &lt;libxml/xxx.h&gt;</pre>
Daniel Veillarde0aed302000-04-16 08:52:20 +0000[diff] [blame]681 <p>instead of</p>
Daniel Veillard361d8452000-04-03 19:48:13 +0000[diff] [blame]682 <pre>#include "xxx.h"</pre>
683 </li>
Daniel Veillard8f621982000-03-20 13:07:15 +0000[diff] [blame]684 <li>a new URI module for parsing URIs and following strictly RFC 2396</li>
685 <li>the memory allocation routines used by libxml can now be overloaded
686 dynamically by using xmlMemSetup()</li>
Daniel Veillard361d8452000-04-03 19:48:13 +0000[diff] [blame]687 <li>The previously CVS only tool tester has been renamed
688 <strong>xmllint</strong> and is now installed as part of the libxml2
689 package</li>
Daniel Veillarde0aed302000-04-16 08:52:20 +0000[diff] [blame]690 <li>The I/O interface has been revamped. There is now ways to plug in
691 specific I/O modules, either at the URI scheme detection level using
692 xmlRegisterInputCallbacks() or by passing I/O functions when creating a
693 parser context using xmlCreateIOParserCtxt()</li>
694 <li>there is a C preprocessor macro LIBXML_VERSION providing the version
695 number of the libxml module in use</li>
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame]696 <li>a number of optional features of libxml can now be excluded at
697 configure time (FTP/HTTP/HTML/XPath/Debug)</li>
Daniel Veillardedfb29b2000-03-14 19:59:05 +0000[diff] [blame]698</ul>
699
700<h3>2.0.0beta: Mar 14 2000</h3>
701<ul>
702 <li>This is a first Beta release of libxml version 2</li>
Daniel Veillarde356c282001-03-10 12:32:04 +0000[diff] [blame]703 <li>It's available only from<a href="ftp://xmlsoft.org/">xmlsoft.org
704 FTP</a>, it's packaged as libxml2-2.0.0beta and available as tar and
705 RPMs</li>
Daniel Veillardedfb29b2000-03-14 19:59:05 +0000[diff] [blame]706 <li>This version is now the head in the Gnome CVS base, the old one is
707 available under the tag LIB_XML_1_X</li>
708 <li>This includes a very large set of changes. Froma programmatic point of
709 view applications should not have to be modified too much, check the <a
710 href="upgrade.html">upgrade page</a></li>
711 <li>Some interfaces may changes (especially a bit about encoding).</li>
712 <li>the updates includes:
Daniel Veillard6c8b1172000-03-01 00:40:41 +0000[diff] [blame]713 <ul>
Daniel Veillardedfb29b2000-03-14 19:59:05 +0000[diff] [blame]714 <li>fix I18N support. ISO-Latin-x/UTF-8/UTF-16 (nearly) seems correctly
715 handled now</li>
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame]716 <li>Better handling of entities, especially well formedness checking
717 and proper PEref extensions in external subsets</li>
Daniel Veillard6c8b1172000-03-01 00:40:41 +0000[diff] [blame]718 <li>DTD conditional sections</li>
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +0000[diff] [blame]719 <li>Validation now correcly handle entities content</li>
Daniel Veillard6c8b1172000-03-01 00:40:41 +0000[diff] [blame]720 <li><a href="http://rpmfind.net/tools/gdome/messages/0039.html">change
721 structures to accomodate DOM</a></li>
Daniel Veillard6c8b1172000-03-01 00:40:41 +0000[diff] [blame]722 </ul>
723 </li>
Daniel Veillardedfb29b2000-03-14 19:59:05 +0000[diff] [blame]724 <li>Serious progress were made toward compliance, <a
725 href="conf/result.html">here are the result of the test</a> against the
726 OASIS testsuite (except the japanese tests since I don't support that
727 encoding yet). This URL is rebuilt every couple of hours using the CVS
728 head version.</li>
Daniel Veillarde41f2b72000-01-30 20:00:07 +0000[diff] [blame]729</ul>
730
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +0000[diff] [blame]731<h3>1.8.7: Mar 6 2000</h3>
732<ul>
733 <li>This is a bug fix release:</li>
734 <li>It is possible to disable the ignorable blanks heuristic used by
735 libxml-1.x, a new function xmlKeepBlanksDefault(0) will allow this. Note
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame]736 that for adherence to XML spec, this behaviour will be disabled by
737 default in 2.x . The same function will allow to keep compatibility for
738 old code.</li>
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]739 <li>Blanks in &lt;a&gt; &lt;/a&gt; constructs are not ignored anymore,
740 avoiding heuristic is really the Right Way :-\</li>
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +0000[diff] [blame]741 <li>The unchecked use of snprintf which was breaking libxml-1.8.6
742 compilation on some platforms has been fixed</li>
743 <li>nanoftp.c nanohttp.c: Fixed '#' and '?' stripping when processing
744 URIs</li>
745</ul>
746
Daniel Veillarde41f2b72000-01-30 20:00:07 +0000[diff] [blame]747<h3>1.8.6: Jan 31 2000</h3>
748<ul>
749 <li>added a nanoFTP transport module, debugged until the new version of <a
750 href="http://rpmfind.net/linux/rpm2html/rpmfind.html">rpmfind</a> can use
751 it without troubles</li>
Daniel Veillardda07c342000-01-25 18:31:22 +0000[diff] [blame]752</ul>
753
754<h3>1.8.5: Jan 21 2000</h3>
755<ul>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000[diff] [blame]756 <li>adding APIs to parse a well balanced chunk of XML (production <a
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame]757 href="http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml#NT-content">[43] content</a> of the
758 XML spec)</li>
Daniel Veillard461a66c2000-01-18 18:01:01 +0000[diff] [blame]759 <li>fixed a hideous bug in xmlGetProp pointed by Rune.Djurhuus@fast.no</li>
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]760 <li>Jody Goldberg &lt;jgoldberg@home.com&gt; provided another patch trying
761 to solve the zlib checks problems</li>
Daniel Veillard461a66c2000-01-18 18:01:01 +0000[diff] [blame]762 <li>The current state in gnome CVS base is expected to ship as 1.8.5 with
763 gnumeric soon</li>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000[diff] [blame]764</ul>
765
766<h3>1.8.4: Jan 13 2000</h3>
767<ul>
768 <li>bug fixes, reintroduced xmlNewGlobalNs(), fixed xmlNewNs()</li>
769 <li>all exit() call should have been removed from libxml</li>
770 <li>fixed a problem with INCLUDE_WINSOCK on WIN32 platform</li>
771 <li>added newDocFragment()</li>
Daniel Veillardf84f71f2000-01-05 19:54:23 +0000[diff] [blame]772</ul>
773
774<h3>1.8.3: Jan 5 2000</h3>
775<ul>
776 <li>a Push interface for the XML and HTML parsers</li>
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +0000[diff] [blame]777 <li>a shell-like interface to the document tree (try tester --shell :-)</li>
Daniel Veillarddbfd6411999-12-28 16:35:14 +0000[diff] [blame]778 <li>lots of bug fixes and improvement added over XMas hollidays</li>
Daniel Veillard437b87b2000-01-03 17:30:46 +0000[diff] [blame]779 <li>fixed the DTD parsing code to work with the xhtml DTD</li>
Daniel Veillardf84f71f2000-01-05 19:54:23 +0000[diff] [blame]780 <li>added xmlRemoveProp(), xmlRemoveID() and xmlRemoveRef()</li>
781 <li>Fixed bugs in xmlNewNs()</li>
Daniel Veillard437b87b2000-01-03 17:30:46 +0000[diff] [blame]782 <li>External entity loading code has been revamped, now it uses
Daniel Veillardf84f71f2000-01-05 19:54:23 +0000[diff] [blame]783 xmlLoadExternalEntity(), some fix on entities processing were added</li>
Daniel Veillard437b87b2000-01-03 17:30:46 +0000[diff] [blame]784 <li>cleaned up WIN32 includes of socket stuff</li>
Daniel Veillard5cb5ab81999-12-21 15:35:29 +0000[diff] [blame]785</ul>
786
787<h3>1.8.2: Dec 21 1999</h3>
788<ul>
Daniel Veillardb24054a1999-12-18 15:32:46 +0000[diff] [blame]789 <li>I got another problem with includes and C++, I hope this issue is fixed
790 for good this time</li>
Daniel Veillard5cb5ab81999-12-21 15:35:29 +0000[diff] [blame]791 <li>Added a few tree modification functions: xmlReplaceNode,
792 xmlAddPrevSibling, xmlAddNextSibling, xmlNodeSetName and
793 xmlDocSetRootElement</li>
794 <li>Tried to improve the HTML output with help from <a
795 href="mailto:clahey@umich.edu">Chris Lahey</a></li>
Daniel Veillarde4e51311999-12-18 15:32:46 +0000[diff] [blame]796</ul>
Daniel Veillardb24054a1999-12-18 15:32:46 +0000[diff] [blame]797
Daniel Veillarde4e51311999-12-18 15:32:46 +0000[diff] [blame]798<h3>1.8.1: Dec 18 1999</h3>
799<ul>
800 <li>various patches to avoid troubles when using libxml with C++ compilers
801 the "namespace" keyword and C escaping in include files</li>
802 <li>a problem in one of the core macros IS_CHAR was corrected</li>
803 <li>fixed a bug introduced in 1.8.0 breaking default namespace processing,
804 and more specifically the Dia application</li>
Daniel Veillard944b5ff1999-12-15 19:08:24 +0000[diff] [blame]805 <li>fixed a posteriori validation (validation after parsing, or by using a
806 Dtd not specified in the original document)</li>
Daniel Veillardb24054a1999-12-18 15:32:46 +0000[diff] [blame]807 <li>fixed a bug in</li>
Daniel Veillard10a2c651999-12-12 13:03:50 +0000[diff] [blame]808</ul>
809
810<h3>1.8.0: Dec 12 1999</h3>
811<ul>
812 <li>cleanup, especially memory wise</li>
813 <li>the parser should be more reliable, especially the HTML one, it should
814 not crash, whatever the input !</li>
815 <li>Integrated various patches, especially a speedup improvement for large
816 dataset from <a href="mailto:cnygard@bellatlantic.net">Carl Nygard</a>,
817 configure with --with-buffers to enable them.</li>
818 <li>attribute normalization, oops should have been added long ago !</li>
819 <li>attributes defaulted from Dtds should be available, xmlSetProp() now
820 does entities escapting by default.</li>
Daniel Veillard4c3a2031999-11-19 17:46:26 +0000[diff] [blame]821</ul>
Daniel Veillard35008381999-10-25 13:15:52 +0000[diff] [blame]822
823<h3>1.7.4: Oct 25 1999</h3>
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000[diff] [blame]824<ul>
Daniel Veillard35008381999-10-25 13:15:52 +0000[diff] [blame]825 <li>Lots of HTML improvement</li>
826 <li>Fixed some errors when saving both XML and HTML</li>
827 <li>More examples, the regression tests should now look clean</li>
828 <li>Fixed a bug with contiguous charref</li>
829</ul>
830
831<h3>1.7.3: Sep 29 1999</h3>
832<ul>
833 <li>portability problems fixed</li>
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000[diff] [blame]834 <li>snprintf was used unconditionnally, leading to link problems on system
Daniel Veillard35008381999-10-25 13:15:52 +0000[diff] [blame]835 were it's not available, fixed</li>
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000[diff] [blame]836</ul>
837
838<h3>1.7.1: Sep 24 1999</h3>
839<ul>
840 <li>The basic type for strings manipulated by libxml has been renamed in
841 1.7.1 from <strong>CHAR</strong> to <strong>xmlChar</strong>. The reason
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame]842 is that CHAR was conflicting with a predefined type on Windows. However
843 on non WIN32 environment, compatibility is provided by the way of a
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000[diff] [blame]844 <strong>#define </strong>.</li>
845 <li>Changed another error : the use of a structure field called errno, and
846 leading to troubles on platforms where it's a macro</li>
847</ul>
848
849<h3>1.7.0: sep 23 1999</h3>
850<ul>
851 <li>Added the ability to fetch remote DTD or parsed entities, see the <a
Daniel Veillard9cb5ff42001-01-29 08:22:21 +0000[diff] [blame]852 href="html/libxml-nanohttp.html">nanohttp</a> module.</li>
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000[diff] [blame]853 <li>Added an errno to report errors by another mean than a simple printf
854 like callback</li>
855 <li>Finished ID/IDREF support and checking when validation</li>
856 <li>Serious memory leaks fixed (there is now a <a
Daniel Veillard9cb5ff42001-01-29 08:22:21 +0000[diff] [blame]857 href="html/libxml-xmlmemory.html">memory wrapper</a> module)</li>
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000[diff] [blame]858 <li>Improvement of <a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xpath">XPath</a>
859 implementation</li>
860 <li>Added an HTML parser front-end</li>
861</ul>
862
863<h2><a name="XML">XML</a></h2>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]864
Daniel Veillard402e8c82000-02-29 22:57:47 +0000[diff] [blame]865<p><a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml">XML is a standard</a> for
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +0000[diff] [blame]866markup-based structured documents. Here is <a name="example">an example XML
867document</a>:</p>
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]868<pre>&lt;?xml version="1.0"?&gt;
869&lt;EXAMPLE prop1="gnome is great" prop2="&amp;amp; linux too"&gt;
870 &lt;head&gt;
871 &lt;title&gt;Welcome to Gnome&lt;/title&gt;
872 &lt;/head&gt;
873 &lt;chapter&gt;
874 &lt;title&gt;The Linux adventure&lt;/title&gt;
875 &lt;p&gt;bla bla bla ...&lt;/p&gt;
876 &lt;image href="linus.gif"/&gt;
877 &lt;p&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;
878 &lt;/chapter&gt;
879&lt;/EXAMPLE&gt;</pre>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]880
Daniel Veillard402e8c82000-02-29 22:57:47 +0000[diff] [blame]881<p>The first line specifies that it's an XML document and gives useful
882information about its encoding. Then the document is a text format whose
883structure is specified by tags between brackets. <strong>Each tag opened has
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +0000[diff] [blame]884to be closed</strong>. XML is pedantic about this. However, if a tag is empty
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame]885(no content), a single tag can serve as both the opening and closing tag if
886it ends with <code>/&gt;</code> rather than with <code>&gt;</code>. Note
887that, for example, the image tag has no content (just an attribute) and is
888closed by ending the tag with <code>/&gt;</code>.</p>
Daniel Veillardccb09631998-10-27 06:21:04 +0000[diff] [blame]889
Daniel Veillard402e8c82000-02-29 22:57:47 +0000[diff] [blame]890<p>XML can be applied sucessfully to a wide range of uses, from long term
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame]891structured document maintenance (where it follows the steps of SGML) to
892simple data encoding mechanisms like configuration file formatting (glade),
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +0000[diff] [blame]893spreadsheets (gnumeric), or even shorter lived documents such as WebDAV where
894it is used to encode remote calls between a client and a server.</p>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]895
Daniel Veillard82687162001-01-22 15:32:01 +0000[diff] [blame]896<h2><a name="XSLT">XSLT</a></h2>
897
Daniel Veillard6e6a6cc2001-02-15 15:55:44 +0000[diff] [blame]898<p>Check <a href="http://xmlsoft.org/XSLT">the separate libxslt page</a></p>
899
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame]900<p><a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xslt">XSL Transformations</a>, is a
901language for transforming XML documents into other XML documents (or
902HTML/textual output).</p>
Daniel Veillard82687162001-01-22 15:32:01 +0000[diff] [blame]903
904<p>A separate library called libxslt is being built on top of libxml2. This
905module "libxslt" can be found in the Gnome CVS base too.</p>
906
Daniel Veillard383b1472001-01-23 11:39:52 +0000[diff] [blame]907<p>You can check the <a
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame]908href="http://cvs.gnome.org/lxr/source/libxslt/FEATURES">features</a>
909supported and the progresses on the <a
Daniel Veillard82687162001-01-22 15:32:01 +0000[diff] [blame]910href="http://cvs.gnome.org/lxr/source/libxslt/ChangeLog">Changelog</a></p>
911
Daniel Veillardc9484202001-10-24 12:35:52 +0000[diff] [blame^]912<h2><a name="architecture">An overview of libxml architecture</a></h2>
Daniel Veillard4540be42000-08-19 16:40:28 +0000[diff] [blame]913
Daniel Veillardec70e912001-02-26 20:10:45 +0000[diff] [blame]914<p>Libxml is made of multiple components; some of them are optional, and most
915of the block interfaces are public. The main components are:</p>
Daniel Veillard4540be42000-08-19 16:40:28 +0000[diff] [blame]916<ul>
917 <li>an Input/Output layer</li>
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000[diff] [blame]918 <li>FTP and HTTP client layers (optional)</li>
Daniel Veillard4540be42000-08-19 16:40:28 +0000[diff] [blame]919 <li>an Internationalization layer managing the encodings support</li>
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000[diff] [blame]920 <li>a URI module</li>
Daniel Veillard4540be42000-08-19 16:40:28 +0000[diff] [blame]921 <li>the XML parser and its basic SAX interface</li>
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000[diff] [blame]922 <li>an HTML parser using the same SAX interface (optional)</li>
Daniel Veillard4540be42000-08-19 16:40:28 +0000[diff] [blame]923 <li>a SAX tree module to build an in-memory DOM representation</li>
924 <li>a tree module to manipulate the DOM representation</li>
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000[diff] [blame]925 <li>a validation module using the DOM representation (optional)</li>
Daniel Veillard4540be42000-08-19 16:40:28 +0000[diff] [blame]926 <li>an XPath module for global lookup in a DOM representation
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000[diff] [blame]927 (optional)</li>
928 <li>a debug module (optional)</li>
Daniel Veillard4540be42000-08-19 16:40:28 +0000[diff] [blame]929</ul>
930
931<p>Graphically this gives the following:</p>
932
933<p><img src="libxml.gif" alt="a graphical view of the various"></p>
934
935<p></p>
936
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000[diff] [blame]937<h2><a name="tree">The tree output</a></h2>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]938
939<p>The parser returns a tree built during the document analysis. The value
Daniel Veillard402e8c82000-02-29 22:57:47 +0000[diff] [blame]940returned is an <strong>xmlDocPtr</strong> (i.e., a pointer to an
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +0000[diff] [blame]941<strong>xmlDoc</strong> structure). This structure contains information such
Daniel Veillard306be992000-07-03 12:38:45 +0000[diff] [blame]942as the file name, the document type, and a <strong>children</strong> pointer
943which is the root of the document (or more exactly the first child under the
944root which is the document). The tree is made of <strong>xmlNode</strong>s,
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000[diff] [blame]945chained in double-linked lists of siblings and with a children&lt;-&gt;parent
Daniel Veillard306be992000-07-03 12:38:45 +0000[diff] [blame]946relationship. An xmlNode can also carry properties (a chain of xmlAttr
947structures). An attribute may have a value which is a list of TEXT or
948ENTITY_REF nodes.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]949
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]950<p>Here is an example (erroneous with respect to the XML spec since there
951should be only one ELEMENT under the root):</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]952
953<p><img src="structure.gif" alt=" structure.gif "></p>
954
955<p>In the source package there is a small program (not installed by default)
Daniel Veillard361d8452000-04-03 19:48:13 +0000[diff] [blame]956called <strong>xmllint</strong> which parses XML files given as argument and
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +0000[diff] [blame]957prints them back as parsed. This is useful for detecting errors both in XML
958code and in the XML parser itself. It has an option <strong>--debug</strong>
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000[diff] [blame]959which prints the actual in-memory structure of the document; here is the
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +0000[diff] [blame]960result with the <a href="#example">example</a> given before:</p>
Daniel Veillard10c6a8f1998-10-28 01:00:12 +0000[diff] [blame]961<pre>DOCUMENT
962version=1.0
963standalone=true
964 ELEMENT EXAMPLE
965 ATTRIBUTE prop1
966 TEXT
967 content=gnome is great
968 ATTRIBUTE prop2
969 ENTITY_REF
970 TEXT
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000[diff] [blame]971 content= linux too
Daniel Veillard402e8c82000-02-29 22:57:47 +0000[diff] [blame]972 ELEMENT head
Daniel Veillard10c6a8f1998-10-28 01:00:12 +0000[diff] [blame]973 ELEMENT title
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +0000[diff] [blame]974 TEXT
975 content=Welcome to Gnome
Daniel Veillard10c6a8f1998-10-28 01:00:12 +0000[diff] [blame]976 ELEMENT chapter
977 ELEMENT title
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +0000[diff] [blame]978 TEXT
979 content=The Linux adventure
Daniel Veillard10c6a8f1998-10-28 01:00:12 +0000[diff] [blame]980 ELEMENT p
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +0000[diff] [blame]981 TEXT
982 content=bla bla bla ...
Daniel Veillard10c6a8f1998-10-28 01:00:12 +0000[diff] [blame]983 ELEMENT image
984 ATTRIBUTE href
985 TEXT
986 content=linus.gif
987 ELEMENT p
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +0000[diff] [blame]988 TEXT
989 content=...</pre>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]990
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]991<p>This should be useful for learning the internal representation model.</p>
Daniel Veillardccb09631998-10-27 06:21:04 +0000[diff] [blame]992
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000[diff] [blame]993<h2><a name="interface">The SAX interface</a></h2>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]994
Daniel Veillard402e8c82000-02-29 22:57:47 +0000[diff] [blame]995<p>Sometimes the DOM tree output is just too large to fit reasonably into
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]996memory. In that case (and if you don't expect to save back the XML document
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame]997loaded using libxml), it's better to use the SAX interface of libxml. SAX is
998a <strong>callback-based interface</strong> to the parser. Before parsing,
999the application layer registers a customized set of callbacks which are
1000called by the library as it progresses through the XML input.</p>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]1001
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]1002<p>To get more detailed step-by-step guidance on using the SAX interface of
Daniel Veillard4540be42000-08-19 16:40:28 +0000[diff] [blame]1003libxml, see the <a
1004href="http://www.daa.com.au/~james/gnome/xml-sax/xml-sax.html">nice
1005documentation</a>.written by <a href="mailto:james@daa.com.au">James
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]1006Henstridge</a>.</p>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]1007
1008<p>You can debug the SAX behaviour by using the <strong>testSAX</strong>
1009program located in the gnome-xml module (it's usually not shipped in the
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]1010binary packages of libxml, but you can find it in the tar source
Daniel Veillard402e8c82000-02-29 22:57:47 +0000[diff] [blame]1011distribution). Here is the sequence of callbacks that would be reported by
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]1012testSAX when parsing the example XML document shown earlier:</p>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]1013<pre>SAX.setDocumentLocator()
1014SAX.startDocument()
1015SAX.getEntity(amp)
1016SAX.startElement(EXAMPLE, prop1='gnome is great', prop2='&amp;amp; linux too')
1017SAX.characters( , 3)
1018SAX.startElement(head)
1019SAX.characters( , 4)
1020SAX.startElement(title)
1021SAX.characters(Welcome to Gnome, 16)
1022SAX.endElement(title)
1023SAX.characters( , 3)
1024SAX.endElement(head)
1025SAX.characters( , 3)
1026SAX.startElement(chapter)
1027SAX.characters( , 4)
1028SAX.startElement(title)
1029SAX.characters(The Linux adventure, 19)
1030SAX.endElement(title)
1031SAX.characters( , 4)
1032SAX.startElement(p)
1033SAX.characters(bla bla bla ..., 15)
1034SAX.endElement(p)
1035SAX.characters( , 4)
1036SAX.startElement(image, href='linus.gif')
1037SAX.endElement(image)
1038SAX.characters( , 4)
1039SAX.startElement(p)
1040SAX.characters(..., 3)
1041SAX.endElement(p)
1042SAX.characters( , 3)
1043SAX.endElement(chapter)
1044SAX.characters( , 1)
1045SAX.endElement(EXAMPLE)
1046SAX.endDocument()</pre>
1047
Daniel Veillardec70e912001-02-26 20:10:45 +0000[diff] [blame]1048<p>Most of the other interfaces of libxml are based on the DOM tree-building
1049facility, so nearly everything up to the end of this document presupposes the
1050use of the standard DOM tree build. Note that the DOM tree itself is built by
1051a set of registered default callbacks, without internal specific
1052interface.</p>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]1053
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000[diff] [blame]1054<h2><a name="library">The XML library interfaces</a></h2>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1055
1056<p>This section is directly intended to help programmers getting bootstrapped
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame]1057using the XML library from the C language. It is not intended to be
1058extensive. I hope the automatically generated documents will provide the
1059completeness required, but as a separate set of documents. The interfaces of
1060the XML library are by principle low level, there is nearly zero abstraction.
1061Those interested in a higher level API should <a href="#DOM">look at
1062DOM</a>.</p>
Daniel Veillardccb09631998-10-27 06:21:04 +0000[diff] [blame]1063
Daniel Veillard9cb5ff42001-01-29 08:22:21 +0000[diff] [blame]1064<p>The <a href="html/libxml-parser.html">parser interfaces for XML</a> are
1065separated from the <a href="html/libxml-htmlparser.html">HTML parser
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]1066interfaces</a>. Let's have a look at how the XML parser can be called:</p>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000[diff] [blame]1067
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]1068<h3><a name="Invoking">Invoking the parser : the pull method</a></h3>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1069
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]1070<p>Usually, the first thing to do is to read an XML input. The parser accepts
1071documents either from in-memory strings or from files. The functions are
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1072defined in "parser.h":</p>
Daniel Veillard10c6a8f1998-10-28 01:00:12 +0000[diff] [blame]1073<dl>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1074 <dt><code>xmlDocPtr xmlParseMemory(char *buffer, int size);</code></dt>
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]1075 <dd><p>Parse a null-terminated string containing the document.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1076 </dd>
Daniel Veillard10c6a8f1998-10-28 01:00:12 +0000[diff] [blame]1077</dl>
1078<dl>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1079 <dt><code>xmlDocPtr xmlParseFile(const char *filename);</code></dt>
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +0000[diff] [blame]1080 <dd><p>Parse an XML document contained in a (possibly compressed)
1081 file.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1082 </dd>
Daniel Veillard10c6a8f1998-10-28 01:00:12 +0000[diff] [blame]1083</dl>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1084
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]1085<p>The parser returns a pointer to the document structure (or NULL in case of
Daniel Veillard10c6a8f1998-10-28 01:00:12 +0000[diff] [blame]1086failure).</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1087
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]1088<h3 id="Invoking1">Invoking the parser: the push method</h3>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000[diff] [blame]1089
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame]1090<p>In order for the application to keep the control when the document is
1091being fetched (which is common for GUI based programs) libxml provides a push
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]1092interface, too, as of version 1.8.3. Here are the interface functions:</p>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000[diff] [blame]1093<pre>xmlParserCtxtPtr xmlCreatePushParserCtxt(xmlSAXHandlerPtr sax,
1094 void *user_data,
1095 const char *chunk,
1096 int size,
1097 const char *filename);
1098int xmlParseChunk (xmlParserCtxtPtr ctxt,
1099 const char *chunk,
1100 int size,
1101 int terminate);</pre>
1102
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]1103<p>and here is a simple example showing how to use the interface:</p>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000[diff] [blame]1104<pre> FILE *f;
1105
1106 f = fopen(filename, "r");
1107 if (f != NULL) {
1108 int res, size = 1024;
1109 char chars[1024];
1110 xmlParserCtxtPtr ctxt;
1111
1112 res = fread(chars, 1, 4, f);
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]1113 if (res &gt; 0) {
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000[diff] [blame]1114 ctxt = xmlCreatePushParserCtxt(NULL, NULL,
1115 chars, res, filename);
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]1116 while ((res = fread(chars, 1, size, f)) &gt; 0) {
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000[diff] [blame]1117 xmlParseChunk(ctxt, chars, res, 0);
1118 }
1119 xmlParseChunk(ctxt, chars, 0, 1);
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]1120 doc = ctxt-&gt;myDoc;
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000[diff] [blame]1121 xmlFreeParserCtxt(ctxt);
1122 }
1123 }</pre>
1124
Daniel Veillardec70e912001-02-26 20:10:45 +0000[diff] [blame]1125<p>The HTML parser embedded into libxml also has a push interface; the
1126functions are just prefixed by "html" rather than "xml".</p>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000[diff] [blame]1127
1128<h3 id="Invoking2">Invoking the parser: the SAX interface</h3>
1129
Daniel Veillardec70e912001-02-26 20:10:45 +0000[diff] [blame]1130<p>The tree-building interface makes the parser memory-hungry, first loading
1131the document in memory and then building the tree itself. Reading a document
1132without building the tree is possible using the SAX interfaces (see SAX.h and
1133<a href="http://www.daa.com.au/~james/gnome/xml-sax/xml-sax.html">James
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]1134Henstridge's documentation</a>). Note also that the push interface can be
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000[diff] [blame]1135limited to SAX: just use the two first arguments of
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000[diff] [blame]1136<code>xmlCreatePushParserCtxt()</code>.</p>
Daniel Veillardccb09631998-10-27 06:21:04 +0000[diff] [blame]1137
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000[diff] [blame]1138<h3><a name="Building">Building a tree from scratch</a></h3>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1139
1140<p>The other way to get an XML tree in memory is by building it. Basically
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +0000[diff] [blame]1141there is a set of functions dedicated to building new elements. (These are
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame]1142also described in &lt;libxml/tree.h&gt;.) For example, here is a piece of
1143code that produces the XML document used in the previous examples:</p>
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]1144<pre> #include &lt;libxml/tree.h&gt;
Daniel Veillard361d8452000-04-03 19:48:13 +0000[diff] [blame]1145 xmlDocPtr doc;
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +0000[diff] [blame]1146 xmlNodePtr tree, subtree;
1147
1148 doc = xmlNewDoc("1.0");
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]1149 doc-&gt;children = xmlNewDocNode(doc, NULL, "EXAMPLE", NULL);
1150 xmlSetProp(doc-&gt;children, "prop1", "gnome is great");
1151 xmlSetProp(doc-&gt;children, "prop2", "&amp; linux too");
1152 tree = xmlNewChild(doc-&gt;children, NULL, "head", NULL);
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +0000[diff] [blame]1153 subtree = xmlNewChild(tree, NULL, "title", "Welcome to Gnome");
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]1154 tree = xmlNewChild(doc-&gt;children, NULL, "chapter", NULL);
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +0000[diff] [blame]1155 subtree = xmlNewChild(tree, NULL, "title", "The Linux adventure");
1156 subtree = xmlNewChild(tree, NULL, "p", "bla bla bla ...");
1157 subtree = xmlNewChild(tree, NULL, "image", NULL);
1158 xmlSetProp(subtree, "href", "linus.gif");</pre>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1159
1160<p>Not really rocket science ...</p>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +0000[diff] [blame]1161
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000[diff] [blame]1162<h3><a name="Traversing">Traversing the tree</a></h3>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1163
Daniel Veillard9cb5ff42001-01-29 08:22:21 +0000[diff] [blame]1164<p>Basically by <a href="html/libxml-tree.html">including "tree.h"</a> your
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame]1165code has access to the internal structure of all the elements of the tree.
1166The names should be somewhat simple like <strong>parent</strong>,
Daniel Veillard306be992000-07-03 12:38:45 +0000[diff] [blame]1167<strong>children</strong>, <strong>next</strong>, <strong>prev</strong>,
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]1168<strong>properties</strong>, etc... For example, still with the previous
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000[diff] [blame]1169example:</p>
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]1170<pre><code>doc-&gt;children-&gt;children-&gt;children</code></pre>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1171
1172<p>points to the title element,</p>
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000[diff] [blame]1173<pre>doc-&gt;children-&gt;children-&gt;next-&gt;children-&gt;children</pre>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1174
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +0000[diff] [blame]1175<p>points to the text node containing the chapter title "The Linux
1176adventure".</p>
Daniel Veillard10c6a8f1998-10-28 01:00:12 +0000[diff] [blame]1177
Daniel Veillardb24054a1999-12-18 15:32:46 +0000[diff] [blame]1178<p><strong>NOTE</strong>: XML allows <em>PI</em>s and <em>comments</em> to be
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]1179present before the document root, so <code>doc-&gt;children</code> may point
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000[diff] [blame]1180to an element which is not the document Root Element; a function
Daniel Veillard5cb5ab81999-12-21 15:35:29 +0000[diff] [blame]1181<code>xmlDocGetRootElement()</code> was added for this purpose.</p>
Daniel Veillardb24054a1999-12-18 15:32:46 +0000[diff] [blame]1182
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000[diff] [blame]1183<h3><a name="Modifying">Modifying the tree</a></h3>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1184
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]1185<p>Functions are provided for reading and writing the document content. Here
Daniel Veillard9cb5ff42001-01-29 08:22:21 +0000[diff] [blame]1186is an excerpt from the <a href="html/libxml-tree.html">tree API</a>:</p>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +0000[diff] [blame]1187<dl>
Daniel Veillarddd6b3671999-09-23 22:19:22 +0000[diff] [blame]1188 <dt><code>xmlAttrPtr xmlSetProp(xmlNodePtr node, const xmlChar *name, const
1189 xmlChar *value);</code></dt>
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame]1190 <dd><p>This sets (or changes) an attribute carried by an ELEMENT node.
1191 The value can be NULL.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1192 </dd>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +0000[diff] [blame]1193</dl>
1194<dl>
Daniel Veillarddd6b3671999-09-23 22:19:22 +0000[diff] [blame]1195 <dt><code>const xmlChar *xmlGetProp(xmlNodePtr node, const xmlChar
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1196 *name);</code></dt>
Daniel Veillardc92c3042000-09-29 02:42:04 +0000[diff] [blame]1197 <dd><p>This function returns a pointer to new copy of the property
1198 content. Note that the user must deallocate the result.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1199 </dd>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +0000[diff] [blame]1200</dl>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1201
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame]1202<p>Two functions are provided for reading and writing the text associated
1203with elements:</p>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +0000[diff] [blame]1204<dl>
Daniel Veillarddd6b3671999-09-23 22:19:22 +0000[diff] [blame]1205 <dt><code>xmlNodePtr xmlStringGetNodeList(xmlDocPtr doc, const xmlChar
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1206 *value);</code></dt>
Daniel Veillardec70e912001-02-26 20:10:45 +0000[diff] [blame]1207 <dd><p>This function takes an "external" string and converts it to one
1208 text node or possibly to a list of entity and text nodes. All
1209 non-predefined entity references like &amp;Gnome; will be stored
1210 internally as entity nodes, hence the result of the function may not be
1211 a single node.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1212 </dd>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +0000[diff] [blame]1213</dl>
1214<dl>
Daniel Veillarddd6b3671999-09-23 22:19:22 +0000[diff] [blame]1215 <dt><code>xmlChar *xmlNodeListGetString(xmlDocPtr doc, xmlNodePtr list, int
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1216 inLine);</code></dt>
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +0000[diff] [blame]1217 <dd><p>This function is the inverse of
1218 <code>xmlStringGetNodeList()</code>. It generates a new string
1219 containing the content of the text and entity nodes. Note the extra
1220 argument inLine. If this argument is set to 1, the function will expand
1221 entity references. For example, instead of returning the &amp;Gnome;
1222 XML encoding in the string, it will substitute it with its value (say,
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000[diff] [blame]1223 "GNU Network Object Model Environment").</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1224 </dd>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +0000[diff] [blame]1225</dl>
Daniel Veillard10c6a8f1998-10-28 01:00:12 +0000[diff] [blame]1226
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000[diff] [blame]1227<h3><a name="Saving">Saving a tree</a></h3>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1228
1229<p>Basically 3 options are possible:</p>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +0000[diff] [blame]1230<dl>
Daniel Veillarddd6b3671999-09-23 22:19:22 +0000[diff] [blame]1231 <dt><code>void xmlDocDumpMemory(xmlDocPtr cur, xmlChar**mem, int
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1232 *size);</code></dt>
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]1233 <dd><p>Returns a buffer into which the document has been saved.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1234 </dd>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +0000[diff] [blame]1235</dl>
1236<dl>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1237 <dt><code>extern void xmlDocDump(FILE *f, xmlDocPtr doc);</code></dt>
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]1238 <dd><p>Dumps a document to an open file descriptor.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1239 </dd>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +0000[diff] [blame]1240</dl>
1241<dl>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1242 <dt><code>int xmlSaveFile(const char *filename, xmlDocPtr cur);</code></dt>
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +0000[diff] [blame]1243 <dd><p>Saves the document to a file. In this case, the compression
1244 interface is triggered if it has been turned on.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1245 </dd>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +0000[diff] [blame]1246</dl>
Daniel Veillard10c6a8f1998-10-28 01:00:12 +0000[diff] [blame]1247
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000[diff] [blame]1248<h3><a name="Compressio">Compression</a></h3>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1249
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]1250<p>The library transparently handles compression when doing file-based
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +0000[diff] [blame]1251accesses. The level of compression on saves can be turned on either globally
1252or individually for one file:</p>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +0000[diff] [blame]1253<dl>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1254 <dt><code>int xmlGetDocCompressMode (xmlDocPtr doc);</code></dt>
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]1255 <dd><p>Gets the document compression ratio (0-9).</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1256 </dd>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +0000[diff] [blame]1257</dl>
1258<dl>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1259 <dt><code>void xmlSetDocCompressMode (xmlDocPtr doc, int mode);</code></dt>
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]1260 <dd><p>Sets the document compression ratio.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1261 </dd>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +0000[diff] [blame]1262</dl>
1263<dl>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1264 <dt><code>int xmlGetCompressMode(void);</code></dt>
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]1265 <dd><p>Gets the default compression ratio.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1266 </dd>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +0000[diff] [blame]1267</dl>
1268<dl>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1269 <dt><code>void xmlSetCompressMode(int mode);</code></dt>
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]1270 <dd><p>Sets the default compression ratio.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1271 </dd>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +0000[diff] [blame]1272</dl>
1273
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000[diff] [blame]1274<h2><a name="Entities">Entities or no entities</a></h2>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]1275
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]1276<p>Entities in principle are similar to simple C macros. An entity defines an
1277abbreviation for a given string that you can reuse many times throughout the
1278content of your document. Entities are especially useful when a given string
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +0000[diff] [blame]1279may occur frequently within a document, or to confine the change needed to a
1280document to a restricted area in the internal subset of the document (at the
1281beginning). Example:</p>
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]1282<pre>1 &lt;?xml version="1.0"?&gt;
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]12832 &lt;!DOCTYPE EXAMPLE SYSTEM "example.dtd" [
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]12843 &lt;!ENTITY xml "Extensible Markup Language"&gt;
12854 ]&gt;
12865 &lt;EXAMPLE&gt;
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]12876 &amp;xml;
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]12887 &lt;/EXAMPLE&gt;</pre>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]1289
1290<p>Line 3 declares the xml entity. Line 6 uses the xml entity, by prefixing
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000[diff] [blame]1291its name with '&amp;' and following it by ';' without any spaces added. There
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]1292are 5 predefined entities in libxml allowing you to escape charaters with
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]1293predefined meaning in some parts of the xml document content:
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]1294<strong>&amp;lt;</strong> for the character '&lt;', <strong>&amp;gt;</strong>
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]1295for the character '&gt;', <strong>&amp;apos;</strong> for the character ''',
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]1296<strong>&amp;quot;</strong> for the character '"', and
1297<strong>&amp;amp;</strong> for the character '&amp;'.</p>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]1298
1299<p>One of the problems related to entities is that you may want the parser to
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +0000[diff] [blame]1300substitute an entity's content so that you can see the replacement text in
1301your application. Or you may prefer to keep entity references as such in the
1302content to be able to save the document back without losing this usually
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame]1303precious information (if the user went through the pain of explicitly
1304defining entities, he may have a a rather negative attitude if you blindly
1305susbtitute them as saving time). The <a
Daniel Veillard9cb5ff42001-01-29 08:22:21 +0000[diff] [blame]1306href="html/libxml-parser.html#XMLSUBSTITUTEENTITIESDEFAULT">xmlSubstituteEntitiesDefault()</a>
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]1307function allows you to check and change the behaviour, which is to not
1308substitute entities by default.</p>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]1309
1310<p>Here is the DOM tree built by libxml for the previous document in the
1311default case:</p>
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]1312<pre>/gnome/src/gnome-xml -&gt; ./xmllint --debug test/ent1
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]1313DOCUMENT
1314version=1.0
1315 ELEMENT EXAMPLE
1316 TEXT
1317 content=
1318 ENTITY_REF
1319 INTERNAL_GENERAL_ENTITY xml
1320 content=Extensible Markup Language
1321 TEXT
1322 content=</pre>
1323
1324<p>And here is the result when substituting entities:</p>
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]1325<pre>/gnome/src/gnome-xml -&gt; ./tester --debug --noent test/ent1
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]1326DOCUMENT
1327version=1.0
1328 ELEMENT EXAMPLE
1329 TEXT
1330 content= Extensible Markup Language</pre>
1331
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]1332<p>So, entities or no entities? Basically, it depends on your use case. I
1333suggest that you keep the non-substituting default behaviour and avoid using
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]1334entities in your XML document or data if you are not willing to handle the
1335entity references elements in the DOM tree.</p>
1336
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000[diff] [blame]1337<p>Note that at save time libxml enforces the conversion of the predefined
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]1338entities where necessary to prevent well-formedness problems, and will also
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000[diff] [blame]1339transparently replace those with chars (i.e. it will not generate entity
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]1340reference elements in the DOM tree or call the reference() SAX callback when
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]1341finding them in the input).</p>
1342
Daniel Veillard7b9c4b72000-08-25 16:26:50 +0000[diff] [blame]1343<p><span style="background-color: #FF0000">WARNING</span>: handling entities
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000[diff] [blame]1344on top of the libxml SAX interface is difficult!!! If you plan to use
Daniel Veillard7b9c4b72000-08-25 16:26:50 +0000[diff] [blame]1345non-predefined entities in your documents, then the learning cuvre to handle
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000[diff] [blame]1346then using the SAX API may be long. If you plan to use complex documents, I
Daniel Veillard7b9c4b72000-08-25 16:26:50 +0000[diff] [blame]1347strongly suggest you consider using the DOM interface instead and let libxml
Daniel Veillard8c6d6af2000-08-25 17:14:13 +0000[diff] [blame]1348deal with the complexity rather than trying to do it yourself.</p>
Daniel Veillard7b9c4b72000-08-25 16:26:50 +0000[diff] [blame]1349
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000[diff] [blame]1350<h2><a name="Namespaces">Namespaces</a></h2>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]1351
Daniel Veillardec303412000-03-24 13:41:54 +0000[diff] [blame]1352<p>The libxml library implements <a
1353href="http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml-names/">XML namespaces</a> support by
1354recognizing namespace contructs in the input, and does namespace lookup
1355automatically when building the DOM tree. A namespace declaration is
1356associated with an in-memory structure and all elements or attributes within
1357that namespace point to it. Hence testing the namespace is a simple and fast
1358equality operation at the user level.</p>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]1359
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +0000[diff] [blame]1360<p>I suggest that people using libxml use a namespace, and declare it in the
1361root element of their document as the default namespace. Then they don't need
1362to use the prefix in the content but we will have a basis for future semantic
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000[diff] [blame]1363refinement and merging of data from different sources. This doesn't increase
Daniel Veillardec70e912001-02-26 20:10:45 +0000[diff] [blame]1364the size of the XML output significantly, but significantly increases its
1365value in the long-term. Example:</p>
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]1366<pre>&lt;mydoc xmlns="http://mydoc.example.org/schemas/"&gt;
1367 &lt;elem1&gt;...&lt;/elem1&gt;
1368 &lt;elem2&gt;...&lt;/elem2&gt;
1369&lt;/mydoc&gt;</pre>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]1370
Daniel Veillardec70e912001-02-26 20:10:45 +0000[diff] [blame]1371<p>The namespace value has to be an absolute URL, but the URL doesn't have to
1372point to any existing resource on the Web. It will bind all the element and
1373atributes with that URL. I suggest to use an URL within a domain you control,
1374and that the URL should contain some kind of version information if possible.
1375For example, <code>"http://www.gnome.org/gnumeric/1.0/"</code> is a good
1376namespace scheme.</p>
Daniel Veillardec303412000-03-24 13:41:54 +0000[diff] [blame]1377
1378<p>Then when you load a file, make sure that a namespace carrying the
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]1379version-independent prefix is installed on the root element of your document,
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]1380and if the version information don't match something you know, warn the user
1381and be liberal in what you accept as the input. Also do *not* try to base
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]1382namespace checking on the prefix value. &lt;foo:text&gt; may be exactly the
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000[diff] [blame]1383same as &lt;bar:text&gt; in another document. What really matters is the URI
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]1384associated with the element or the attribute, not the prefix string (which is
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000[diff] [blame]1385just a shortcut for the full URI). In libxml, element and attributes have an
Daniel Veillardec303412000-03-24 13:41:54 +0000[diff] [blame]1386<code>ns</code> field pointing to an xmlNs structure detailing the namespace
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000[diff] [blame]1387prefix and its URI.</p>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]1388
1389<p>@@Interfaces@@</p>
1390
1391<p>@@Examples@@</p>
1392
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000[diff] [blame]1393<p>Usually people object to using namespaces together with validity checking.
1394I will try to make sure that using namespaces won't break validity checking,
1395so even if you plan to use or currently are using validation I strongly
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +0000[diff] [blame]1396suggest adding namespaces to your document. A default namespace scheme
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]1397<code>xmlns="http://...."</code> should not break validity even on less
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000[diff] [blame]1398flexible parsers. Using namespaces to mix and differentiate content coming
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame]1399from multiple DTDs will certainly break current validation schemes. I will
1400try to provide ways to do this, but this may not be portable or
1401standardized.</p>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]1402
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000[diff] [blame]1403<h2><a name="Validation">Validation, or are you afraid of DTDs ?</a></h2>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]1404
1405<p>Well what is validation and what is a DTD ?</p>
1406
1407<p>Validation is the process of checking a document against a set of
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000[diff] [blame]1408construction rules; a <strong>DTD</strong> (Document Type Definition) is such
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]1409a set of rules.</p>
1410
1411<p>The validation process and building DTDs are the two most difficult parts
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000[diff] [blame]1412of the XML life cycle. Briefly a DTD defines all the possibles element to be
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame]1413found within your document, what is the formal shape of your document tree
1414(by defining the allowed content of an element, either text, a regular
1415expression for the allowed list of children, or mixed content i.e. both text
1416and children). The DTD also defines the allowed attributes for all elements
1417and the types of the attributes. For more detailed information, I suggest
1418that you read the related parts of the XML specification, the examples found
1419under gnome-xml/test/valid/dtd and any of the large number of books available
1420on XML. The dia example in gnome-xml/test/valid should be both simple and
Daniel Veillardec70e912001-02-26 20:10:45 +0000[diff] [blame]1421complete enough to allow you to build your own.</p>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]1422
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000[diff] [blame]1423<p>A word of warning, building a good DTD which will fit the needs of your
1424application in the long-term is far from trivial; however, the extra level of
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame]1425quality it can ensure is well worth the price for some sets of applications
1426or if you already have already a DTD defined for your application field.</p>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]1427
1428<p>The validation is not completely finished but in a (very IMHO) usable
1429state. Until a real validation interface is defined the way to do it is to
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame]1430define and set the <strong>xmlDoValidityCheckingDefaultValue</strong>
1431external variable to 1, this will of course be changed at some point:</p>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]1432
1433<p>extern int xmlDoValidityCheckingDefaultValue;</p>
1434
1435<p>...</p>
1436
1437<p>xmlDoValidityCheckingDefaultValue = 1;</p>
1438
1439<p></p>
1440
1441<p>To handle external entities, use the function
1442<strong>xmlSetExternalEntityLoader</strong>(xmlExternalEntityLoader f); to
1443link in you HTTP/FTP/Entities database library to the standard libxml
1444core.</p>
1445
1446<p>@@interfaces@@</p>
1447
Daniel Veillard35008381999-10-25 13:15:52 +0000[diff] [blame]1448<h2><a name="DOM"></a><a name="Principles">DOM Principles</a></h2>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1449
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame]1450<p><a href="http://www.w3.org/DOM/">DOM</a> stands for the <em>Document
1451Object Model</em>; this is an API for accessing XML or HTML structured
1452documents. Native support for DOM in Gnome is on the way (module gnome-dom),
1453and will be based on gnome-xml. This will be a far cleaner interface to
1454manipulate XML files within Gnome since it won't expose the internal
1455structure.</p>
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +0000[diff] [blame]1456
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]1457<p>The current DOM implementation on top of libxml is the <a
Daniel Veillarda47fb3d2001-03-25 17:23:49 +0000[diff] [blame]1458href="http://cvs.gnome.org/lxr/source/gdome2/">gdome2 Gnome module</a>, this
1459is a full DOM interface, thanks to Paolo Casarini, check the <a
1460href="http://www.cs.unibo.it/~casarini/gdome2/">Gdome2 homepage</a> for more
1461informations.</p>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]1462
Daniel Veillard35008381999-10-25 13:15:52 +0000[diff] [blame]1463<h2><a name="Example"></a><a name="real">A real example</a></h2>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1464
1465<p>Here is a real size example, where the actual content of the application
1466data is not kept in the DOM tree but uses internal structures. It is based on
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +0000[diff] [blame]1467a proposal to keep a database of jobs related to Gnome, with an XML based
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1468storage structure. Here is an <a href="gjobs.xml">XML encoded jobs
1469base</a>:</p>
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]1470<pre>&lt;?xml version="1.0"?&gt;
1471&lt;gjob:Helping xmlns:gjob="http://www.gnome.org/some-location"&gt;
1472 &lt;gjob:Jobs&gt;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +0000[diff] [blame]1473
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]1474 &lt;gjob:Job&gt;
1475 &lt;gjob:Project ID="3"/&gt;
1476 &lt;gjob:Application&gt;GBackup&lt;/gjob:Application&gt;
1477 &lt;gjob:Category&gt;Development&lt;/gjob:Category&gt;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +0000[diff] [blame]1478
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]1479 &lt;gjob:Update&gt;
1480 &lt;gjob:Status&gt;Open&lt;/gjob:Status&gt;
1481 &lt;gjob:Modified&gt;Mon, 07 Jun 1999 20:27:45 -0400 MET DST&lt;/gjob:Modified&gt;
1482 &lt;gjob:Salary&gt;USD 0.00&lt;/gjob:Salary&gt;
1483 &lt;/gjob:Update&gt;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +0000[diff] [blame]1484
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]1485 &lt;gjob:Developers&gt;
1486 &lt;gjob:Developer&gt;
1487 &lt;/gjob:Developer&gt;
1488 &lt;/gjob:Developers&gt;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +0000[diff] [blame]1489
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]1490 &lt;gjob:Contact&gt;
1491 &lt;gjob:Person&gt;Nathan Clemons&lt;/gjob:Person&gt;
1492 &lt;gjob:Email&gt;nathan@windsofstorm.net&lt;/gjob:Email&gt;
1493 &lt;gjob:Company&gt;
1494 &lt;/gjob:Company&gt;
1495 &lt;gjob:Organisation&gt;
1496 &lt;/gjob:Organisation&gt;
1497 &lt;gjob:Webpage&gt;
1498 &lt;/gjob:Webpage&gt;
1499 &lt;gjob:Snailmail&gt;
1500 &lt;/gjob:Snailmail&gt;
1501 &lt;gjob:Phone&gt;
1502 &lt;/gjob:Phone&gt;
1503 &lt;/gjob:Contact&gt;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +0000[diff] [blame]1504
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]1505 &lt;gjob:Requirements&gt;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +0000[diff] [blame]1506 The program should be released as free software, under the GPL.
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]1507 &lt;/gjob:Requirements&gt;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +0000[diff] [blame]1508
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]1509 &lt;gjob:Skills&gt;
1510 &lt;/gjob:Skills&gt;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +0000[diff] [blame]1511
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]1512 &lt;gjob:Details&gt;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +0000[diff] [blame]1513 A GNOME based system that will allow a superuser to configure
1514 compressed and uncompressed files and/or file systems to be backed
1515 up with a supported media in the system. This should be able to
1516 perform via find commands generating a list of files that are passed
1517 to tar, dd, cpio, cp, gzip, etc., to be directed to the tape machine
1518 or via operations performed on the filesystem itself. Email
1519 notification and GUI status display very important.
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]1520 &lt;/gjob:Details&gt;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +0000[diff] [blame]1521
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]1522 &lt;/gjob:Job&gt;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +0000[diff] [blame]1523
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]1524 &lt;/gjob:Jobs&gt;
1525&lt;/gjob:Helping&gt;</pre>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1526
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame]1527<p>While loading the XML file into an internal DOM tree is a matter of
1528calling only a couple of functions, browsing the tree to gather the ata and
1529generate the internal structures is harder, and more error prone.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1530
1531<p>The suggested principle is to be tolerant with respect to the input
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame]1532structure. For example, the ordering of the attributes is not significant,
1533the XML specification is clear about it. It's also usually a good idea not to
Daniel Veillardec70e912001-02-26 20:10:45 +0000[diff] [blame]1534depend on the order of the children of a given node, unless it really makes
1535things harder. Here is some code to parse the information for a person:</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1536<pre>/*
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +0000[diff] [blame]1537 * A person record
1538 */
1539typedef struct person {
1540 char *name;
1541 char *email;
1542 char *company;
1543 char *organisation;
1544 char *smail;
1545 char *webPage;
1546 char *phone;
1547} person, *personPtr;
1548
1549/*
1550 * And the code needed to parse it
1551 */
1552personPtr parsePerson(xmlDocPtr doc, xmlNsPtr ns, xmlNodePtr cur) {
1553 personPtr ret = NULL;
1554
1555DEBUG("parsePerson\n");
1556 /*
1557 * allocate the struct
1558 */
1559 ret = (personPtr) malloc(sizeof(person));
1560 if (ret == NULL) {
1561 fprintf(stderr,"out of memory\n");
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1562 return(NULL);
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +0000[diff] [blame]1563 }
1564 memset(ret, 0, sizeof(person));
1565
1566 /* We don't care what the top level element name is */
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]1567 cur = cur-&gt;xmlChildrenNode;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +0000[diff] [blame]1568 while (cur != NULL) {
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]1569 if ((!strcmp(cur-&gt;name, "Person")) &amp;&amp; (cur-&gt;ns == ns))
1570 ret-&gt;name = xmlNodeListGetString(doc, cur-&gt;xmlChildrenNode, 1);
1571 if ((!strcmp(cur-&gt;name, "Email")) &amp;&amp; (cur-&gt;ns == ns))
1572 ret-&gt;email = xmlNodeListGetString(doc, cur-&gt;xmlChildrenNode, 1);
1573 cur = cur-&gt;next;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +0000[diff] [blame]1574 }
1575
1576 return(ret);
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1577}</pre>
1578
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000[diff] [blame]1579<p>Here are a couple of things to notice:</p>
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +0000[diff] [blame]1580<ul>
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000[diff] [blame]1581 <li>Usually a recursive parsing style is the more convenient one: XML data
1582 is by nature subject to repetitive constructs and usually exibits highly
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1583 stuctured patterns.</li>
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame]1584 <li>The two arguments of type <em>xmlDocPtr</em> and <em>xmlNsPtr</em>,
1585 i.e. the pointer to the global XML document and the namespace reserved to
1586 the application. Document wide information are needed for example to
1587 decode entities and it's a good coding practice to define a namespace for
1588 your application set of data and test that the element and attributes
1589 you're analyzing actually pertains to your application space. This is
1590 done by a simple equality test (cur-&gt;ns == ns).</li>
Daniel Veillardec70e912001-02-26 20:10:45 +0000[diff] [blame]1591 <li>To retrieve text and attributes value, you can use the function
1592 <em>xmlNodeListGetString</em> to gather all the text and entity reference
1593 nodes generated by the DOM output and produce an single text string.</li>
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +0000[diff] [blame]1594</ul>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1595
1596<p>Here is another piece of code used to parse another level of the
1597structure:</p>
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]1598<pre>#include &lt;libxml/tree.h&gt;
Daniel Veillard361d8452000-04-03 19:48:13 +0000[diff] [blame]1599/*
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +0000[diff] [blame]1600 * a Description for a Job
1601 */
1602typedef struct job {
1603 char *projectID;
1604 char *application;
1605 char *category;
1606 personPtr contact;
1607 int nbDevelopers;
1608 personPtr developers[100]; /* using dynamic alloc is left as an exercise */
1609} job, *jobPtr;
1610
1611/*
1612 * And the code needed to parse it
1613 */
1614jobPtr parseJob(xmlDocPtr doc, xmlNsPtr ns, xmlNodePtr cur) {
1615 jobPtr ret = NULL;
1616
1617DEBUG("parseJob\n");
1618 /*
1619 * allocate the struct
1620 */
1621 ret = (jobPtr) malloc(sizeof(job));
1622 if (ret == NULL) {
1623 fprintf(stderr,"out of memory\n");
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1624 return(NULL);
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +0000[diff] [blame]1625 }
1626 memset(ret, 0, sizeof(job));
1627
1628 /* We don't care what the top level element name is */
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]1629 cur = cur-&gt;xmlChildrenNode;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +0000[diff] [blame]1630 while (cur != NULL) {
1631
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]1632 if ((!strcmp(cur-&gt;name, "Project")) &amp;&amp; (cur-&gt;ns == ns)) {
1633 ret-&gt;projectID = xmlGetProp(cur, "ID");
1634 if (ret-&gt;projectID == NULL) {
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1635 fprintf(stderr, "Project has no ID\n");
1636 }
1637 }
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]1638 if ((!strcmp(cur-&gt;name, "Application")) &amp;&amp; (cur-&gt;ns == ns))
1639 ret-&gt;application = xmlNodeListGetString(doc, cur-&gt;xmlChildrenNode, 1);
1640 if ((!strcmp(cur-&gt;name, "Category")) &amp;&amp; (cur-&gt;ns == ns))
1641 ret-&gt;category = xmlNodeListGetString(doc, cur-&gt;xmlChildrenNode, 1);
1642 if ((!strcmp(cur-&gt;name, "Contact")) &amp;&amp; (cur-&gt;ns == ns))
1643 ret-&gt;contact = parsePerson(doc, ns, cur);
1644 cur = cur-&gt;next;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +0000[diff] [blame]1645 }
1646
1647 return(ret);
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1648}</pre>
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +0000[diff] [blame]1649
Daniel Veillardec70e912001-02-26 20:10:45 +0000[diff] [blame]1650<p>Once you are used to it, writing this kind of code is quite simple, but
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame]1651boring. Ultimately, it could be possble to write stubbers taking either C
1652data structure definitions, a set of XML examples or an XML DTD and produce
1653the code needed to import and export the content between C data and XML
1654storage. This is left as an exercise to the reader :-)</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1655
Daniel Veillard6f0adb52000-07-03 11:41:26 +0000[diff] [blame]1656<p>Feel free to use <a href="example/gjobread.c">the code for the full C
1657parsing example</a> as a template, it is also available with Makefile in the
1658Gnome CVS base under gnome-xml/example</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1659
Daniel Veillardc310d562000-06-23 18:32:15 +0000[diff] [blame]1660<h2><a name="Contributi">Contributions</a></h2>
1661<ul>
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame]1662 <li><a href="mailto:ari@lusis.org">Ari Johnson</a>
1663 provides a C++ wrapper for libxml:
Daniel Veillardc310d562000-06-23 18:32:15 +0000[diff] [blame]1664 <p>Website: <a
1665 href="http://lusis.org/~ari/xml++/">http://lusis.org/~ari/xml++/</a></p>
1666 <p>Download: <a
1667 href="http://lusis.org/~ari/xml++/libxml++.tar.gz">http://lusis.org/~ari/xml++/libxml++.tar.gz</a></p>
1668 </li>
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame]1669 <li><a href="mailto:izlatkovic@daenet.de">Igor Zlatkovic</a>
1670 is now the maintainer of the Windows port, <a
Daniel Veillard95189532001-07-26 18:30:26 +0000[diff] [blame]1671 href="http://www.fh-frankfurt.de/~igor/projects/libxml/index.html">he
1672 provides binaries</a></li>
Daniel Veillardc9484202001-10-24 12:35:52 +0000[diff] [blame^]1673 <li><a href="mailto:Gary.Pennington@sun.com">Gary Pennington</a>
1674 provides <a href="http://pages.eidosnet.co.uk/~garypen/libxml/">Solaris
Daniel Veillard0a702dc2001-10-19 14:50:57 +0000[diff] [blame]1675 binaries</a></li>
Daniel Veillarde356c282001-03-10 12:32:04 +0000[diff] [blame]1676 <li><a
1677 href="http://mail.gnome.org/archives/xml/2001-March/msg00014.html">Matt
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame]1678 Sergeant</a>
1679 developped <a href="http://axkit.org/download/">XML::LibXSLT</a>, a perl
1680 wrapper for libxml2/libxslt as part of the <a
1681 href="http://axkit.com/">AxKit XML application server</a></li>
1682 <li><a href="mailto:fnatter@gmx.net">Felix Natter</a>
1683 and <a href="mailto:geertk@ai.rug.nl">Geert Kloosterman</a> provide <a
Daniel Veillardca989762001-06-23 17:39:29 +0000[diff] [blame]1684 href="libxml-doc.el">an emacs module</a> to lookup libxml(2) functions
Daniel Veillard3f6f7f62000-06-30 17:58:25 +0000[diff] [blame]1685 documentation</li>
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame]1686 <li><a href="mailto:sherwin@nlm.nih.gov">Ziying Sherwin</a>
1687 provided <a href="http://xmlsoft.org/messages/0488.html">man
1688 pages</a></li>
Daniel Veillard5168dbf2001-07-07 00:18:23 +0000[diff] [blame]1689 <li>there is a module for <a
1690 href="http://acs-misc.sourceforge.net/nsxml.html">libxml/libxslt support
1691 in OpenNSD/AOLServer</a></li>
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame]1692 <li><a href="mailto:dkuhlman@cutter.rexx.com">Dave Kuhlman</a>
1693 provides libxml/libxslt <a href="http://www.rexx.com/~dkuhlman">wrappers
1694 for Python</a></li>
Daniel Veillardc310d562000-06-23 18:32:15 +0000[diff] [blame]1695</ul>
1696
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]1697<p></p>
1698
Daniel Veillardf7ed3362001-08-17 12:01:21 +0000[diff] [blame]1699<p><a href="mailto:daniel@veillard.com">Daniel Veillard</a></p>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]1700
Daniel Veillardc9484202001-10-24 12:35:52 +0000[diff] [blame^]1701<p>$Id: xml.html,v 1.113 2001/10/19 14:50:57 veillard Exp $</p>
Daniel Veillardccb09631998-10-27 06:21:04 +0000[diff] [blame]1702</body>
1703</html>