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Daniel Veillardccb09631998-10-27 06:21:04 +00003<html>
4<head>
Daniel Veillardec78c0f2000-08-25 10:25:23 +00005 <title>The XML C library for Gnome</title>
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +00006 <meta name="GENERATOR" content="amaya 5.1">
Daniel Veillardb24054a1999-12-18 15:32:46 +00007 <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html">
Daniel Veillardccb09631998-10-27 06:21:04 +00008</head>
Daniel Veillardccb09631998-10-27 06:21:04 +00009
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +000010<body bgcolor="#ffffff">
Daniel Veillardec78c0f2000-08-25 10:25:23 +000011<h1 align="center">The XML C library for Gnome</h1>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +000012
Daniel Veillard9c466822001-10-25 12:03:39 +000013<h1>Note: this is the flat content of the <a href="index.html">web
14site</a></h1>
15
Daniel Veillardc9484202001-10-24 12:35:52 +000016<h1 style="text-align: center">libxml, a.k.a. gnome-xml</h1>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +000017
18<p></p>
Daniel Veillard9c466822001-10-25 12:03:39 +000019
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +000020<p>Libxml is the XML C library developed for the Gnome project. XML itself
Daniel Veillard9c466822001-10-25 12:03:39 +000021is a metalanguage to design markup languages, i.e. text language where
22semantic and structure are added to the content using extra "markup"
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +000023information enclosed between angle brackets. HTML is the most well-known
Daniel Veillard1eb24242002-03-18 11:33:03 +000024markup language. Though the library is written in C <a href="python.html">a
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +000025variety of language bindings</a> make it available in other environments.</p>
Daniel Veillard9c466822001-10-25 12:03:39 +000026
Daniel Veillard710823b2003-03-04 10:05:52 +000027<p>Libxml2 is known to be very portable, the library should build and work
28without serious troubles on a variety of systems (Linux, Unix, Windows,
29CygWin, MacOS, MacOS X, RISC Os, OS/2, VMS, QNX, MVS, ...)</p>
30
Daniel Veillard9c466822001-10-25 12:03:39 +000031<p>Libxml2 implements a number of existing standards related to markup
32languages:</p>
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +000033<ul>
Daniel Veillard9c466822001-10-25 12:03:39 +000034 <li>the XML standard: <a
35 href="http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml">http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml</a></li>
36 <li>Namespaces in XML: <a
37 href="http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml-names/">http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml-names/</a></li>
38 <li>XML Base: <a
39 href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xmlbase/">http://www.w3.org/TR/xmlbase/</a></li>
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +000040 <li><a href="http://www.cis.ohio-state.edu/rfc/rfc2396.txt">RFC 2396</a> :
41 Uniform Resource Identifiers <a
Daniel Veillard9c466822001-10-25 12:03:39 +000042 href="http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2396.txt">http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2396.txt</a></li>
43 <li>XML Path Language (XPath) 1.0: <a
44 href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xpath">http://www.w3.org/TR/xpath</a></li>
45 <li>HTML4 parser: <a
46 href="http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/">http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/</a></li>
47 <li>most of XML Pointer Language (XPointer) Version 1.0: <a
48 href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xptr">http://www.w3.org/TR/xptr</a></li>
49 <li>XML Inclusions (XInclude) Version 1.0: <a
50 href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xinclude/">http://www.w3.org/TR/xinclude/</a></li>
51 <li>[ISO-8859-1], <a
52 href="http://www.cis.ohio-state.edu/rfc/rfc2044.txt">rfc2044</a> [UTF-8]
53 and <a href="http://www.cis.ohio-state.edu/rfc/rfc2781.txt">rfc2781</a>
54 [UTF-16] core encodings</li>
55 <li>part of SGML Open Technical Resolution TR9401:1997</li>
56 <li>XML Catalogs Working Draft 06 August 2001: <a
57 href="http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/entity/spec-2001-08-06.html">http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/entity/spec-2001-08-06.html</a></li>
Daniel Veillard5c396542002-03-15 07:57:50 +000058 <li>Canonical XML Version 1.0: <a
59 href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xml-c14n">http://www.w3.org/TR/xml-c14n</a>
Daniel Veillard2d347fa2002-03-17 10:34:11 +000060 and the Exclusive XML Canonicalization CR draft <a
61 href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xml-exc-c14n">http://www.w3.org/TR/xml-exc-c14n</a></li>
Daniel Veillard17bed982003-02-24 20:11:43 +000062 <li>Relax NG Committee Specification 3 December 2001 <a
63 href="http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/relax-ng/spec-20011203.html">http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/relax-ng/spec-20011203.html</a></li>
Daniel Veillardf83a2c72003-04-08 13:48:40 +000064 <li>W3C XML Schemas Part 2: Datatypes <a
65 href="http://www.w3.org/TR/2001/REC-xmlschema-2-20010502/">REC 02 May
66 2001</a> except the base64Binary and hexBinary types</li>
Daniel Veillard96984452000-08-31 13:50:12 +000067</ul>
68
Daniel Veillard9c466822001-10-25 12:03:39 +000069<p>In most cases libxml tries to implement the specifications in a relatively
Daniel Veillard42766c02002-08-22 20:52:17 +000070strictly compliant way. As of release 2.4.16, libxml2 passes all 1800+ tests
71from the <a
Daniel Veillarda5393562002-02-20 11:40:49 +000072href="http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/xml-conformance/">OASIS XML Tests
73Suite</a>.</p>
Daniel Veillard5b16f582002-02-20 11:38:46 +000074
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +000075<p>To some extent libxml2 provides support for the following additional
76specifications but doesn't claim to implement them completely:</p>
Daniel Veillard9c466822001-10-25 12:03:39 +000077<ul>
78 <li>Document Object Model (DOM) <a
79 href="http://www.w3.org/TR/DOM-Level-2-Core/">http://www.w3.org/TR/DOM-Level-2-Core/</a>
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +000080 it doesn't implement the API itself, gdome2 does this on top of
Daniel Veillard9c466822001-10-25 12:03:39 +000081 libxml2</li>
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +000082 <li><a href="http://www.cis.ohio-state.edu/rfc/rfc959.txt">RFC 959</a> :
83 libxml implements a basic FTP client code</li>
84 <li><a href="http://www.cis.ohio-state.edu/rfc/rfc1945.txt">RFC 1945</a> :
85 HTTP/1.0, again a basic HTTP client code</li>
Daniel Veillard9c466822001-10-25 12:03:39 +000086 <li>SAX: a minimal SAX implementation compatible with early expat
87 versions</li>
88 <li>DocBook SGML v4: libxml2 includes a hackish parser to transition to
89 XML</li>
90</ul>
91
Daniel Veillardf83a2c72003-04-08 13:48:40 +000092<p>A partial implementation of <a
93href="http://www.w3.org/TR/2001/REC-xmlschema-1-20010502/">XML Schemas Part
941: Structure</a> is being worked on but it would be far too early to make any
95conformance statement about it at the moment.</p>
Daniel Veillarde6d8e202002-05-02 06:11:10 +000096
Daniel Veillard96984452000-08-31 13:50:12 +000097<p>Separate documents:</p>
98<ul>
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +000099 <li><a href="http://xmlsoft.org/XSLT/">the libxslt page</a> providing an
Daniel Veillard2d347fa2002-03-17 10:34:11 +0000100 implementation of XSLT 1.0 and common extensions like EXSLT for
101 libxml2</li>
Daniel Veillardc6271d22001-10-27 07:50:58 +0000102 <li><a href="http://www.cs.unibo.it/~casarini/gdome2/">the gdome2 page</a>
Daniel Veillard2d347fa2002-03-17 10:34:11 +0000103 : a standard DOM2 implementation for libxml2</li>
104 <li><a href="http://www.aleksey.com/xmlsec/">the XMLSec page</a>: an
105 implementation of <a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xmldsig-core/">W3C XML
106 Digital Signature</a> for libxml2</li>
Daniel Veillarde6d8e202002-05-02 06:11:10 +0000107 <li>also check the related links section below for more related and active
108 projects.</li>
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000109</ul>
110
Daniel Veillard806cada2003-03-19 21:58:59 +0000111<p>Results of the <a
112href="http://xmlbench.sourceforge.net/results/benchmark/index.html">xmlbench
113benchmark</a> on sourceforge 19 March 2003 (smaller is better):</p>
Daniel Veillardd8da01c2003-03-24 15:58:23 +0000114
115<p align="center"><img src="benchmark.gif"
116alt="benchmark results for Expat Xerces libxml2 Oracle and Sun toolkits"></p>
Daniel Veillard806cada2003-03-19 21:58:59 +0000117
Daniel Veillarde1662542002-08-28 11:50:59 +0000118<p>Logo designed by <a href="mailto:liyanage@access.ch">Marc Liyanage</a>.</p>
119
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000120<h2><a name="Introducti">Introduction</a></h2>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000121
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +0000122<p>This document describes libxml, the <a
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000123href="http://www.w3.org/XML/">XML</a> C library developed for the <a
Daniel Veillardec78c0f2000-08-25 10:25:23 +0000124href="http://www.gnome.org/">Gnome</a> project. <a
125href="http://www.w3.org/XML/">XML is a standard</a> for building tag-based
126structured documents/data.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000127
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000128<p>Here are some key points about libxml:</p>
129<ul>
Daniel Veillard2d347fa2002-03-17 10:34:11 +0000130 <li>Libxml exports Push (progressive) and Pull (blocking) type parser
131 interfaces for both XML and HTML.</li>
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000132 <li>Libxml can do DTD validation at parse time, using a parsed document
133 instance, or with an arbitrary DTD.</li>
Daniel Veillard2d347fa2002-03-17 10:34:11 +0000134 <li>Libxml includes complete <a
Daniel Veillard8c2ecaf2001-07-10 17:53:07 +0000135 href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xpath">XPath</a>, <a
136 href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xptr">XPointer</a> and <a
137 href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xinclude">XInclude</a> implementations.</li>
Daniel Veillardec78c0f2000-08-25 10:25:23 +0000138 <li>It is written in plain C, making as few assumptions as possible, and
Daniel Veillard189446d2000-10-13 10:23:06 +0000139 sticking closely to ANSI C/POSIX for easy embedding. Works on
Daniel Veillardab8500d2000-10-15 21:06:19 +0000140 Linux/Unix/Windows, ported to a number of other platforms.</li>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000141 <li>Basic support for HTTP and FTP client allowing applications to fetch
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000142 remote resources.</li>
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000143 <li>The design is modular, most of the extensions can be compiled out.</li>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000144 <li>The internal document representation is as close as possible to the <a
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000145 href="http://www.w3.org/DOM/">DOM</a> interfaces.</li>
146 <li>Libxml also has a <a href="http://www.megginson.com/SAX/index.html">SAX
Daniel Veillard402e8c82000-02-29 22:57:47 +0000147 like interface</a>; the interface is designed to be compatible with <a
148 href="http://www.jclark.com/xml/expat.html">Expat</a>.</li>
Daniel Veillardc575b992002-02-08 13:28:40 +0000149 <li>This library is released under the <a
150 href="http://www.opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.html">MIT
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000151 License</a>. See the Copyright file in the distribution for the precise
Daniel Veillardc575b992002-02-08 13:28:40 +0000152 wording.</li>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000153</ul>
Daniel Veillardccb09631998-10-27 06:21:04 +0000154
Daniel Veillarde0c1d722001-03-21 10:28:36 +0000155<p>Warning: unless you are forced to because your application links with a
Daniel Veillard2d347fa2002-03-17 10:34:11 +0000156Gnome-1.X library requiring it, <strong><span
Daniel Veillarde0c1d722001-03-21 10:28:36 +0000157style="background-color: #FF0000">Do Not Use libxml1</span></strong>, use
158libxml2</p>
159
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000160<h2><a name="FAQ">FAQ</a></h2>
161
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000162<p>Table of Contents:</p>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000163<ul>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000164 <li><a href="FAQ.html#License">License(s)</a></li>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000165 <li><a href="FAQ.html#Installati">Installation</a></li>
166 <li><a href="FAQ.html#Compilatio">Compilation</a></li>
167 <li><a href="FAQ.html#Developer">Developer corner</a></li>
168</ul>
169
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000170<h3><a name="License">License</a>(s)</h3>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000171<ol>
172 <li><em>Licensing Terms for libxml</em>
Daniel Veillardc575b992002-02-08 13:28:40 +0000173 <p>libxml is released under the <a
174 href="http://www.opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.html">MIT
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000175 License</a>; see the file Copyright in the distribution for the precise
Daniel Veillardc575b992002-02-08 13:28:40 +0000176 wording</p>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000177 </li>
178 <li><em>Can I embed libxml in a proprietary application ?</em>
Daniel Veillard42766c02002-08-22 20:52:17 +0000179 <p>Yes. The MIT License allows you to keep proprietary the changes you
180 made to libxml, but it would be graceful to send-back bug fixes and
181 improvements as patches for possible incorporation in the main
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000182 development tree.</p>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000183 </li>
184</ol>
185
186<h3><a name="Installati">Installation</a></h3>
187<ol>
188 <li>Unless you are forced to because your application links with a Gnome
189 library requiring it, <strong><span style="background-color: #FF0000">Do
190 Not Use libxml1</span></strong>, use libxml2</li>
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +0000191 <li><em>Where can I get libxml</em> ?
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000192 <p>The original distribution comes from <a
193 href="ftp://rpmfind.net/pub/libxml/">rpmfind.net</a> or <a
Daniel Veillard6581e1b2003-02-09 22:21:43 +0000194 href="ftp://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/sources/libxml2/2.5/">gnome.org</a></p>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000195 <p>Most Linux and BSD distributions include libxml, this is probably the
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000196 safer way for end-users to use libxml.</p>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000197 <p>David Doolin provides precompiled Windows versions at <a
198 href="http://www.ce.berkeley.edu/~doolin/code/libxmlwin32/ ">http://www.ce.berkeley.edu/~doolin/code/libxmlwin32/</a></p>
199 </li>
200 <li><em>I see libxml and libxml2 releases, which one should I install ?</em>
201 <ul>
Daniel Veillard42766c02002-08-22 20:52:17 +0000202 <li>If you are not constrained by backward compatibility issues with
203 existing applications, install libxml2 only</li>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000204 <li>If you are not doing development, you can safely install both.
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000205 Usually the packages <a
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000206 href="http://rpmfind.net/linux/RPM/libxml.html">libxml</a> and <a
207 href="http://rpmfind.net/linux/RPM/libxml2.html">libxml2</a> are
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000208 compatible (this is not the case for development packages).</li>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000209 <li>If you are a developer and your system provides separate packaging
210 for shared libraries and the development components, it is possible
211 to install libxml and libxml2, and also <a
212 href="http://rpmfind.net/linux/RPM/libxml-devel.html">libxml-devel</a>
213 and <a
214 href="http://rpmfind.net/linux/RPM/libxml2-devel.html">libxml2-devel</a>
215 too for libxml2 &gt;= 2.3.0</li>
216 <li>If you are developing a new application, please develop against
217 libxml2(-devel)</li>
218 </ul>
219 </li>
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000220 <li><em>I can't install the libxml package, it conflicts with libxml0</em>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000221 <p>You probably have an old libxml0 package used to provide the shared
Daniel Veillard42766c02002-08-22 20:52:17 +0000222 library for libxml.so.0, you can probably safely remove it. The libxml
223 packages provided on <a
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000224 href="ftp://rpmfind.net/pub/libxml/">rpmfind.net</a> provide
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000225 libxml.so.0</p>
226 </li>
227 <li><em>I can't install the libxml(2) RPM package due to failed
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000228 dependencies</em>
229 <p>The most generic solution is to re-fetch the latest src.rpm , and
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000230 rebuild it locally with</p>
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000231 <p><code>rpm --rebuild libxml(2)-xxx.src.rpm</code>.</p>
Daniel Veillard42766c02002-08-22 20:52:17 +0000232 <p>If everything goes well it will generate two binary rpm packages (one
233 providing the shared libs and xmllint, and the other one, the -devel
234 package, providing includes, static libraries and scripts needed to build
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000235 applications with libxml(2)) that you can install locally.</p>
236 </li>
237</ol>
238
239<h3><a name="Compilatio">Compilation</a></h3>
240<ol>
241 <li><em>What is the process to compile libxml ?</em>
242 <p>As most UNIX libraries libxml follows the "standard":</p>
243 <p><code>gunzip -c xxx.tar.gz | tar xvf -</code></p>
244 <p><code>cd libxml-xxxx</code></p>
245 <p><code>./configure --help</code></p>
246 <p>to see the options, then the compilation/installation proper</p>
247 <p><code>./configure [possible options]</code></p>
248 <p><code>make</code></p>
249 <p><code>make install</code></p>
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000250 <p>At that point you may have to rerun ldconfig or a similar utility to
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000251 update your list of installed shared libs.</p>
252 </li>
253 <li><em>What other libraries are needed to compile/install libxml ?</em>
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000254 <p>Libxml does not require any other library, the normal C ANSI API
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000255 should be sufficient (please report any violation to this rule you may
256 find).</p>
257 <p>However if found at configuration time libxml will detect and use the
258 following libs:</p>
259 <ul>
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +0000260 <li><a href="http://www.info-zip.org/pub/infozip/zlib/">libz</a> : a
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000261 highly portable and available widely compression library.</li>
262 <li>iconv: a powerful character encoding conversion library. It is
263 included by default in recent glibc libraries, so it doesn't need to
264 be installed specifically on Linux. It now seems a <a
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000265 href="http://www.opennc.org/onlinepubs/7908799/xsh/iconv.html">part
266 of the official UNIX</a> specification. Here is one <a
Daniel Veillarddad3f682002-11-17 16:47:27 +0000267 href="http://www.gnu.org/software/libiconv/">implementation of the
268 library</a> which source can be found <a
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000269 href="ftp://ftp.ilog.fr/pub/Users/haible/gnu/">here</a>.</li>
270 </ul>
271 </li>
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000272 <li><em>Make check fails on some platforms</em>
Daniel Veillard42766c02002-08-22 20:52:17 +0000273 <p>Sometimes the regression tests' results don't completely match the
274 value produced by the parser, and the makefile uses diff to print the
275 delta. On some platforms the diff return breaks the compilation process;
276 if the diff is small this is probably not a serious problem.</p>
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000277 <p>Sometimes (especially on Solaris) make checks fail due to limitations
Daniel Veillarde46182c2002-02-12 14:29:11 +0000278 in make. Try using GNU-make instead.</p>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000279 </li>
280 <li><em>I use the CVS version and there is no configure script</em>
Daniel Veillard42766c02002-08-22 20:52:17 +0000281 <p>The configure script (and other Makefiles) are generated. Use the
282 autogen.sh script to regenerate the configure script and Makefiles,
283 like:</p>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000284 <p><code>./autogen.sh --prefix=/usr --disable-shared</code></p>
285 </li>
286 <li><em>I have troubles when running make tests with gcc-3.0</em>
287 <p>It seems the initial release of gcc-3.0 has a problem with the
288 optimizer which miscompiles the URI module. Please use another
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000289 compiler.</p>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000290 </li>
291</ol>
292
293<h3><a name="Developer">Developer</a> corner</h3>
294<ol>
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000295 <li><em>xmlDocDump() generates output on one line.</em>
296 <p>Libxml will not <strong>invent</strong> spaces in the content of a
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000297 document since <strong>all spaces in the content of a document are
298 significant</strong>. If you build a tree from the API and want
299 indentation:</p>
300 <ol>
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000301 <li>the correct way is to generate those yourself too.</li>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000302 <li>the dangerous way is to ask libxml to add those blanks to your
303 content <strong>modifying the content of your document in the
304 process</strong>. The result may not be what you expect. There is
305 <strong>NO</strong> way to guarantee that such a modification won't
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000306 affect other parts of the content of your document. See <a
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000307 href="http://xmlsoft.org/html/libxml-parser.html#XMLKEEPBLANKSDEFAULT">xmlKeepBlanksDefault
308 ()</a> and <a
309 href="http://xmlsoft.org/html/libxml-tree.html#XMLSAVEFORMATFILE">xmlSaveFormatFile
310 ()</a></li>
311 </ol>
312 </li>
313 <li>Extra nodes in the document:
314 <p><em>For a XML file as below:</em></p>
315 <pre>&lt;?xml version="1.0"?&gt;
316&lt;PLAN xmlns="http://www.argus.ca/autotest/1.0/"&gt;
317&lt;NODE CommFlag="0"/&gt;
318&lt;NODE CommFlag="1"/&gt;
319&lt;/PLAN&gt;</pre>
320 <p><em>after parsing it with the function
321 pxmlDoc=xmlParseFile(...);</em></p>
322 <p><em>I want to the get the content of the first node (node with the
323 CommFlag="0")</em></p>
324 <p><em>so I did it as following;</em></p>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000325 <pre>xmlNodePtr pnode;
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000326pnode=pxmlDoc-&gt;children-&gt;children;</pre>
327 <p><em>but it does not work. If I change it to</em></p>
328 <pre>pnode=pxmlDoc-&gt;children-&gt;children-&gt;next;</pre>
329 <p><em>then it works. Can someone explain it to me.</em></p>
330 <p></p>
331 <p>In XML all characters in the content of the document are significant
332 <strong>including blanks and formatting line breaks</strong>.</p>
333 <p>The extra nodes you are wondering about are just that, text nodes with
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000334 the formatting spaces which are part of the document but that people tend
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000335 to forget. There is a function <a
336 href="http://xmlsoft.org/html/libxml-parser.html">xmlKeepBlanksDefault
337 ()</a> to remove those at parse time, but that's an heuristic, and its
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000338 use should be limited to cases where you are certain there is no
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000339 mixed-content in the document.</p>
340 </li>
341 <li><em>I get compilation errors of existing code like when accessing
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000342 <strong>root</strong> or <strong>child fields</strong> of nodes.</em>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000343 <p>You are compiling code developed for libxml version 1 and using a
344 libxml2 development environment. Either switch back to libxml v1 devel or
345 even better fix the code to compile with libxml2 (or both) by <a
346 href="upgrade.html">following the instructions</a>.</p>
347 </li>
348 <li><em>I get compilation errors about non existing
349 <strong>xmlRootNode</strong> or <strong>xmlChildrenNode</strong>
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000350 fields.</em>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000351 <p>The source code you are using has been <a
352 href="upgrade.html">upgraded</a> to be able to compile with both libxml
353 and libxml2, but you need to install a more recent version:
354 libxml(-devel) &gt;= 1.8.8 or libxml2(-devel) &gt;= 2.1.0</p>
355 </li>
356 <li><em>XPath implementation looks seriously broken</em>
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000357 <p>XPath implementation prior to 2.3.0 was really incomplete. Upgrade to
358 a recent version, there are no known bugs in the current version.</p>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000359 </li>
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000360 <li><em>The example provided in the web page does not compile.</em>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000361 <p>It's hard to maintain the documentation in sync with the code
362 &lt;grin/&gt; ...</p>
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000363 <p>Check the previous points 1/ and 2/ raised before, and please send
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000364 patches.</p>
365 </li>
Daniel Veillard42766c02002-08-22 20:52:17 +0000366 <li><em>Where can I get more examples and information than privoded on the
367 web page?</em>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000368 <p>Ideally a libxml book would be nice. I have no such plan ... But you
369 can:</p>
370 <ul>
371 <li>check more deeply the <a href="html/libxml-lib.html">existing
372 generated doc</a></li>
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000373 <li>look for examples of use for libxml function using the Gnome code.
374 For example the following will query the full Gnome CVS base for the
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000375 use of the <strong>xmlAddChild()</strong> function:
376 <p><a
377 href="http://cvs.gnome.org/lxr/search?string=xmlAddChild">http://cvs.gnome.org/lxr/search?string=xmlAddChild</a></p>
378 <p>This may be slow, a large hardware donation to the gnome project
379 could cure this :-)</p>
380 </li>
381 <li><a
382 href="http://cvs.gnome.org/bonsai/rview.cgi?cvsroot=/cvs/gnome&amp;dir=gnome-xml">Browse
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +0000383 the libxml source</a> , I try to write code as clean and documented
Daniel Veillard42766c02002-08-22 20:52:17 +0000384 as possible, so looking at it may be helpful. In particular the code
385 of xmllint.c and of the various testXXX.c test programs should
386 provide good examples of how to do things with the library.</li>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000387 </ul>
388 </li>
389 <li>What about C++ ?
390 <p>libxml is written in pure C in order to allow easy reuse on a number
391 of platforms, including embedded systems. I don't intend to convert to
392 C++.</p>
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000393 <p>There are however a few C++ wrappers which may fulfill your needs:</p>
Daniel Veillard9b6fd302002-05-13 12:06:47 +0000394 <ul>
395 <li>by Ari Johnson &lt;ari@btigate.com&gt;:
396 <p>Website: <a
397 href="http://lusis.org/~ari/xml++/">http://lusis.org/~ari/xml++/</a></p>
398 <p>Download: <a
399 href="http://lusis.org/~ari/xml++/libxml++.tar.gz">http://lusis.org/~ari/xml++/libxml++.tar.gz</a></p>
400 </li>
401 <li>by Peter Jones &lt;pjones@pmade.org&gt;
402 <p>Website: <a
403 href="http://pmade.org/pjones/software/xmlwrapp/">http://pmade.org/pjones/software/xmlwrapp/</a></p>
404 </li>
405 </ul>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000406 </li>
407 <li>How to validate a document a posteriori ?
408 <p>It is possible to validate documents which had not been validated at
Daniel Veillard42766c02002-08-22 20:52:17 +0000409 initial parsing time or documents which have been built from scratch
410 using the API. Use the <a
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000411 href="http://xmlsoft.org/html/libxml-valid.html#XMLVALIDATEDTD">xmlValidateDtd()</a>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000412 function. It is also possible to simply add a DTD to an existing
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000413 document:</p>
414 <pre>xmlDocPtr doc; /* your existing document */
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000415xmlDtdPtr dtd = xmlParseDTD(NULL, filename_of_dtd); /* parse the DTD */
416
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000417 dtd-&gt;name = xmlStrDup((xmlChar*)"root_name"); /* use the given root */
418
419 doc-&gt;intSubset = dtd;
420 if (doc-&gt;children == NULL) xmlAddChild((xmlNodePtr)doc, (xmlNodePtr)dtd);
421 else xmlAddPrevSibling(doc-&gt;children, (xmlNodePtr)dtd);
422 </pre>
423 </li>
Daniel Veillarddad3f682002-11-17 16:47:27 +0000424 <li>So what is this funky "xmlChar" used all the time?
425 <p>It is a null terminated sequence of utf-8 characters. And only utf-8!
426 You need to convert strings encoded in different ways to utf-8 before
427 passing them to the API. This can be accomplished with the iconv library
428 for instance.</p>
John Fleck61f6fb62002-10-31 15:23:29 +0000429 </li>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000430 <li>etc ...</li>
431</ol>
432
433<p></p>
434
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000435<h2><a name="Documentat">Documentation</a></h2>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000436
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000437<p>There are several on-line resources related to using libxml:</p>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000438<ol>
Daniel Veillard321be0c2002-10-08 21:26:42 +0000439 <li>Use the <a href="search.php">search engine</a> to lookup
440 informations.</li>
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000441 <li>Check the <a href="FAQ.html">FAQ.</a></li>
Daniel Veillardc19fccc2000-07-03 11:52:01 +0000442 <li>Check the <a href="http://xmlsoft.org/html/libxml-lib.html">extensive
Daniel Veillard8c6d6af2000-08-25 17:14:13 +0000443 documentation</a> automatically extracted from code comments (using <a
444 href="http://cvs.gnome.org/bonsai/rview.cgi?cvsroot=/cvs/gnome&amp;dir=gtk-doc">gtk
445 doc</a>).</li>
Daniel Veillard8d869642000-07-14 12:12:59 +0000446 <li>Look at the documentation about <a href="encoding.html">libxml
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000447 internationalization support</a>.</li>
Daniel Veillardbc66f852002-01-14 09:49:20 +0000448 <li>This page provides a global overview and <a href="example.html">some
Daniel Veillard402e8c82000-02-29 22:57:47 +0000449 examples</a> on how to use libxml.</li>
Daniel Veillarddad3f682002-11-17 16:47:27 +0000450 <li>John Fleck's libxml tutorial: <a href="tutorial/index.html">html</a> or
451 <a href="tutorial/xmltutorial.pdf">pdf</a>.</li>
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +0000452 <li><a href="mailto:james@daa.com.au">James Henstridge</a> wrote <a
Daniel Veillard402e8c82000-02-29 22:57:47 +0000453 href="http://www.daa.com.au/~james/gnome/xml-sax/xml-sax.html">some nice
454 documentation</a> explaining how to use the libxml SAX interface.</li>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000455 <li>George Lebl wrote <a
456 href="http://www-4.ibm.com/software/developer/library/gnome3/">an article
Daniel Veillard402e8c82000-02-29 22:57:47 +0000457 for IBM developerWorks</a> about using libxml.</li>
Daniel Veillardec303412000-03-24 13:41:54 +0000458 <li>Check <a href="http://cvs.gnome.org/lxr/source/gnome-xml/TODO">the TODO
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000459 file</a>.</li>
Daniel Veillard42766c02002-08-22 20:52:17 +0000460 <li>Read the <a href="upgrade.html">1.x to 2.x upgrade path</a>
461 description. If you are starting a new project using libxml you should
462 really use the 2.x version.</li>
Daniel Veillard845cce42002-01-09 11:51:37 +0000463 <li>And don't forget to look at the <a
464 href="http://mail.gnome.org/archives/xml/">mailing-list archive</a>.</li>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000465</ol>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000466
Daniel Veillardd5f97f82000-09-17 16:38:14 +0000467<h2><a name="Reporting">Reporting bugs and getting help</a></h2>
Daniel Veillard4c3a2031999-11-19 17:46:26 +0000468
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000469<p>Well, bugs or missing features are always possible, and I will make a
470point of fixing them in a timely fashion. The best way to report a bug is to
471use the <a href="http://bugzilla.gnome.org/buglist.cgi?product=libxml">Gnome
Daniel Veillard42766c02002-08-22 20:52:17 +0000472bug tracking database</a> (make sure to use the "libxml2" module name). I
473look at reports there regularly and it's good to have a reminder when a bug
474is still open. Be sure to specify that the bug is for the package libxml2.</p>
Daniel Veillard4c3a2031999-11-19 17:46:26 +0000475
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000476<p>There is also a mailing-list <a
Daniel Veillard3197f162001-04-04 00:40:08 +0000477href="mailto:xml@gnome.org">xml@gnome.org</a> for libxml, with an <a
478href="http://mail.gnome.org/archives/xml/">on-line archive</a> (<a
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000479href="http://xmlsoft.org/messages">old</a>). To subscribe to this list,
480please visit the <a
481href="http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/xml">associated Web</a> page and
482follow the instructions. <strong>Do not send code, I won't debug it</strong>
483(but patches are really appreciated!).</p>
Daniel Veillard234547b2001-07-05 09:46:10 +0000484
Daniel Veillard008186f2001-09-13 14:24:44 +0000485<p>Check the following <strong><span style="color: #FF0000">before
486posting</span></strong>:</p>
Daniel Veillard234547b2001-07-05 09:46:10 +0000487<ul>
Daniel Veillard321be0c2002-10-08 21:26:42 +0000488 <li>Read the <a href="FAQ.html">FAQ</a> and <a href="search.php">use the
489 search engine</a> to get informations related to your problem.</li>
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000490 <li>Make sure you are <a href="ftp://xmlsoft.org/">using a recent
491 version</a>, and that the problem still shows up in a recent version.</li>
492 <li>Check the <a href="http://mail.gnome.org/archives/xml/">list
493 archives</a> to see if the problem was reported already. In this case
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000494 there is probably a fix available, similarly check the <a
Daniel Veillarde7ead2d2001-08-22 23:44:09 +0000495 href="http://bugzilla.gnome.org/buglist.cgi?product=libxml">registered
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000496 open bugs</a>.</li>
497 <li>Make sure you can reproduce the bug with xmllint or one of the test
498 programs found in source in the distribution.</li>
Daniel Veillard234547b2001-07-05 09:46:10 +0000499 <li>Please send the command showing the error as well as the input (as an
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000500 attachment)</li>
Daniel Veillard234547b2001-07-05 09:46:10 +0000501</ul>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000502
Daniel Veillarddadd0872001-09-15 09:21:44 +0000503<p>Then send the bug with associated informations to reproduce it to the <a
Daniel Veillard33a67802001-03-07 09:44:02 +0000504href="mailto:xml@gnome.org">xml@gnome.org</a> list; if it's really libxml
Daniel Veillard98d071d2003-01-10 09:22:44 +0000505related I will approve it. Please do not send mail to me directly, it makes
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000506things really hard to track and in some cases I am not the best person to
Daniel Veillard98d071d2003-01-10 09:22:44 +0000507answer a given question, ask on the list.</p>
508
509<p>To <span style="color: #E50000">be really clear about support</span>:</p>
510<ul>
511 <li>Support or help <span style="color: #E50000">request MUST be sent to
512 the list or on bugzilla</span> in case of problems, so that the Question
513 and Answers can be shared publicly. Failing to do so carries the implicit
514 message "I want free support but I don't want to share the benefits with
Daniel Veillard831e8fd2003-01-25 11:45:34 +0000515 others" and is not welcome. I will automatically Carbon-Copy the
516 xml@gnome.org mailing list for any technical reply made about libxml2 or
517 libxslt.</li>
Daniel Veillard98d071d2003-01-10 09:22:44 +0000518 <li>There is <span style="color: #E50000">no garantee for support</span>,
519 if your question remains unanswered after a week, repost it, making sure
520 you gave all the detail needed and the informations requested.</li>
521 <li>Failing to provide informations as requested or double checking first
522 for prior feedback also carries the implicit message "the time of the
523 library maintainers is less valuable than my time" and might not be
524 welcome.</li>
525</ul>
Daniel Veillard4c3a2031999-11-19 17:46:26 +0000526
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000527<p>Of course, bugs reported with a suggested patch for fixing them will
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000528probably be processed faster than those without.</p>
Daniel Veillardec303412000-03-24 13:41:54 +0000529
530<p>If you're looking for help, a quick look at <a
Daniel Veillardf7ed3362001-08-17 12:01:21 +0000531href="http://mail.gnome.org/archives/xml/">the list archive</a> may actually
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000532provide the answer. I usually send source samples when answering libxml usage
Daniel Veillard6f0adb52000-07-03 11:41:26 +0000533questions. The <a href="http://xmlsoft.org/html/book1.html">auto-generated
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000534documentation</a> is not as polished as I would like (i need to learn more
535about DocBook), but it's a good starting point.</p>
Daniel Veillardec303412000-03-24 13:41:54 +0000536
Daniel Veillardd5f97f82000-09-17 16:38:14 +0000537<h2><a name="help">How to help</a></h2>
538
539<p>You can help the project in various ways, the best thing to do first is to
540subscribe to the mailing-list as explained before, check the <a
Daniel Veillardf7ed3362001-08-17 12:01:21 +0000541href="http://mail.gnome.org/archives/xml/">archives </a>and the <a
542href="http://bugzilla.gnome.org/buglist.cgi?product=libxml">Gnome bug
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000543database</a>:</p>
Daniel Veillardd5f97f82000-09-17 16:38:14 +0000544<ol>
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000545 <li>Provide patches when you find problems.</li>
546 <li>Provide the diffs when you port libxml to a new platform. They may not
Daniel Veillardab8500d2000-10-15 21:06:19 +0000547 be integrated in all cases but help pinpointing portability problems
548 and</li>
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000549 <li>Provide documentation fixes (either as patches to the code comments or
Daniel Veillardd5f97f82000-09-17 16:38:14 +0000550 as HTML diffs).</li>
Daniel Veillard42766c02002-08-22 20:52:17 +0000551 <li>Provide new documentations pieces (translations, examples, etc
552 ...).</li>
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000553 <li>Check the TODO file and try to close one of the items.</li>
554 <li>Take one of the points raised in the archive or the bug database and
Daniel Veillarde7ead2d2001-08-22 23:44:09 +0000555 provide a fix. <a href="mailto:daniel@veillard.com">Get in touch with me
556 </a>before to avoid synchronization problems and check that the suggested
557 fix will fit in nicely :-)</li>
Daniel Veillardd5f97f82000-09-17 16:38:14 +0000558</ol>
559
Daniel Veillard10a2c651999-12-12 13:03:50 +0000560<h2><a name="Downloads">Downloads</a></h2>
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000561
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000562<p>The latest versions of libxml can be found on <a
Daniel Veillard20c8cf22001-06-26 22:47:36 +0000563href="ftp://xmlsoft.org/">xmlsoft.org</a> (<a
564href="ftp://speakeasy.rpmfind.net/pub/libxml/">Seattle</a>, <a
565href="ftp://fr.rpmfind.net/pub/libxml/">France</a>) or on the <a
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000566href="ftp://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/MIRRORS.html">Gnome FTP server</a> either
Daniel Veillard6581e1b2003-02-09 22:21:43 +0000567as a <a href="ftp://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/sources/libxml2/2.5/">source
MDT 2002 John Fleck30c70542002-09-24 14:24:54 +0000568archive</a><!-- commenting this out because they seem to have disappeared or <a
Daniel Veillarda41123c2001-04-22 19:31:20 +0000569href="ftp://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/stable/redhat/i386/libxml/">RPM
Daniel Veillarde16b5742002-09-26 17:50:03 +0000570packages</a> -->
Daniel Veillard321be0c2002-10-08 21:26:42 +0000571 , Antonin Sprinzl also provide <a href="ftp://gd.tuwien.ac.at/pub/libxml/">a
Daniel Veillarde16b5742002-09-26 17:50:03 +0000572mirror in Austria</a>. (NOTE that you need both the <a
Daniel Veillardc19fccc2000-07-03 11:52:01 +0000573href="http://rpmfind.net/linux/RPM/libxml2.html">libxml(2)</a> and <a
574href="http://rpmfind.net/linux/RPM/libxml2-devel.html">libxml(2)-devel</a>
Daniel Veillardb46a5732003-04-08 13:35:48 +0000575packages installed to compile applications using libxml.)</p>
576
577<p>Binary ports:</p>
578<ul>
579 <li>Red Hat RPMs for i386 are available directly on <a
580 href="ftp://xmlsoft.org/">xmlsoft.org</a>, the source RPM will compile on
581 any architecture supported by Red Hat.</li>
Daniel Veillardf83a2c72003-04-08 13:48:40 +0000582 <li><p><a href="mailto:igor@zlatkovic.com">Igor Zlatkovic</a></p>
Daniel Veillardce192eb2003-04-16 15:58:05 +0000583 is now the maintainer of the Windows port, <a
Daniel Veillardb46a5732003-04-08 13:35:48 +0000584 href="http://www.zlatkovic.com/projects/libxml/index.html">he provides
585 binaries</a>.</li>
586 <li><a href="mailto:Gary.Pennington@sun.com">Gary Pennington</a> provides
587 <a href="http://garypennington.net/libxml2/">Solaris binaries</a>.</li>
588 <li><a href="mailto:Steve.Ball@zveno.com">Steve Ball</a> provides <a
589 href="http://www.zveno.com/open_source/libxml2xslt.html">Mac Os X
590 binaries</a>.</li>
591 <li>The HP-UX porting center provides <a
592 href="http://hpux.connect.org.uk/hppd/hpux/Gnome/">HP-UX binaries</a></li>
593</ul>
594
595<p>If you know other supported binary ports, please <a
596href="http://veillard.com/">contact me</a>.</p>
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000597
Daniel Veillard6c8b1172000-03-01 00:40:41 +0000598<p><a name="Snapshot">Snapshot:</a></p>
599<ul>
600 <li>Code from the W3C cvs base libxml <a
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000601 href="ftp://xmlsoft.org/cvs-snapshot.tar.gz">cvs-snapshot.tar.gz</a>.</li>
Daniel Veillard6c8b1172000-03-01 00:40:41 +0000602 <li>Docs, content of the web site, the list archive included <a
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000603 href="ftp://xmlsoft.org/libxml-docs.tar.gz">libxml-docs.tar.gz</a>.</li>
Daniel Veillard6c8b1172000-03-01 00:40:41 +0000604</ul>
605
Daniel Veillardc6271d22001-10-27 07:50:58 +0000606<p><a name="Contribs">Contributions:</a></p>
Daniel Veillard6c8b1172000-03-01 00:40:41 +0000607
608<p>I do accept external contributions, especially if compiling on another
Daniel Veillardc6271d22001-10-27 07:50:58 +0000609platform, get in touch with me to upload the package, wrappers for various
Daniel Veillard51095312001-10-28 18:51:57 +0000610languages have been provided, and can be found in the <a
611href="contribs.html">contrib section</a></p>
Daniel Veillard6c8b1172000-03-01 00:40:41 +0000612
Daniel Veillard82687162001-01-22 15:32:01 +0000613<p>Libxml is also available from CVS:</p>
Daniel Veillard10a2c651999-12-12 13:03:50 +0000614<ul>
Daniel Veillard10a2c651999-12-12 13:03:50 +0000615 <li><p>The <a
616 href="http://cvs.gnome.org/bonsai/rview.cgi?cvsroot=/cvs/gnome&amp;dir=gnome-xml">Gnome
Daniel Veillard402e8c82000-02-29 22:57:47 +0000617 CVS base</a>. Check the <a
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000618 href="http://developer.gnome.org/tools/cvs.html">Gnome CVS Tools</a>
619 page; the CVS module is <b>gnome-xml</b>.</p>
Daniel Veillard10a2c651999-12-12 13:03:50 +0000620 </li>
Daniel Veillard82687162001-01-22 15:32:01 +0000621 <li>The <strong>libxslt</strong> module is also present there</li>
Daniel Veillard10a2c651999-12-12 13:03:50 +0000622</ul>
623
624<h2><a name="News">News</a></h2>
625
Daniel Veillard944b5ff1999-12-15 19:08:24 +0000626<h3>CVS only : check the <a
627href="http://cvs.gnome.org/lxr/source/gnome-xml/ChangeLog">Changelog</a> file
Daniel Veillard189446d2000-10-13 10:23:06 +0000628for a really accurate description</h3>
Daniel Veillardab8500d2000-10-15 21:06:19 +0000629
Daniel Veillarde6d8e202002-05-02 06:11:10 +0000630<p>Items not finished and worked on, get in touch with the list if you want
631to test those</p>
Daniel Veillardab8500d2000-10-15 21:06:19 +0000632<ul>
Daniel Veillard72fef162003-02-05 14:31:19 +0000633 <li>More testing on RelaxNG</li>
Daniel Veillardcf27f7c2002-04-30 07:12:39 +0000634 <li>Finishing up <a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xmlschema-1/">XML
Daniel Veillard72fef162003-02-05 14:31:19 +0000635 Schemas</a></li>
636</ul>
637
Daniel Veillardc2d4a932003-04-01 11:13:05 +0000638<h3>2.5.6: Apr 1 2003</h3>
639<ul>
640 <li>Fixed W3C XML Schemas datatype, should be compliant now except for
641 binHex and base64 which are not supported yet.</li>
642 <li>bug fixes: non-ASCII IDs, HTML output, XInclude on large docs and
643 XInclude entities handling, encoding detection on external subsets, XML
644 Schemas bugs and memory leaks, HTML parser (James Bursa)</li>
645 <li>portability: python/trio (Albert Chin), Sun compiler warnings</li>
646 <li>documentation: added --relaxng option to xmllint man page (John)</li>
647 <li>improved error reporting: xml:space, start/end tag mismatches, Relax NG
648 errors</li>
649</ul>
650
651<h3>2.5.5: Mar 24 2003</h3>
Daniel Veillardd8da01c2003-03-24 15:58:23 +0000652<ul>
653 <li>Lot of fixes on the Relax NG implementation. More testing including
654 DocBook and TEI examples.</li>
655 <li>Increased the support for W3C XML Schemas datatype</li>
656 <li>Several bug fixes in the URI handling layer</li>
657 <li>Bug fixes: HTML parser, xmlReader, DTD validation, XPath, encoding
658 conversion, line counting in the parser.</li>
659 <li>Added support for $XMLLINT_INDENT environment variable, FTP delete</li>
660 <li>Fixed the RPM spec file name</li>
661</ul>
662
Daniel Veillard17bed982003-02-24 20:11:43 +0000663<h3>2.5.4: Feb 20 2003</h3>
664<ul>
665 <li>Conformance testing and lot of fixes on Relax NG and XInclude
666 implementation</li>
667 <li>Implementation of XPointer element() scheme</li>
668 <li>Bug fixes: XML parser, XInclude entities merge, validity checking on
669 namespaces,
670 <p>2 serialization bugs, node info generation problems, a DTD regexp
671 generation problem.</p>
672 </li>
673 <li>Portability: windows updates and path canonicalization (Igor)</li>
674 <li>A few typo fixes (Kjartan Maraas)</li>
675 <li>Python bindings generator fixes (Stephane Bidoul)</li>
676</ul>
677
Daniel Veillard1d788d22003-02-10 16:21:58 +0000678<h3>2.5.3: Feb 10 2003</h3>
679<ul>
680 <li>RelaxNG and XML Schemas datatypes improvements, and added a first
681 version of RelaxNG Python bindings</li>
682 <li>Fixes: XLink (Sean Chittenden), XInclude (Sean Chittenden), API fix for
683 serializing namespace nodes, encoding conversion bug, XHTML1
684 serialization</li>
685 <li>Portability fixes: Windows (Igor), AMD 64bits RPM spec file</li>
686</ul>
687
Daniel Veillard72fef162003-02-05 14:31:19 +0000688<h3>2.5.2: Feb 5 2003</h3>
689<ul>
690 <li>First implementation of RelaxNG, added --relaxng flag to xmllint</li>
691 <li>Schemas support now compiled in by default.</li>
692 <li>Bug fixes: DTD validation, namespace checking, XInclude and entities,
693 delegateURI in XML Catalogs, HTML parser, XML reader (Stéphane Bidoul),
694 XPath parser and evaluation, UTF8ToUTF8 serialization, XML reader memory
695 consumption, HTML parser, HTML serialization in the presence of
696 namespaces</li>
697 <li>added an HTML API to check elements and attributes.</li>
698 <li>Documentation improvement, PDF for the tutorial (John Fleck), doc
699 patches (Stefan Kost)</li>
700 <li>Portability fixes: NetBSD (Julio Merino), Windows (Igor Zlatkovic)</li>
701 <li>Added python bindings for XPointer, contextual error reporting
702 (Stéphane Bidoul)</li>
703 <li>URI/file escaping problems (Stefano Zacchiroli)</li>
Daniel Veillardcf27f7c2002-04-30 07:12:39 +0000704</ul>
705
Daniel Veillarde2830f12003-01-08 17:47:49 +0000706<h3>2.5.1: Jan 8 2003</h3>
707<ul>
708 <li>Fixes a memory leak and configuration/compilation problems in 2.5.0</li>
709 <li>documentation updates (John)</li>
710 <li>a couple of XmlTextReader fixes</li>
711</ul>
712
Daniel Veillard7b4b2f92003-01-06 13:11:20 +0000713<h3>2.5.0: Jan 6 2003</h3>
714<ul>
715 <li>New <a href="xmlreader.html">XmltextReader interface</a> based on C#
716 API (with help of Stéphane Bidoul)</li>
717 <li>Windows: more exports, including the new API (Igor)</li>
718 <li>XInclude fallback fix</li>
719 <li>Python: bindings for the new API, packaging (Stéphane Bidoul),
720 drv_libxml2.py Python xml.sax driver (Stéphane Bidoul), fixes, speedup
721 and iterators for Python-2.2 (Hannu Krosing)</li>
722 <li>Tutorial fixes (john Fleck and Niraj Tolia) xmllint man update
723 (John)</li>
724 <li>Fix an XML parser bug raised by Vyacheslav Pindyura</li>
725 <li>Fix for VMS serialization (Nigel Hall) and config (Craig A. Berry)</li>
726 <li>Entities handling fixes</li>
727 <li>new API to optionally track node creation and deletion (Lukas
728 Schroeder)</li>
729 <li>Added documentation for the XmltextReader interface and some <a
730 href="guidelines.html">XML guidelines</a></li>
731</ul>
732
Daniel Veillardc1eed322002-12-12 11:01:32 +0000733<h3>2.4.30: Dec 12 2002</h3>
734<ul>
735 <li>2.4.29 broke the python bindings, rereleasing</li>
736 <li>Improvement/fixes of the XML API generator, and couple of minor code
737 fixes.</li>
738</ul>
739
Daniel Veillard9b4bb4d2002-12-11 19:28:47 +0000740<h3>2.4.29: Dec 11 2002</h3>
741<ul>
742 <li>Windows fixes (Igor): Windows CE port, pthread linking, python bindings
743 (Stéphane Bidoul), Mingw (Magnus Henoch), and export list updates</li>
744 <li>Fix for prev in python bindings (ERDI Gergo)</li>
745 <li>Fix for entities handling (Marcus Clarke)</li>
746 <li>Refactored the XML and HTML dumps to a single code path, fixed XHTML1
747 dump</li>
748 <li>Fix for URI parsing when handling URNs with fragment identifiers</li>
749 <li>Fix for HTTP URL escaping problem</li>
750 <li>added an TextXmlReader (C#) like API (work in progress)</li>
751 <li>Rewrote the API in XML generation script, includes a C parser and saves
752 more informations needed for C# bindings</li>
753</ul>
754
Daniel Veillardf9c4cad2002-11-22 15:57:07 +0000755<h3>2.4.28: Nov 22 2002</h3>
756<ul>
757 <li>a couple of python binding fixes</li>
758 <li>2 bug fixes in the XML push parser</li>
759 <li>potential memory leak removed (Martin Stoilov)</li>
760 <li>fix to the configure script for Unix (Dimitri Papadopoulos)</li>
761 <li>added encoding support for XInclude parse="text"</li>
762 <li>autodetection of XHTML1 and specific serialization rules added</li>
Daniel Veillard9b4bb4d2002-12-11 19:28:47 +0000763 <li>nasty threading bug fixed (William Brack)</li>
Daniel Veillardf9c4cad2002-11-22 15:57:07 +0000764</ul>
765
Daniel Veillarddad3f682002-11-17 16:47:27 +0000766<h3>2.4.27: Nov 17 2002</h3>
767<ul>
768 <li>fixes for the Python bindings</li>
769 <li>a number of bug fixes: SGML catalogs, xmlParseBalancedChunkMemory(),
770 HTML parser, Schemas (Charles Bozeman), document fragment support
771 (Christian Glahn), xmlReconciliateNs (Brian Stafford), XPointer,
772 xmlFreeNode(), xmlSAXParseMemory (Peter Jones), xmlGetNodePath (Petr
773 Pajas), entities processing</li>
774 <li>added grep to xmllint --shell</li>
775 <li>VMS update patch from Craig A. Berry</li>
776 <li>cleanup of the Windows build with support for more compilers (Igor),
777 better thread support on Windows</li>
778 <li>cleanup of Unix Makefiles and spec file</li>
779 <li>Improvements to the documentation (John Fleck)</li>
780</ul>
781
Daniel Veillard48267432002-10-18 11:21:38 +0000782<h3>2.4.26: Oct 18 2002</h3>
783<ul>
784 <li>Patches for Windows CE port, improvements on Windows paths handling</li>
785 <li>Fixes to the validation code (DTD and Schemas), xmlNodeGetPath() ,
786 HTML serialization, Namespace compliance, and a number of small
787 problems</li>
788</ul>
789
Daniel Veillarde16b5742002-09-26 17:50:03 +0000790<h3>2.4.25: Sep 26 2002</h3>
791<ul>
792 <li>A number of bug fixes: XPath, validation, Python bindings, DOM and
793 tree, xmlI/O, Html</li>
794 <li>Serious rewrite of XInclude</li>
795 <li>Made XML Schemas regexp part of the default build and APIs, small fix
796 and improvement of the regexp core</li>
797 <li>Changed the validation code to reuse XML Schemas regexp APIs</li>
798 <li>Better handling of Windows file paths, improvement of Makefiles (Igor,
799 Daniel Gehriger, Mark Vakoc)</li>
800 <li>Improved the python I/O bindings, the tests, added resolver and regexp
Daniel Veillard321be0c2002-10-08 21:26:42 +0000801 APIs</li>
Daniel Veillarde16b5742002-09-26 17:50:03 +0000802 <li>New logos from Marc Liyanage</li>
803 <li>Tutorial improvements: John Fleck, Christopher Harris</li>
804 <li>Makefile: Fixes for AMD x86_64 (Mandrake), DESTDIR (Christophe
805 Merlet)</li>
806 <li>removal of all stderr/perror use for error reporting</li>
807 <li>Better error reporting: XPath and DTD validation</li>
808 <li>update of the trio portability layer (Bjorn Reese)</li>
809</ul>
810
Daniel Veillard42766c02002-08-22 20:52:17 +0000811<p><strong>2.4.24: Aug 22 2002</strong></p>
812<ul>
813 <li>XPath fixes (William), xf:escape-uri() (Wesley Terpstra)</li>
814 <li>Python binding fixes: makefiles (William), generator, rpm build, x86-64
815 (fcrozat)</li>
816 <li>HTML &lt;style&gt; and boolean attributes serializer fixes</li>
817 <li>C14N improvements by Aleksey</li>
Daniel Veillarde1662542002-08-28 11:50:59 +0000818 <li>doc cleanups: Rick Jones</li>
Daniel Veillard42766c02002-08-22 20:52:17 +0000819 <li>Windows compiler makefile updates: Igor and Elizabeth Barham</li>
820 <li>XInclude: implementation of fallback and xml:base fixup added</li>
821</ul>
822
Daniel Veillard782afda2002-07-08 15:12:49 +0000823<h3>2.4.23: July 6 2002</h3>
824<ul>
825 <li>performances patches: Peter Jacobi</li>
826 <li>c14n fixes, testsuite and performances: Aleksey Sanin</li>
827 <li>added xmlDocFormatDump: Chema Celorio</li>
828 <li>new tutorial: John Fleck</li>
829 <li>new hash functions and performances: Sander Vesik, portability fix from
830 Peter Jacobi</li>
831 <li>a number of bug fixes: XPath (William Brack, Richard Jinks), XML and
832 HTML parsers, ID lookup function</li>
833 <li>removal of all remaining sprintf: Aleksey Sanin</li>
834</ul>
835
Daniel Veillardc0801af2002-05-28 16:28:42 +0000836<h3>2.4.22: May 27 2002</h3>
837<ul>
838 <li>a number of bug fixes: configure scripts, base handling, parser, memory
839 usage, HTML parser, XPath, documentation (Christian Cornelssen),
Daniel Veillard21473672002-06-17 07:29:22 +0000840 indentation, URI parsing</li>
Daniel Veillardc0801af2002-05-28 16:28:42 +0000841 <li>Optimizations for XMLSec, fixing and making public some of the network
842 protocol handlers (Aleksey)</li>
843 <li>performance patch from Gary Pennington</li>
844 <li>Charles Bozeman provided date and time support for XML Schemas
845 datatypes</li>
846</ul>
847
Daniel Veillardcf27f7c2002-04-30 07:12:39 +0000848<h3>2.4.21: Apr 29 2002</h3>
849
850<p>This release is both a bug fix release and also contains the early XML
851Schemas <a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xmlschema-1/">structures</a> and <a
852href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xmlschema-2/">datatypes</a> code, beware, all
853interfaces are likely to change, there is huge holes, it is clearly a work in
854progress and don't even think of putting this code in a production system,
Daniel Veillarde6d8e202002-05-02 06:11:10 +0000855it's actually not compiled in by default. The real fixes are:</p>
Daniel Veillardcf27f7c2002-04-30 07:12:39 +0000856<ul>
857 <li>a couple of bugs or limitations introduced in 2.4.20</li>
858 <li>patches for Borland C++ and MSC by Igor</li>
859 <li>some fixes on XPath strings and conformance patches by Richard
860 Jinks</li>
861 <li>patch from Aleksey for the ExcC14N specification</li>
862 <li>OSF/1 bug fix by Bjorn</li>
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +0000863</ul>
864
Daniel Veillarda7084cd2002-04-15 17:12:47 +0000865<h3>2.4.20: Apr 15 2002</h3>
866<ul>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000867 <li>bug fixes: file descriptor leak, XPath, HTML output, DTD validation</li>
Daniel Veillarda7084cd2002-04-15 17:12:47 +0000868 <li>XPath conformance testing by Richard Jinks</li>
869 <li>Portability fixes: Solaris, MPE/iX, Windows, OSF/1, python bindings,
870 libxml.m4</li>
871</ul>
872
Daniel Veillard19274092002-03-25 16:48:03 +0000873<h3>2.4.19: Mar 25 2002</h3>
874<ul>
875 <li>bug fixes: half a dozen XPath bugs, Validation, ISO-Latin to UTF8
876 encoder</li>
877 <li>portability fixes in the HTTP code</li>
Daniel Veillardb2fb8ed2002-04-01 09:33:12 +0000878 <li>memory allocation checks using valgrind, and profiling tests</li>
Daniel Veillard19274092002-03-25 16:48:03 +0000879 <li>revamp of the Windows build and Makefiles</li>
880</ul>
881
Daniel Veillard34ce8be2002-03-18 19:37:11 +0000882<h3>2.4.18: Mar 18 2002</h3>
883<ul>
884 <li>bug fixes: tree, SAX, canonicalization, validation, portability,
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000885 XPath</li>
Daniel Veillard34ce8be2002-03-18 19:37:11 +0000886 <li>removed the --with-buffer option it was becoming unmaintainable</li>
887 <li>serious cleanup of the Python makefiles</li>
888 <li>speedup patch to XPath very effective for DocBook stylesheets</li>
889 <li>Fixes for Windows build, cleanup of the documentation</li>
890</ul>
891
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +0000892<h3>2.4.17: Mar 8 2002</h3>
893<ul>
894 <li>a lot of bug fixes, including "namespace nodes have no parents in
895 XPath"</li>
896 <li>fixed/improved the Python wrappers, added more examples and more
897 regression tests, XPath extension functions can now return node-sets</li>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000898 <li>added the XML Canonicalization support from Aleksey Sanin</li>
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000899</ul>
900
Daniel Veillard5f4b5992002-02-20 10:22:49 +0000901<h3>2.4.16: Feb 20 2002</h3>
902<ul>
903 <li>a lot of bug fixes, most of them were triggered by the XML Testsuite
904 from OASIS and W3C. Compliance has been significantly improved.</li>
905 <li>a couple of portability fixes too.</li>
906</ul>
907
Daniel Veillard397ff112002-02-11 18:27:20 +0000908<h3>2.4.15: Feb 11 2002</h3>
909<ul>
910 <li>Fixed the Makefiles, especially the python module ones</li>
911 <li>A few bug fixes and cleanup</li>
912 <li>Includes cleanup</li>
913</ul>
914
Daniel Veillardb6c1e2f2002-02-08 14:52:52 +0000915<h3>2.4.14: Feb 8 2002</h3>
916<ul>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000917 <li>Change of License to the <a
Daniel Veillardb6c1e2f2002-02-08 14:52:52 +0000918 href="http://www.opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.html">MIT
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000919 License</a> basically for integration in XFree86 codebase, and removing
920 confusion around the previous dual-licensing</li>
Daniel Veillardb6c1e2f2002-02-08 14:52:52 +0000921 <li>added Python bindings, beta software but should already be quite
922 complete</li>
923 <li>a large number of fixes and cleanups, especially for all tree
924 manipulations</li>
925 <li>cleanup of the headers, generation of a reference API definition in
926 XML</li>
927</ul>
928
929<h3>2.4.13: Jan 14 2002</h3>
Daniel Veillard744683d2002-01-14 17:30:20 +0000930<ul>
931 <li>update of the documentation: John Fleck and Charlie Bozeman</li>
932 <li>cleanup of timing code from Justin Fletcher</li>
933 <li>fixes for Windows and initial thread support on Win32: Igor and Serguei
934 Narojnyi</li>
935 <li>Cygwin patch from Robert Collins</li>
936 <li>added xmlSetEntityReferenceFunc() for Keith Isdale work on xsldbg</li>
937</ul>
938
Daniel Veillardef90ba72001-12-07 14:24:22 +0000939<h3>2.4.12: Dec 7 2001</h3>
940<ul>
941 <li>a few bug fixes: thread (Gary Pennington), xmllint (Geert Kloosterman),
942 XML parser (Robin Berjon), XPointer (Danny Jamshy), I/O cleanups
943 (robert)</li>
944 <li>Eric Lavigne contributed project files for MacOS</li>
945 <li>some makefiles cleanups</li>
946</ul>
947
Daniel Veillarda4871052001-11-26 13:19:48 +0000948<h3>2.4.11: Nov 26 2001</h3>
949<ul>
950 <li>fixed a couple of errors in the includes, fixed a few bugs, some code
951 cleanups</li>
952 <li>xmllint man pages improvement by Heiko Rupp</li>
953 <li>updated VMS build instructions from John A Fotheringham</li>
954 <li>Windows Makefiles updates from Igor</li>
955</ul>
956
Daniel Veillard43d3f612001-11-10 11:57:23 +0000957<h3>2.4.10: Nov 10 2001</h3>
958<ul>
959 <li>URI escaping fix (Joel Young)</li>
960 <li>added xmlGetNodePath() (for paths or XPointers generation)</li>
961 <li>Fixes namespace handling problems when using DTD and validation</li>
962 <li>improvements on xmllint: Morus Walter patches for --format and
963 --encode, Stefan Kost and Heiko Rupp improvements on the --shell</li>
964 <li>fixes for xmlcatalog linking pointed by Weiqi Gao</li>
965 <li>fixes to the HTML parser</li>
966</ul>
967
968<h3>2.4.9: Nov 6 2001</h3>
969<ul>
970 <li>fixes more catalog bugs</li>
971 <li>avoid a compilation problem, improve xmlGetLineNo()</li>
972</ul>
973
Daniel Veillarded421aa2001-11-04 21:22:45 +0000974<h3>2.4.8: Nov 4 2001</h3>
975<ul>
976 <li>fixed SGML catalogs broken in previous release, updated xmlcatalog
977 tool</li>
978 <li>fixed a compile errors and some includes troubles.</li>
979</ul>
980
Daniel Veillard52dcab32001-10-30 12:51:17 +0000981<h3>2.4.7: Oct 30 2001</h3>
982<ul>
983 <li>exported some debugging interfaces</li>
984 <li>serious rewrite of the catalog code</li>
985 <li>integrated Gary Pennington thread safety patch, added configure option
986 and regression tests</li>
987 <li>removed an HTML parser bug</li>
988 <li>fixed a couple of potentially serious validation bugs</li>
989 <li>integrated the SGML DocBook support in xmllint</li>
990 <li>changed the nanoftp anonymous login passwd</li>
991 <li>some I/O cleanup and a couple of interfaces for Perl wrapper</li>
992 <li>general bug fixes</li>
993 <li>updated xmllint man page by John Fleck</li>
994 <li>some VMS and Windows updates</li>
995</ul>
996
Daniel Veillard60087f32001-10-10 09:45:09 +0000997<h3>2.4.6: Oct 10 2001</h3>
998<ul>
Daniel Veillard52dcab32001-10-30 12:51:17 +0000999 <li>added an updated man pages by John Fleck</li>
Daniel Veillard60087f32001-10-10 09:45:09 +00001000 <li>portability and configure fixes</li>
1001 <li>an infinite loop on the HTML parser was removed (William)</li>
1002 <li>Windows makefile patches from Igor</li>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00001003 <li>fixed half a dozen bugs reported for libxml or libxslt</li>
Daniel Veillard60087f32001-10-10 09:45:09 +00001004 <li>updated xmlcatalog to be able to modify SGML super catalogs</li>
1005</ul>
1006
Daniel Veillarddadd0872001-09-15 09:21:44 +00001007<h3>2.4.5: Sep 14 2001</h3>
1008<ul>
1009 <li>Remove a few annoying bugs in 2.4.4</li>
1010 <li>forces the HTML serializer to output decimal charrefs since some
1011 version of Netscape can't handle hexadecimal ones</li>
1012</ul>
1013
1014<h3>1.8.16: Sep 14 2001</h3>
1015<ul>
1016 <li>maintenance release of the old libxml1 branch, couple of bug and
1017 portability fixes</li>
1018</ul>
1019
Daniel Veillard04382ae2001-09-12 18:51:30 +00001020<h3>2.4.4: Sep 12 2001</h3>
1021<ul>
1022 <li>added --convert to xmlcatalog, bug fixes and cleanups of XML
1023 Catalog</li>
1024 <li>a few bug fixes and some portability changes</li>
1025 <li>some documentation cleanups</li>
1026</ul>
1027
Daniel Veillard39936902001-08-24 00:49:01 +00001028<h3>2.4.3: Aug 23 2001</h3>
1029<ul>
1030 <li>XML Catalog support see the doc</li>
1031 <li>New NaN/Infinity floating point code</li>
1032 <li>A few bug fixes</li>
1033</ul>
1034
1035<h3>2.4.2: Aug 15 2001</h3>
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +00001036<ul>
1037 <li>adds xmlLineNumbersDefault() to control line number generation</li>
1038 <li>lot of bug fixes</li>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00001039 <li>the Microsoft MSC projects files should now be up to date</li>
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +00001040 <li>inheritance of namespaces from DTD defaulted attributes</li>
1041 <li>fixes a serious potential security bug</li>
1042 <li>added a --format option to xmllint</li>
1043</ul>
1044
1045<h3>2.4.1: July 24 2001</h3>
1046<ul>
1047 <li>possibility to keep line numbers in the tree</li>
1048 <li>some computation NaN fixes</li>
1049 <li>extension of the XPath API</li>
1050 <li>cleanup for alpha and ia64 targets</li>
1051 <li>patch to allow saving through HTTP PUT or POST</li>
Daniel Veillard09ab7e12001-07-10 15:49:44 +00001052</ul>
1053
1054<h3>2.4.0: July 10 2001</h3>
1055<ul>
1056 <li>Fixed a few bugs in XPath, validation, and tree handling.</li>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00001057 <li>Fixed XML Base implementation, added a couple of examples to the
Daniel Veillard09ab7e12001-07-10 15:49:44 +00001058 regression tests</li>
1059 <li>A bit of cleanup</li>
Daniel Veillardab8500d2000-10-15 21:06:19 +00001060</ul>
1061
Daniel Veillard5b43fde2001-07-05 23:31:40 +00001062<h3>2.3.14: July 5 2001</h3>
1063<ul>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00001064 <li>fixed some entities problems and reduce memory requirement when
1065 substituting them</li>
Daniel Veillard5b43fde2001-07-05 23:31:40 +00001066 <li>lots of improvements in the XPath queries interpreter can be
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00001067 substantially faster</li>
Daniel Veillard5b43fde2001-07-05 23:31:40 +00001068 <li>Makefiles and configure cleanups</li>
1069 <li>Fixes to XPath variable eval, and compare on empty node set</li>
1070 <li>HTML tag closing bug fixed</li>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00001071 <li>Fixed an URI reference computation problem when validating</li>
Daniel Veillard5b43fde2001-07-05 23:31:40 +00001072</ul>
1073
Daniel Veillard2adbb512001-06-28 16:20:36 +00001074<h3>2.3.13: June 28 2001</h3>
1075<ul>
1076 <li>2.3.12 configure.in was broken as well as the push mode XML parser</li>
1077 <li>a few more fixes for compilation on Windows MSC by Yon Derek</li>
1078</ul>
1079
1080<h3>1.8.14: June 28 2001</h3>
1081<ul>
1082 <li>Zbigniew Chyla gave a patch to use the old XML parser in push mode</li>
1083 <li>Small Makefile fix</li>
1084</ul>
1085
Daniel Veillard11648102001-06-26 16:08:24 +00001086<h3>2.3.12: June 26 2001</h3>
1087<ul>
1088 <li>lots of cleanup</li>
1089 <li>a couple of validation fix</li>
1090 <li>fixed line number counting</li>
1091 <li>fixed serious problems in the XInclude processing</li>
1092 <li>added support for UTF8 BOM at beginning of entities</li>
1093 <li>fixed a strange gcc optimizer bugs in xpath handling of float, gcc-3.0
1094 miscompile uri.c (William), Thomas Leitner provided a fix for the
1095 optimizer on Tru64</li>
1096 <li>incorporated Yon Derek and Igor Zlatkovic fixes and improvements for
1097 compilation on Windows MSC</li>
1098 <li>update of libxml-doc.el (Felix Natter)</li>
1099 <li>fixed 2 bugs in URI normalization code</li>
1100</ul>
1101
Daniel Veillarde3c81b52001-06-17 14:50:34 +00001102<h3>2.3.11: June 17 2001</h3>
1103<ul>
1104 <li>updates to trio, Makefiles and configure should fix some portability
1105 problems (alpha)</li>
1106 <li>fixed some HTML serialization problems (pre, script, and block/inline
1107 handling), added encoding aware APIs, cleanup of this code</li>
1108 <li>added xmlHasNsProp()</li>
1109 <li>implemented a specific PI for encoding support in the DocBook SGML
1110 parser</li>
1111 <li>some XPath fixes (-Infinity, / as a function parameter and namespaces
1112 node selection)</li>
1113 <li>fixed a performance problem and an error in the validation code</li>
1114 <li>fixed XInclude routine to implement the recursive behaviour</li>
1115 <li>fixed xmlFreeNode problem when libxml is included statically twice</li>
1116 <li>added --version to xmllint for bug reports</li>
1117</ul>
1118
Daniel Veillard2e4f1882001-06-01 10:11:57 +00001119<h3>2.3.10: June 1 2001</h3>
1120<ul>
1121 <li>fixed the SGML catalog support</li>
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +00001122 <li>a number of reported bugs got fixed, in XPath, iconv detection,
1123 XInclude processing</li>
Daniel Veillard2e4f1882001-06-01 10:11:57 +00001124 <li>XPath string function should now handle unicode correctly</li>
1125</ul>
1126
Daniel Veillard4623acd2001-05-19 15:13:15 +00001127<h3>2.3.9: May 19 2001</h3>
1128
1129<p>Lots of bugfixes, and added a basic SGML catalog support:</p>
1130<ul>
1131 <li>HTML push bugfix #54891 and another patch from Jonas Borgström</li>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00001132 <li>some serious speed optimization again</li>
Daniel Veillard4623acd2001-05-19 15:13:15 +00001133 <li>some documentation cleanups</li>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00001134 <li>trying to get better linking on Solaris (-R)</li>
Daniel Veillard4623acd2001-05-19 15:13:15 +00001135 <li>XPath API cleanup from Thomas Broyer</li>
1136 <li>Validation bug fixed #54631, added a patch from Gary Pennington, fixed
1137 xmlValidGetValidElements()</li>
1138 <li>Added an INSTALL file</li>
1139 <li>Attribute removal added to API: #54433</li>
1140 <li>added a basic support for SGML catalogs</li>
1141 <li>fixed xmlKeepBlanksDefault(0) API</li>
1142 <li>bugfix in xmlNodeGetLang()</li>
1143 <li>fixed a small configure portability problem</li>
1144 <li>fixed an inversion of SYSTEM and PUBLIC identifier in HTML document</li>
1145</ul>
1146
Daniel Veillarda265af72001-05-14 11:13:58 +00001147<h3>1.8.13: May 14 2001</h3>
1148<ul>
1149 <li>bugfixes release of the old libxml1 branch used by Gnome</li>
1150</ul>
1151
Daniel Veillard3bbbe6f2001-05-03 11:15:37 +00001152<h3>2.3.8: May 3 2001</h3>
1153<ul>
1154 <li>Integrated an SGML DocBook parser for the Gnome project</li>
1155 <li>Fixed a few things in the HTML parser</li>
1156 <li>Fixed some XPath bugs raised by XSLT use, tried to fix the floating
1157 point portability issue</li>
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +00001158 <li>Speed improvement (8M/s for SAX, 3M/s for DOM, 1.5M/s for
1159 DOM+validation using the XML REC as input and a 700MHz celeron).</li>
Daniel Veillard3bbbe6f2001-05-03 11:15:37 +00001160 <li>incorporated more Windows cleanup</li>
1161 <li>added xmlSaveFormatFile()</li>
1162 <li>fixed problems in copying nodes with entities references (gdome)</li>
1163 <li>removed some troubles surrounding the new validation module</li>
1164</ul>
1165
Daniel Veillarda41123c2001-04-22 19:31:20 +00001166<h3>2.3.7: April 22 2001</h3>
1167<ul>
1168 <li>lots of small bug fixes, corrected XPointer</li>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00001169 <li>Non deterministic content model validation support</li>
Daniel Veillarda41123c2001-04-22 19:31:20 +00001170 <li>added xmlDocCopyNode for gdome2</li>
1171 <li>revamped the way the HTML parser handles end of tags</li>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00001172 <li>XPath: corrections of namespaces support and number formatting</li>
Daniel Veillarda41123c2001-04-22 19:31:20 +00001173 <li>Windows: Igor Zlatkovic patches for MSC compilation</li>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00001174 <li>HTML output fixes from P C Chow and William M. Brack</li>
Daniel Veillarda41123c2001-04-22 19:31:20 +00001175 <li>Improved validation speed sensible for DocBook</li>
1176 <li>fixed a big bug with ID declared in external parsed entities</li>
1177 <li>portability fixes, update of Trio from Bjorn Reese</li>
1178</ul>
1179
Daniel Veillardafc73112001-04-11 11:51:41 +00001180<h3>2.3.6: April 8 2001</h3>
1181<ul>
1182 <li>Code cleanup using extreme gcc compiler warning options, found and
1183 cleared half a dozen potential problem</li>
1184 <li>the Eazel team found an XML parser bug</li>
1185 <li>cleaned up the user of some of the string formatting function. used the
1186 trio library code to provide the one needed when the platform is missing
1187 them</li>
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +00001188 <li>xpath: removed a memory leak and fixed the predicate evaluation
1189 problem, extended the testsuite and cleaned up the result. XPointer seems
1190 broken ...</li>
Daniel Veillardafc73112001-04-11 11:51:41 +00001191</ul>
1192
Daniel Veillard56a4cb82001-03-24 17:00:36 +00001193<h3>2.3.5: Mar 23 2001</h3>
1194<ul>
1195 <li>Biggest change is separate parsing and evaluation of XPath expressions,
1196 there is some new APIs for this too</li>
1197 <li>included a number of bug fixes(XML push parser, 51876, notations,
1198 52299)</li>
1199 <li>Fixed some portability issues</li>
1200</ul>
1201
Daniel Veillarde356c282001-03-10 12:32:04 +00001202<h3>2.3.4: Mar 10 2001</h3>
1203<ul>
1204 <li>Fixed bugs #51860 and #51861</li>
1205 <li>Added a global variable xmlDefaultBufferSize to allow default buffer
1206 size to be application tunable.</li>
1207 <li>Some cleanup in the validation code, still a bug left and this part
1208 should probably be rewritten to support ambiguous content model :-\</li>
1209 <li>Fix a couple of serious bugs introduced or raised by changes in 2.3.3
1210 parser</li>
1211 <li>Fixed another bug in xmlNodeGetContent()</li>
1212 <li>Bjorn fixed XPath node collection and Number formatting</li>
1213 <li>Fixed a loop reported in the HTML parsing</li>
1214 <li>blank space are reported even if the Dtd content model proves that they
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00001215 are formatting spaces, this is for XML conformance</li>
Daniel Veillarde356c282001-03-10 12:32:04 +00001216</ul>
1217
Daniel Veillardb402c072001-03-01 17:28:58 +00001218<h3>2.3.3: Mar 1 2001</h3>
1219<ul>
1220 <li>small change in XPath for XSLT</li>
1221 <li>documentation cleanups</li>
1222 <li>fix in validation by Gary Pennington</li>
1223 <li>serious parsing performances improvements</li>
1224</ul>
1225
Daniel Veillardec70e912001-02-26 20:10:45 +00001226<h3>2.3.2: Feb 24 2001</h3>
Daniel Veillard71681102001-02-24 17:48:53 +00001227<ul>
1228 <li>chasing XPath bugs, found a bunch, completed some TODO</li>
1229 <li>fixed a Dtd parsing bug</li>
1230 <li>fixed a bug in xmlNodeGetContent</li>
1231 <li>ID/IDREF support partly rewritten by Gary Pennington</li>
1232</ul>
1233
Daniel Veillardec70e912001-02-26 20:10:45 +00001234<h3>2.3.1: Feb 15 2001</h3>
Daniel Veillard6e6a6cc2001-02-15 15:55:44 +00001235<ul>
1236 <li>some XPath and HTML bug fixes for XSLT</li>
1237 <li>small extension of the hash table interfaces for DOM gdome2
1238 implementation</li>
1239 <li>A few bug fixes</li>
1240</ul>
1241
Daniel Veillardec70e912001-02-26 20:10:45 +00001242<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 +00001243<ul>
1244 <li>Lots of XPath bug fixes</li>
1245 <li>Add a mode with Dtd lookup but without validation error reporting for
1246 XSLT</li>
1247 <li>Add support for text node without escaping (XSLT)</li>
1248 <li>bug fixes for xmlCheckFilename</li>
1249 <li>validation code bug fixes from Gary Pennington</li>
1250 <li>Patch from Paul D. Smith correcting URI path normalization</li>
1251 <li>Patch to allow simultaneous install of libxml-devel and
1252 libxml2-devel</li>
1253 <li>the example Makefile is now fixed</li>
1254 <li>added HTML to the RPM packages</li>
1255 <li>tree copying bugfixes</li>
1256 <li>updates to Windows makefiles</li>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00001257 <li>optimization patch from Bjorn Reese</li>
Daniel Veillard6e6a6cc2001-02-15 15:55:44 +00001258</ul>
1259
Daniel Veillardec70e912001-02-26 20:10:45 +00001260<h3>2.2.11: Jan 4 2001</h3>
Daniel Veillard503b8932001-01-05 06:36:31 +00001261<ul>
1262 <li>bunch of bug fixes (memory I/O, xpath, ftp/http, ...)</li>
1263 <li>added htmlHandleOmittedElem()</li>
1264 <li>Applied Bjorn Reese's IPV6 first patch</li>
1265 <li>Applied Paul D. Smith patches for validation of XInclude results</li>
Daniel Veillard82687162001-01-22 15:32:01 +00001266 <li>added XPointer xmlns() new scheme support</li>
Daniel Veillard503b8932001-01-05 06:36:31 +00001267</ul>
1268
Daniel Veillard2ddd23d2000-11-25 10:42:19 +00001269<h3>2.2.10: Nov 25 2000</h3>
Daniel Veillard9d343c42000-11-25 10:12:43 +00001270<ul>
1271 <li>Fix the Windows problems of 2.2.8</li>
1272 <li>integrate OpenVMS patches</li>
1273 <li>better handling of some nasty HTML input</li>
1274 <li>Improved the XPointer implementation</li>
1275 <li>integrate a number of provided patches</li>
1276</ul>
1277
Daniel Veillard2ddd23d2000-11-25 10:42:19 +00001278<h3>2.2.9: Nov 25 2000</h3>
1279<ul>
1280 <li>erroneous release :-(</li>
1281</ul>
1282
Daniel Veillard28929b22000-11-13 18:22:49 +00001283<h3>2.2.8: Nov 13 2000</h3>
1284<ul>
1285 <li>First version of <a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xinclude">XInclude</a>
1286 support</li>
1287 <li>Patch in conditional section handling</li>
1288 <li>updated MS compiler project</li>
1289 <li>fixed some XPath problems</li>
1290 <li>added an URI escaping function</li>
1291 <li>some other bug fixes</li>
1292</ul>
1293
1294<h3>2.2.7: Oct 31 2000</h3>
1295<ul>
1296 <li>added message redirection</li>
1297 <li>XPath improvements (thanks TOM !)</li>
1298 <li>xmlIOParseDTD() added</li>
1299 <li>various small fixes in the HTML, URI, HTTP and XPointer support</li>
1300 <li>some cleanup of the Makefile, autoconf and the distribution content</li>
1301</ul>
1302
Daniel Veillard29a11cc2000-10-25 13:32:39 +00001303<h3>2.2.6: Oct 25 2000:</h3>
1304<ul>
1305 <li>Added an hash table module, migrated a number of internal structure to
1306 those</li>
1307 <li>Fixed a posteriori validation problems</li>
1308 <li>HTTP module cleanups</li>
1309 <li>HTML parser improvements (tag errors, script/style handling, attribute
1310 normalization)</li>
1311 <li>coalescing of adjacent text nodes</li>
1312 <li>couple of XPath bug fixes, exported the internal API</li>
1313</ul>
1314
Daniel Veillardab8500d2000-10-15 21:06:19 +00001315<h3>2.2.5: Oct 15 2000:</h3>
Daniel Veillard4c3a2031999-11-19 17:46:26 +00001316<ul>
Daniel Veillard189446d2000-10-13 10:23:06 +00001317 <li>XPointer implementation and testsuite</li>
1318 <li>Lot of XPath fixes, added variable and functions registration, more
1319 tests</li>
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +00001320 <li>Portability fixes, lots of enhancements toward an easy Windows build
1321 and release</li>
Daniel Veillard189446d2000-10-13 10:23:06 +00001322 <li>Late validation fixes</li>
1323 <li>Integrated a lot of contributed patches</li>
1324 <li>added memory management docs</li>
Daniel Veillardab8500d2000-10-15 21:06:19 +00001325 <li>a performance problem when using large buffer seems fixed</li>
Daniel Veillard189446d2000-10-13 10:23:06 +00001326</ul>
1327
1328<h3>2.2.4: Oct 1 2000:</h3>
1329<ul>
1330 <li>main XPath problem fixed</li>
1331 <li>Integrated portability patches for Windows</li>
1332 <li>Serious bug fixes on the URI and HTML code</li>
Daniel Veillard361d8452000-04-03 19:48:13 +00001333</ul>
1334
Daniel Veillardd5f97f82000-09-17 16:38:14 +00001335<h3>2.2.3: Sep 17 2000</h3>
1336<ul>
1337 <li>bug fixes</li>
1338 <li>cleanup of entity handling code</li>
1339 <li>overall review of all loops in the parsers, all sprintf usage has been
1340 checked too</li>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00001341 <li>Far better handling of larges Dtd. Validating against DocBook XML Dtd
Daniel Veillardd5f97f82000-09-17 16:38:14 +00001342 works smoothly now.</li>
1343</ul>
1344
1345<h3>1.8.10: Sep 6 2000</h3>
1346<ul>
1347 <li>bug fix release for some Gnome projects</li>
1348</ul>
1349
1350<h3>2.2.2: August 12 2000</h3>
Daniel Veillard786d7c82000-08-12 23:38:57 +00001351<ul>
1352 <li>mostly bug fixes</li>
Daniel Veillardec78c0f2000-08-25 10:25:23 +00001353 <li>started adding routines to access xml parser context options</li>
Daniel Veillard786d7c82000-08-12 23:38:57 +00001354</ul>
1355
Daniel Veillardd5f97f82000-09-17 16:38:14 +00001356<h3>2.2.1: July 21 2000</h3>
Daniel Veillarda2679fa2000-07-22 02:38:15 +00001357<ul>
1358 <li>a purely bug fixes release</li>
1359 <li>fixed an encoding support problem when parsing from a memory block</li>
1360 <li>fixed a DOCTYPE parsing problem</li>
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +00001361 <li>removed a bug in the function allowing to override the memory
1362 allocation routines</li>
Daniel Veillarda2679fa2000-07-22 02:38:15 +00001363</ul>
1364
Daniel Veillardd5f97f82000-09-17 16:38:14 +00001365<h3>2.2.0: July 14 2000</h3>
Daniel Veillard94e90602000-07-17 14:38:19 +00001366<ul>
1367 <li>applied a lot of portability fixes</li>
1368 <li>better encoding support/cleanup and saving (content is now always
1369 encoded in UTF-8)</li>
1370 <li>the HTML parser now correctly handles encodings</li>
1371 <li>added xmlHasProp()</li>
1372 <li>fixed a serious problem with &amp;#38;</li>
1373 <li>propagated the fix to FTP client</li>
1374 <li>cleanup, bugfixes, etc ...</li>
1375 <li>Added a page about <a href="encoding.html">libxml Internationalization
1376 support</a></li>
1377</ul>
1378
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00001379<h3>1.8.9: July 9 2000</h3>
1380<ul>
1381 <li>fixed the spec the RPMs should be better</li>
1382 <li>fixed a serious bug in the FTP implementation, released 1.8.9 to solve
1383 rpmfind users problem</li>
1384</ul>
1385
Daniel Veillard6388e172000-07-03 16:07:19 +00001386<h3>2.1.1: July 1 2000</h3>
1387<ul>
1388 <li>fixes a couple of bugs in the 2.1.0 packaging</li>
1389 <li>improvements on the HTML parser</li>
1390</ul>
1391
Daniel Veillard3f6f7f62000-06-30 17:58:25 +00001392<h3>2.1.0 and 1.8.8: June 29 2000</h3>
1393<ul>
Daniel Veillardc0801af2002-05-28 16:28:42 +00001394 <li>1.8.8 is mostly a commodity package for upgrading to libxml2 according
1395 to <a href="upgrade.html">new instructions</a>. It fixes a nasty problem
Daniel Veillard3f6f7f62000-06-30 17:58:25 +00001396 about &amp;#38; charref parsing</li>
1397 <li>2.1.0 also ease the upgrade from libxml v1 to the recent version. it
1398 also contains numerous fixes and enhancements:
1399 <ul>
1400 <li>added xmlStopParser() to stop parsing</li>
1401 <li>improved a lot parsing speed when there is large CDATA blocs</li>
1402 <li>includes XPath patches provided by Picdar Technology</li>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00001403 <li>tried to fix as much as possible DTD validation and namespace
Daniel Veillard3f6f7f62000-06-30 17:58:25 +00001404 related problems</li>
1405 <li>output to a given encoding has been added/tested</li>
1406 <li>lot of various fixes</li>
1407 </ul>
1408 </li>
1409</ul>
1410
Daniel Veillarde0aed302000-04-16 08:52:20 +00001411<h3>2.0.0: Apr 12 2000</h3>
Daniel Veillard361d8452000-04-03 19:48:13 +00001412<ul>
1413 <li>First public release of libxml2. If you are using libxml, it's a good
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00001414 idea to check the 1.x to 2.x upgrade instructions. NOTE: while initially
1415 scheduled for Apr 3 the release occurred only on Apr 12 due to massive
Daniel Veillarde0aed302000-04-16 08:52:20 +00001416 workload.</li>
Daniel Veillard361d8452000-04-03 19:48:13 +00001417 <li>The include are now located under $prefix/include/libxml (instead of
Daniel Veillarde0aed302000-04-16 08:52:20 +00001418 $prefix/include/gnome-xml), they also are referenced by
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00001419 <pre>#include &lt;libxml/xxx.h&gt;</pre>
Daniel Veillarde0aed302000-04-16 08:52:20 +00001420 <p>instead of</p>
Daniel Veillard361d8452000-04-03 19:48:13 +00001421 <pre>#include "xxx.h"</pre>
1422 </li>
Daniel Veillard8f621982000-03-20 13:07:15 +00001423 <li>a new URI module for parsing URIs and following strictly RFC 2396</li>
1424 <li>the memory allocation routines used by libxml can now be overloaded
1425 dynamically by using xmlMemSetup()</li>
Daniel Veillard361d8452000-04-03 19:48:13 +00001426 <li>The previously CVS only tool tester has been renamed
1427 <strong>xmllint</strong> and is now installed as part of the libxml2
1428 package</li>
Daniel Veillarde0aed302000-04-16 08:52:20 +00001429 <li>The I/O interface has been revamped. There is now ways to plug in
1430 specific I/O modules, either at the URI scheme detection level using
1431 xmlRegisterInputCallbacks() or by passing I/O functions when creating a
1432 parser context using xmlCreateIOParserCtxt()</li>
1433 <li>there is a C preprocessor macro LIBXML_VERSION providing the version
1434 number of the libxml module in use</li>
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +00001435 <li>a number of optional features of libxml can now be excluded at
1436 configure time (FTP/HTTP/HTML/XPath/Debug)</li>
Daniel Veillardedfb29b2000-03-14 19:59:05 +00001437</ul>
1438
1439<h3>2.0.0beta: Mar 14 2000</h3>
1440<ul>
1441 <li>This is a first Beta release of libxml version 2</li>
Daniel Veillarde356c282001-03-10 12:32:04 +00001442 <li>It's available only from<a href="ftp://xmlsoft.org/">xmlsoft.org
1443 FTP</a>, it's packaged as libxml2-2.0.0beta and available as tar and
1444 RPMs</li>
Daniel Veillardedfb29b2000-03-14 19:59:05 +00001445 <li>This version is now the head in the Gnome CVS base, the old one is
1446 available under the tag LIB_XML_1_X</li>
Daniel Veillardc0801af2002-05-28 16:28:42 +00001447 <li>This includes a very large set of changes. From a programmatic point
1448 of view applications should not have to be modified too much, check the
1449 <a href="upgrade.html">upgrade page</a></li>
Daniel Veillardedfb29b2000-03-14 19:59:05 +00001450 <li>Some interfaces may changes (especially a bit about encoding).</li>
1451 <li>the updates includes:
Daniel Veillard6c8b1172000-03-01 00:40:41 +00001452 <ul>
Daniel Veillardedfb29b2000-03-14 19:59:05 +00001453 <li>fix I18N support. ISO-Latin-x/UTF-8/UTF-16 (nearly) seems correctly
1454 handled now</li>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00001455 <li>Better handling of entities, especially well-formedness checking
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +00001456 and proper PEref extensions in external subsets</li>
Daniel Veillard6c8b1172000-03-01 00:40:41 +00001457 <li>DTD conditional sections</li>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00001458 <li>Validation now correctly handle entities content</li>
Daniel Veillard6c8b1172000-03-01 00:40:41 +00001459 <li><a href="http://rpmfind.net/tools/gdome/messages/0039.html">change
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00001460 structures to accommodate DOM</a></li>
Daniel Veillard6c8b1172000-03-01 00:40:41 +00001461 </ul>
1462 </li>
Daniel Veillardedfb29b2000-03-14 19:59:05 +00001463 <li>Serious progress were made toward compliance, <a
1464 href="conf/result.html">here are the result of the test</a> against the
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00001465 OASIS testsuite (except the Japanese tests since I don't support that
Daniel Veillardedfb29b2000-03-14 19:59:05 +00001466 encoding yet). This URL is rebuilt every couple of hours using the CVS
1467 head version.</li>
Daniel Veillarde41f2b72000-01-30 20:00:07 +00001468</ul>
1469
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +00001470<h3>1.8.7: Mar 6 2000</h3>
1471<ul>
1472 <li>This is a bug fix release:</li>
1473 <li>It is possible to disable the ignorable blanks heuristic used by
1474 libxml-1.x, a new function xmlKeepBlanksDefault(0) will allow this. Note
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +00001475 that for adherence to XML spec, this behaviour will be disabled by
1476 default in 2.x . The same function will allow to keep compatibility for
1477 old code.</li>
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00001478 <li>Blanks in &lt;a&gt; &lt;/a&gt; constructs are not ignored anymore,
1479 avoiding heuristic is really the Right Way :-\</li>
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +00001480 <li>The unchecked use of snprintf which was breaking libxml-1.8.6
1481 compilation on some platforms has been fixed</li>
1482 <li>nanoftp.c nanohttp.c: Fixed '#' and '?' stripping when processing
1483 URIs</li>
1484</ul>
1485
Daniel Veillarde41f2b72000-01-30 20:00:07 +00001486<h3>1.8.6: Jan 31 2000</h3>
1487<ul>
1488 <li>added a nanoFTP transport module, debugged until the new version of <a
1489 href="http://rpmfind.net/linux/rpm2html/rpmfind.html">rpmfind</a> can use
1490 it without troubles</li>
Daniel Veillardda07c342000-01-25 18:31:22 +00001491</ul>
1492
1493<h3>1.8.5: Jan 21 2000</h3>
1494<ul>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +00001495 <li>adding APIs to parse a well balanced chunk of XML (production <a
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +00001496 href="http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml#NT-content">[43] content</a> of the
1497 XML spec)</li>
Daniel Veillard461a66c2000-01-18 18:01:01 +00001498 <li>fixed a hideous bug in xmlGetProp pointed by Rune.Djurhuus@fast.no</li>
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00001499 <li>Jody Goldberg &lt;jgoldberg@home.com&gt; provided another patch trying
1500 to solve the zlib checks problems</li>
Daniel Veillard461a66c2000-01-18 18:01:01 +00001501 <li>The current state in gnome CVS base is expected to ship as 1.8.5 with
1502 gnumeric soon</li>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +00001503</ul>
1504
1505<h3>1.8.4: Jan 13 2000</h3>
1506<ul>
1507 <li>bug fixes, reintroduced xmlNewGlobalNs(), fixed xmlNewNs()</li>
1508 <li>all exit() call should have been removed from libxml</li>
1509 <li>fixed a problem with INCLUDE_WINSOCK on WIN32 platform</li>
1510 <li>added newDocFragment()</li>
Daniel Veillardf84f71f2000-01-05 19:54:23 +00001511</ul>
1512
1513<h3>1.8.3: Jan 5 2000</h3>
1514<ul>
1515 <li>a Push interface for the XML and HTML parsers</li>
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +00001516 <li>a shell-like interface to the document tree (try tester --shell :-)</li>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00001517 <li>lots of bug fixes and improvement added over XMas holidays</li>
Daniel Veillard437b87b2000-01-03 17:30:46 +00001518 <li>fixed the DTD parsing code to work with the xhtml DTD</li>
Daniel Veillardf84f71f2000-01-05 19:54:23 +00001519 <li>added xmlRemoveProp(), xmlRemoveID() and xmlRemoveRef()</li>
1520 <li>Fixed bugs in xmlNewNs()</li>
Daniel Veillard437b87b2000-01-03 17:30:46 +00001521 <li>External entity loading code has been revamped, now it uses
Daniel Veillardf84f71f2000-01-05 19:54:23 +00001522 xmlLoadExternalEntity(), some fix on entities processing were added</li>
Daniel Veillard437b87b2000-01-03 17:30:46 +00001523 <li>cleaned up WIN32 includes of socket stuff</li>
Daniel Veillard5cb5ab81999-12-21 15:35:29 +00001524</ul>
1525
1526<h3>1.8.2: Dec 21 1999</h3>
1527<ul>
Daniel Veillardb24054a1999-12-18 15:32:46 +00001528 <li>I got another problem with includes and C++, I hope this issue is fixed
1529 for good this time</li>
Daniel Veillard5cb5ab81999-12-21 15:35:29 +00001530 <li>Added a few tree modification functions: xmlReplaceNode,
1531 xmlAddPrevSibling, xmlAddNextSibling, xmlNodeSetName and
1532 xmlDocSetRootElement</li>
1533 <li>Tried to improve the HTML output with help from <a
1534 href="mailto:clahey@umich.edu">Chris Lahey</a></li>
Daniel Veillarde4e51311999-12-18 15:32:46 +00001535</ul>
Daniel Veillardb24054a1999-12-18 15:32:46 +00001536
Daniel Veillarde4e51311999-12-18 15:32:46 +00001537<h3>1.8.1: Dec 18 1999</h3>
1538<ul>
1539 <li>various patches to avoid troubles when using libxml with C++ compilers
1540 the "namespace" keyword and C escaping in include files</li>
1541 <li>a problem in one of the core macros IS_CHAR was corrected</li>
1542 <li>fixed a bug introduced in 1.8.0 breaking default namespace processing,
1543 and more specifically the Dia application</li>
Daniel Veillard944b5ff1999-12-15 19:08:24 +00001544 <li>fixed a posteriori validation (validation after parsing, or by using a
1545 Dtd not specified in the original document)</li>
Daniel Veillardb24054a1999-12-18 15:32:46 +00001546 <li>fixed a bug in</li>
Daniel Veillard10a2c651999-12-12 13:03:50 +00001547</ul>
1548
1549<h3>1.8.0: Dec 12 1999</h3>
1550<ul>
1551 <li>cleanup, especially memory wise</li>
1552 <li>the parser should be more reliable, especially the HTML one, it should
1553 not crash, whatever the input !</li>
1554 <li>Integrated various patches, especially a speedup improvement for large
1555 dataset from <a href="mailto:cnygard@bellatlantic.net">Carl Nygard</a>,
1556 configure with --with-buffers to enable them.</li>
1557 <li>attribute normalization, oops should have been added long ago !</li>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00001558 <li>attributes defaulted from DTDs should be available, xmlSetProp() now
1559 does entities escaping by default.</li>
Daniel Veillard4c3a2031999-11-19 17:46:26 +00001560</ul>
Daniel Veillard35008381999-10-25 13:15:52 +00001561
1562<h3>1.7.4: Oct 25 1999</h3>
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +00001563<ul>
Daniel Veillard35008381999-10-25 13:15:52 +00001564 <li>Lots of HTML improvement</li>
1565 <li>Fixed some errors when saving both XML and HTML</li>
1566 <li>More examples, the regression tests should now look clean</li>
1567 <li>Fixed a bug with contiguous charref</li>
1568</ul>
1569
1570<h3>1.7.3: Sep 29 1999</h3>
1571<ul>
1572 <li>portability problems fixed</li>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00001573 <li>snprintf was used unconditionally, leading to link problems on system
Daniel Veillard35008381999-10-25 13:15:52 +00001574 were it's not available, fixed</li>
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +00001575</ul>
1576
1577<h3>1.7.1: Sep 24 1999</h3>
1578<ul>
1579 <li>The basic type for strings manipulated by libxml has been renamed in
1580 1.7.1 from <strong>CHAR</strong> to <strong>xmlChar</strong>. The reason
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +00001581 is that CHAR was conflicting with a predefined type on Windows. However
1582 on non WIN32 environment, compatibility is provided by the way of a
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +00001583 <strong>#define </strong>.</li>
1584 <li>Changed another error : the use of a structure field called errno, and
1585 leading to troubles on platforms where it's a macro</li>
1586</ul>
1587
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00001588<h3>1.7.0: Sep 23 1999</h3>
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +00001589<ul>
1590 <li>Added the ability to fetch remote DTD or parsed entities, see the <a
Daniel Veillard9cb5ff42001-01-29 08:22:21 +00001591 href="html/libxml-nanohttp.html">nanohttp</a> module.</li>
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +00001592 <li>Added an errno to report errors by another mean than a simple printf
1593 like callback</li>
1594 <li>Finished ID/IDREF support and checking when validation</li>
1595 <li>Serious memory leaks fixed (there is now a <a
Daniel Veillard9cb5ff42001-01-29 08:22:21 +00001596 href="html/libxml-xmlmemory.html">memory wrapper</a> module)</li>
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +00001597 <li>Improvement of <a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xpath">XPath</a>
1598 implementation</li>
1599 <li>Added an HTML parser front-end</li>
1600</ul>
1601
1602<h2><a name="XML">XML</a></h2>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00001603
Daniel Veillard402e8c82000-02-29 22:57:47 +00001604<p><a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml">XML is a standard</a> for
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +00001605markup-based structured documents. Here is <a name="example">an example XML
1606document</a>:</p>
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00001607<pre>&lt;?xml version="1.0"?&gt;
1608&lt;EXAMPLE prop1="gnome is great" prop2="&amp;amp; linux too"&gt;
1609 &lt;head&gt;
1610 &lt;title&gt;Welcome to Gnome&lt;/title&gt;
1611 &lt;/head&gt;
1612 &lt;chapter&gt;
1613 &lt;title&gt;The Linux adventure&lt;/title&gt;
1614 &lt;p&gt;bla bla bla ...&lt;/p&gt;
1615 &lt;image href="linus.gif"/&gt;
1616 &lt;p&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;
1617 &lt;/chapter&gt;
1618&lt;/EXAMPLE&gt;</pre>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00001619
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +00001620<p>The first line specifies that it is an XML document and gives useful
Daniel Veillard42766c02002-08-22 20:52:17 +00001621information about its encoding. Then the rest of the document is a text
1622format whose structure is specified by tags between brackets. <strong>Each
1623tag opened has to be closed</strong>. XML is pedantic about this. However, if
1624a tag is empty (no content), a single tag can serve as both the opening and
1625closing tag if it ends with <code>/&gt;</code> rather than with
1626<code>&gt;</code>. Note that, for example, the image tag has no content (just
1627an attribute) and is closed by ending the tag with <code>/&gt;</code>.</p>
Daniel Veillardccb09631998-10-27 06:21:04 +00001628
Daniel Veillard42766c02002-08-22 20:52:17 +00001629<p>XML can be applied successfully to a wide range of tasks, ranging from
1630long term structured document maintenance (where it follows the steps of
1631SGML) to simple data encoding mechanisms like configuration file formatting
1632(glade), spreadsheets (gnumeric), or even shorter lived documents such as
1633WebDAV where it is used to encode remote calls between a client and a
1634server.</p>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00001635
Daniel Veillard82687162001-01-22 15:32:01 +00001636<h2><a name="XSLT">XSLT</a></h2>
1637
Daniel Veillard6e6a6cc2001-02-15 15:55:44 +00001638<p>Check <a href="http://xmlsoft.org/XSLT">the separate libxslt page</a></p>
1639
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +00001640<p><a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xslt">XSL Transformations</a>, is a
1641language for transforming XML documents into other XML documents (or
1642HTML/textual output).</p>
Daniel Veillard82687162001-01-22 15:32:01 +00001643
Daniel Veillard42766c02002-08-22 20:52:17 +00001644<p>A separate library called libxslt is being developed on top of libxml2.
1645This module "libxslt" too can be found in the Gnome CVS base.</p>
Daniel Veillard82687162001-01-22 15:32:01 +00001646
Daniel Veillard383b1472001-01-23 11:39:52 +00001647<p>You can check the <a
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +00001648href="http://cvs.gnome.org/lxr/source/libxslt/FEATURES">features</a>
1649supported and the progresses on the <a
Daniel Veillard6dbcaf82002-02-20 14:37:47 +00001650href="http://cvs.gnome.org/lxr/source/libxslt/ChangeLog"
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +00001651name="Changelog">Changelog</a>.</p>
Daniel Veillard6dbcaf82002-02-20 14:37:47 +00001652
1653<h2><a name="Python">Python and bindings</a></h2>
1654
Daniel Veillard42766c02002-08-22 20:52:17 +00001655<p>There are a number of language bindings and wrappers available for
1656libxml2, the list below is not exhaustive. Please contact the <a
Daniel Veillard6dbcaf82002-02-20 14:37:47 +00001657href="http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/xml-bindings">xml-bindings@gnome.org</a>
1658(<a href="http://mail.gnome.org/archives/xml-bindings/">archives</a>) in
1659order to get updates to this list or to discuss the specific topic of libxml2
1660or libxslt wrappers or bindings:</p>
1661<ul>
Daniel Veillardc14401e2002-11-20 14:28:17 +00001662 <li><a href="http://libxmlplusplus.sourceforge.net/">Libxml++</a> seems the
1663 most up-to-date C++ bindings for libxml2, check the <a
1664 href="http://libxmlplusplus.sourceforge.net/reference/html/hierarchy.html">documentation</a>
1665 and the <a
1666 href="http://cvs.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/libxmlplusplus/libxml%2b%2b/examples/">examples</a>.</li>
Daniel Veillard6dbcaf82002-02-20 14:37:47 +00001667 <li>There is another <a href="http://libgdome-cpp.berlios.de/">C++ wrapper
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +00001668 based on the gdome2 bindings</a> maintained by Tobias Peters.</li>
Daniel Veillard9b6fd302002-05-13 12:06:47 +00001669 <li>and a third C++ wrapper by Peter Jones &lt;pjones@pmade.org&gt;
1670 <p>Website: <a
1671 href="http://pmade.org/pjones/software/xmlwrapp/">http://pmade.org/pjones/software/xmlwrapp/</a></p>
1672 </li>
Daniel Veillard6dbcaf82002-02-20 14:37:47 +00001673 <li><a
1674 href="http://mail.gnome.org/archives/xml/2001-March/msg00014.html">Matt
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00001675 Sergeant</a> developed <a
1676 href="http://axkit.org/download/">XML::LibXSLT</a>, a Perl wrapper for
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +00001677 libxml2/libxslt as part of the <a href="http://axkit.com/">AxKit XML
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +00001678 application server</a>.</li>
Daniel Veillard21473672002-06-17 07:29:22 +00001679 <li><a href="mailto:dkuhlman@cutter.rexx.com">Dave Kuhlman</a> provides an
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +00001680 earlier version of the libxml/libxslt <a
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +00001681 href="http://www.rexx.com/~dkuhlman">wrappers for Python</a>.</li>
Daniel Veillard21473672002-06-17 07:29:22 +00001682 <li>Gopal.V and Peter Minten develop <a
1683 href="http://savannah.gnu.org/projects/libxmlsharp">libxml#</a>, a set of
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +00001684 C# libxml2 bindings.</li>
Daniel Veillard6dbcaf82002-02-20 14:37:47 +00001685 <li>Petr Kozelka provides <a
1686 href="http://sourceforge.net/projects/libxml2-pas">Pascal units to glue
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +00001687 libxml2</a> with Kylix, Delphi and other Pascal compilers.</li>
Daniel Veillardb2fb8ed2002-04-01 09:33:12 +00001688 <li>Uwe Fechner also provides <a
1689 href="http://sourceforge.net/projects/idom2-pas/">idom2</a>, a DOM2
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +00001690 implementation for Kylix2/D5/D6 from Borland.</li>
Daniel Veillard6dbcaf82002-02-20 14:37:47 +00001691 <li>Wai-Sun "Squidster" Chia provides <a
1692 href="http://www.rubycolor.org/arc/redist/">bindings for Ruby</a> and
1693 libxml2 bindings are also available in Ruby through the <a
1694 href="http://libgdome-ruby.berlios.de/">libgdome-ruby</a> module
1695 maintained by Tobias Peters.</li>
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +00001696 <li>Steve Ball and contributors maintains <a
1697 href="http://tclxml.sourceforge.net/">libxml2 and libxslt bindings for
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +00001698 Tcl</a>.</li>
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +00001699 <li>There is support for libxml2 in the DOM module of PHP.</li>
Daniel Veillard41b01a82003-02-27 11:09:06 +00001700 <li><a href="http://savannah.gnu.org/projects/classpathx/">LibxmlJ</a> is
Daniel Veillard806cada2003-03-19 21:58:59 +00001701 an effort to create a 100% JAXP-compatible Java wrapper for libxml2 and
1702 libxslt as part of GNU ClasspathX project.</li>
Daniel Veillard6dbcaf82002-02-20 14:37:47 +00001703</ul>
1704
Daniel Veillardc0801af2002-05-28 16:28:42 +00001705<p>The distribution includes a set of Python bindings, which are guaranteed
1706to be maintained as part of the library in the future, though the Python
Daniel Veillard41b01a82003-02-27 11:09:06 +00001707interface have not yet reached the completeness of the C API.</p>
Daniel Veillard7b4b2f92003-01-06 13:11:20 +00001708
Daniel Veillard27907c72002-12-16 16:05:58 +00001709<p><a href="mailto:stephane.bidoul@softwareag.com">Stéphane Bidoul</a>
Daniel Veillard7b4b2f92003-01-06 13:11:20 +00001710maintains <a href="http://users.skynet.be/sbi/libxml-python/">a Windows port
1711of the Python bindings</a>.</p>
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +00001712
Daniel Veillard7ef0fcb2002-12-14 10:38:55 +00001713<p>Note to people interested in building bindings, the API is formalized as
1714<a href="libxml2-api.xml">an XML API description file</a> which allows to
1715automate a large part of the Python bindings, this includes function
Daniel Veillard7b4b2f92003-01-06 13:11:20 +00001716descriptions, enums, structures, typedefs, etc... The Python script used to
1717build the bindings is python/generator.py in the source distribution.</p>
Daniel Veillard7ef0fcb2002-12-14 10:38:55 +00001718
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +00001719<p>To install the Python bindings there are 2 options:</p>
Daniel Veillard0b79dfe2002-02-23 13:02:31 +00001720<ul>
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +00001721 <li>If you use an RPM based distribution, simply install the <a
1722 href="http://rpmfind.net/linux/rpm2html/search.php?query=libxml2-python">libxml2-python
1723 RPM</a> (and if needed the <a
1724 href="http://rpmfind.net/linux/rpm2html/search.php?query=libxslt-python">libxslt-python
1725 RPM</a>).</li>
1726 <li>Otherwise use the <a href="ftp://xmlsoft.org/python/">libxml2-python
1727 module distribution</a> corresponding to your installed version of
1728 libxml2 and libxslt. Note that to install it you will need both libxml2
1729 and libxslt installed and run "python setup.py build install" in the
1730 module tree.</li>
Daniel Veillard0b79dfe2002-02-23 13:02:31 +00001731</ul>
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +00001732
1733<p>The distribution includes a set of examples and regression tests for the
1734python bindings in the <code>python/tests</code> directory. Here are some
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +00001735excerpts from those tests:</p>
Daniel Veillard6dbcaf82002-02-20 14:37:47 +00001736
1737<h3>tst.py:</h3>
1738
1739<p>This is a basic test of the file interface and DOM navigation:</p>
1740<pre>import libxml2
1741
1742doc = libxml2.parseFile("tst.xml")
1743if doc.name != "tst.xml":
1744 print "doc.name failed"
1745 sys.exit(1)
1746root = doc.children
1747if root.name != "doc":
1748 print "root.name failed"
1749 sys.exit(1)
1750child = root.children
1751if child.name != "foo":
1752 print "child.name failed"
1753 sys.exit(1)
1754doc.freeDoc()</pre>
1755
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +00001756<p>The Python module is called libxml2; parseFile is the equivalent of
Daniel Veillard6dbcaf82002-02-20 14:37:47 +00001757xmlParseFile (most of the bindings are automatically generated, and the xml
1758prefix is removed and the casing convention are kept). All node seen at the
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00001759binding level share the same subset of accessors:</p>
Daniel Veillard6dbcaf82002-02-20 14:37:47 +00001760<ul>
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +00001761 <li><code>name</code> : returns the node name</li>
Daniel Veillardc0801af2002-05-28 16:28:42 +00001762 <li><code>type</code> : returns a string indicating the node type</li>
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +00001763 <li><code>content</code> : returns the content of the node, it is based on
1764 xmlNodeGetContent() and hence is recursive.</li>
1765 <li><code>parent</code> , <code>children</code>, <code>last</code>,
1766 <code>next</code>, <code>prev</code>, <code>doc</code>,
1767 <code>properties</code>: pointing to the associated element in the tree,
1768 those may return None in case no such link exists.</li>
Daniel Veillard6dbcaf82002-02-20 14:37:47 +00001769</ul>
1770
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00001771<p>Also note the need to explicitly deallocate documents with freeDoc() .
Daniel Veillard6dbcaf82002-02-20 14:37:47 +00001772Reference counting for libxml2 trees would need quite a lot of work to
1773function properly, and rather than risk memory leaks if not implemented
1774correctly it sounds safer to have an explicit function to free a tree. The
1775wrapper python objects like doc, root or child are them automatically garbage
1776collected.</p>
1777
1778<h3>validate.py:</h3>
1779
1780<p>This test check the validation interfaces and redirection of error
1781messages:</p>
1782<pre>import libxml2
1783
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00001784#deactivate error messages from the validation
Daniel Veillard6dbcaf82002-02-20 14:37:47 +00001785def noerr(ctx, str):
1786 pass
1787
1788libxml2.registerErrorHandler(noerr, None)
1789
1790ctxt = libxml2.createFileParserCtxt("invalid.xml")
1791ctxt.validate(1)
1792ctxt.parseDocument()
1793doc = ctxt.doc()
1794valid = ctxt.isValid()
1795doc.freeDoc()
1796if valid != 0:
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00001797 print "validity check failed"</pre>
Daniel Veillard6dbcaf82002-02-20 14:37:47 +00001798
1799<p>The first thing to notice is the call to registerErrorHandler(), it
1800defines a new error handler global to the library. It is used to avoid seeing
1801the error messages when trying to validate the invalid document.</p>
1802
1803<p>The main interest of that test is the creation of a parser context with
1804createFileParserCtxt() and how the behaviour can be changed before calling
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00001805parseDocument() . Similarly the informations resulting from the parsing phase
Daniel Veillard6dbcaf82002-02-20 14:37:47 +00001806are also available using context methods.</p>
1807
1808<p>Contexts like nodes are defined as class and the libxml2 wrappers maps the
1809C function interfaces in terms of objects method as much as possible. The
1810best to get a complete view of what methods are supported is to look at the
1811libxml2.py module containing all the wrappers.</p>
1812
1813<h3>push.py:</h3>
1814
1815<p>This test show how to activate the push parser interface:</p>
1816<pre>import libxml2
1817
1818ctxt = libxml2.createPushParser(None, "&lt;foo", 4, "test.xml")
1819ctxt.parseChunk("/&gt;", 2, 1)
1820doc = ctxt.doc()
1821
1822doc.freeDoc()</pre>
1823
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00001824<p>The context is created with a special call based on the
Daniel Veillard6dbcaf82002-02-20 14:37:47 +00001825xmlCreatePushParser() from the C library. The first argument is an optional
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00001826SAX callback object, then the initial set of data, the length and the name of
Daniel Veillard6dbcaf82002-02-20 14:37:47 +00001827the resource in case URI-References need to be computed by the parser.</p>
1828
1829<p>Then the data are pushed using the parseChunk() method, the last call
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00001830setting the third argument terminate to 1.</p>
Daniel Veillard6dbcaf82002-02-20 14:37:47 +00001831
1832<h3>pushSAX.py:</h3>
1833
1834<p>this test show the use of the event based parsing interfaces. In this case
1835the parser does not build a document, but provides callback information as
1836the parser makes progresses analyzing the data being provided:</p>
1837<pre>import libxml2
1838log = ""
1839
1840class callback:
1841 def startDocument(self):
1842 global log
1843 log = log + "startDocument:"
1844
1845 def endDocument(self):
1846 global log
1847 log = log + "endDocument:"
1848
1849 def startElement(self, tag, attrs):
1850 global log
1851 log = log + "startElement %s %s:" % (tag, attrs)
1852
1853 def endElement(self, tag):
1854 global log
1855 log = log + "endElement %s:" % (tag)
1856
1857 def characters(self, data):
1858 global log
1859 log = log + "characters: %s:" % (data)
1860
1861 def warning(self, msg):
1862 global log
1863 log = log + "warning: %s:" % (msg)
1864
1865 def error(self, msg):
1866 global log
1867 log = log + "error: %s:" % (msg)
1868
1869 def fatalError(self, msg):
1870 global log
1871 log = log + "fatalError: %s:" % (msg)
1872
1873handler = callback()
1874
1875ctxt = libxml2.createPushParser(handler, "&lt;foo", 4, "test.xml")
1876chunk = " url='tst'&gt;b"
1877ctxt.parseChunk(chunk, len(chunk), 0)
1878chunk = "ar&lt;/foo&gt;"
1879ctxt.parseChunk(chunk, len(chunk), 1)
1880
Daniel Veillardfcbfa2d2002-02-21 17:54:27 +00001881reference = "startDocument:startElement foo {'url': 'tst'}:" + \
1882 "characters: bar:endElement foo:endDocument:"
Daniel Veillard6dbcaf82002-02-20 14:37:47 +00001883if log != reference:
1884 print "Error got: %s" % log
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00001885 print "Expected: %s" % reference</pre>
Daniel Veillard6dbcaf82002-02-20 14:37:47 +00001886
1887<p>The key object in that test is the handler, it provides a number of entry
1888points which can be called by the parser as it makes progresses to indicate
1889the information set obtained. The full set of callback is larger than what
1890the callback class in that specific example implements (see the SAX
1891definition for a complete list). The wrapper will only call those supplied by
1892the object when activated. The startElement receives the names of the element
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00001893and a dictionary containing the attributes carried by this element.</p>
Daniel Veillard6dbcaf82002-02-20 14:37:47 +00001894
1895<p>Also note that the reference string generated from the callback shows a
1896single character call even though the string "bar" is passed to the parser
1897from 2 different call to parseChunk()</p>
1898
1899<h3>xpath.py:</h3>
1900
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00001901<p>This is a basic test of XPath wrappers support</p>
Daniel Veillard6dbcaf82002-02-20 14:37:47 +00001902<pre>import libxml2
1903
1904doc = libxml2.parseFile("tst.xml")
1905ctxt = doc.xpathNewContext()
1906res = ctxt.xpathEval("//*")
1907if len(res) != 2:
1908 print "xpath query: wrong node set size"
1909 sys.exit(1)
1910if res[0].name != "doc" or res[1].name != "foo":
1911 print "xpath query: wrong node set value"
1912 sys.exit(1)
1913doc.freeDoc()
1914ctxt.xpathFreeContext()</pre>
1915
1916<p>This test parses a file, then create an XPath context to evaluate XPath
1917expression on it. The xpathEval() method execute an XPath query and returns
1918the result mapped in a Python way. String and numbers are natively converted,
1919and node sets are returned as a tuple of libxml2 Python nodes wrappers. Like
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00001920the document, the XPath context need to be freed explicitly, also not that
Daniel Veillard6dbcaf82002-02-20 14:37:47 +00001921the result of the XPath query may point back to the document tree and hence
1922the document must be freed after the result of the query is used.</p>
1923
1924<h3>xpathext.py:</h3>
1925
1926<p>This test shows how to extend the XPath engine with functions written in
1927python:</p>
1928<pre>import libxml2
1929
1930def foo(ctx, x):
1931 return x + 1
1932
1933doc = libxml2.parseFile("tst.xml")
1934ctxt = doc.xpathNewContext()
1935libxml2.registerXPathFunction(ctxt._o, "foo", None, foo)
1936res = ctxt.xpathEval("foo(1)")
1937if res != 2:
1938 print "xpath extension failure"
1939doc.freeDoc()
1940ctxt.xpathFreeContext()</pre>
1941
1942<p>Note how the extension function is registered with the context (but that
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00001943part is not yet finalized, this may change slightly in the future).</p>
Daniel Veillard6dbcaf82002-02-20 14:37:47 +00001944
1945<h3>tstxpath.py:</h3>
1946
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00001947<p>This test is similar to the previous one but shows how the extension
Daniel Veillard6dbcaf82002-02-20 14:37:47 +00001948function can access the XPath evaluation context:</p>
1949<pre>def foo(ctx, x):
1950 global called
1951
1952 #
1953 # test that access to the XPath evaluation contexts
1954 #
1955 pctxt = libxml2.xpathParserContext(_obj=ctx)
1956 ctxt = pctxt.context()
1957 called = ctxt.function()
1958 return x + 1</pre>
1959
1960<p>All the interfaces around the XPath parser(or rather evaluation) context
1961are not finalized, but it should be sufficient to do contextual work at the
1962evaluation point.</p>
1963
1964<h3>Memory debugging:</h3>
1965
1966<p>last but not least, all tests starts with the following prologue:</p>
1967<pre>#memory debug specific
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +00001968libxml2.debugMemory(1)</pre>
Daniel Veillard6dbcaf82002-02-20 14:37:47 +00001969
1970<p>and ends with the following epilogue:</p>
1971<pre>#memory debug specific
1972libxml2.cleanupParser()
1973if libxml2.debugMemory(1) == 0:
1974 print "OK"
1975else:
1976 print "Memory leak %d bytes" % (libxml2.debugMemory(1))
1977 libxml2.dumpMemory()</pre>
1978
1979<p>Those activate the memory debugging interface of libxml2 where all
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00001980allocated block in the library are tracked. The prologue then cleans up the
Daniel Veillard6dbcaf82002-02-20 14:37:47 +00001981library state and checks that all allocated memory has been freed. If not it
1982calls dumpMemory() which saves that list in a <code>.memdump</code> file.</p>
Daniel Veillard82687162001-01-22 15:32:01 +00001983
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00001984<h2><a name="architecture">libxml architecture</a></h2>
Daniel Veillard4540be42000-08-19 16:40:28 +00001985
Daniel Veillardec70e912001-02-26 20:10:45 +00001986<p>Libxml is made of multiple components; some of them are optional, and most
1987of the block interfaces are public. The main components are:</p>
Daniel Veillard4540be42000-08-19 16:40:28 +00001988<ul>
1989 <li>an Input/Output layer</li>
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +00001990 <li>FTP and HTTP client layers (optional)</li>
Daniel Veillard4540be42000-08-19 16:40:28 +00001991 <li>an Internationalization layer managing the encodings support</li>
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +00001992 <li>a URI module</li>
Daniel Veillard4540be42000-08-19 16:40:28 +00001993 <li>the XML parser and its basic SAX interface</li>
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +00001994 <li>an HTML parser using the same SAX interface (optional)</li>
Daniel Veillard4540be42000-08-19 16:40:28 +00001995 <li>a SAX tree module to build an in-memory DOM representation</li>
1996 <li>a tree module to manipulate the DOM representation</li>
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +00001997 <li>a validation module using the DOM representation (optional)</li>
Daniel Veillard4540be42000-08-19 16:40:28 +00001998 <li>an XPath module for global lookup in a DOM representation
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +00001999 (optional)</li>
2000 <li>a debug module (optional)</li>
Daniel Veillard4540be42000-08-19 16:40:28 +00002001</ul>
2002
2003<p>Graphically this gives the following:</p>
2004
2005<p><img src="libxml.gif" alt="a graphical view of the various"></p>
2006
2007<p></p>
2008
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +00002009<h2><a name="tree">The tree output</a></h2>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00002010
2011<p>The parser returns a tree built during the document analysis. The value
Daniel Veillard402e8c82000-02-29 22:57:47 +00002012returned is an <strong>xmlDocPtr</strong> (i.e., a pointer to an
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +00002013<strong>xmlDoc</strong> structure). This structure contains information such
Daniel Veillard306be992000-07-03 12:38:45 +00002014as the file name, the document type, and a <strong>children</strong> pointer
2015which is the root of the document (or more exactly the first child under the
2016root which is the document). The tree is made of <strong>xmlNode</strong>s,
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +00002017chained in double-linked lists of siblings and with a children&lt;-&gt;parent
Daniel Veillard306be992000-07-03 12:38:45 +00002018relationship. An xmlNode can also carry properties (a chain of xmlAttr
2019structures). An attribute may have a value which is a list of TEXT or
2020ENTITY_REF nodes.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00002021
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00002022<p>Here is an example (erroneous with respect to the XML spec since there
2023should be only one ELEMENT under the root):</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00002024
2025<p><img src="structure.gif" alt=" structure.gif "></p>
2026
2027<p>In the source package there is a small program (not installed by default)
Daniel Veillard361d8452000-04-03 19:48:13 +00002028called <strong>xmllint</strong> which parses XML files given as argument and
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +00002029prints them back as parsed. This is useful for detecting errors both in XML
2030code and in the XML parser itself. It has an option <strong>--debug</strong>
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +00002031which prints the actual in-memory structure of the document; here is the
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +00002032result with the <a href="#example">example</a> given before:</p>
Daniel Veillard10c6a8f1998-10-28 01:00:12 +00002033<pre>DOCUMENT
2034version=1.0
2035standalone=true
2036 ELEMENT EXAMPLE
2037 ATTRIBUTE prop1
2038 TEXT
2039 content=gnome is great
2040 ATTRIBUTE prop2
2041 ENTITY_REF
2042 TEXT
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +00002043 content= linux too
Daniel Veillard402e8c82000-02-29 22:57:47 +00002044 ELEMENT head
Daniel Veillard10c6a8f1998-10-28 01:00:12 +00002045 ELEMENT title
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +00002046 TEXT
2047 content=Welcome to Gnome
Daniel Veillard10c6a8f1998-10-28 01:00:12 +00002048 ELEMENT chapter
2049 ELEMENT title
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +00002050 TEXT
2051 content=The Linux adventure
Daniel Veillard10c6a8f1998-10-28 01:00:12 +00002052 ELEMENT p
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +00002053 TEXT
2054 content=bla bla bla ...
Daniel Veillard10c6a8f1998-10-28 01:00:12 +00002055 ELEMENT image
2056 ATTRIBUTE href
2057 TEXT
2058 content=linus.gif
2059 ELEMENT p
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +00002060 TEXT
2061 content=...</pre>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00002062
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00002063<p>This should be useful for learning the internal representation model.</p>
Daniel Veillardccb09631998-10-27 06:21:04 +00002064
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +00002065<h2><a name="interface">The SAX interface</a></h2>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00002066
Daniel Veillard402e8c82000-02-29 22:57:47 +00002067<p>Sometimes the DOM tree output is just too large to fit reasonably into
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00002068memory. In that case (and if you don't expect to save back the XML document
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +00002069loaded using libxml), it's better to use the SAX interface of libxml. SAX is
2070a <strong>callback-based interface</strong> to the parser. Before parsing,
2071the application layer registers a customized set of callbacks which are
2072called by the library as it progresses through the XML input.</p>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00002073
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00002074<p>To get more detailed step-by-step guidance on using the SAX interface of
Daniel Veillard4540be42000-08-19 16:40:28 +00002075libxml, see the <a
2076href="http://www.daa.com.au/~james/gnome/xml-sax/xml-sax.html">nice
2077documentation</a>.written by <a href="mailto:james@daa.com.au">James
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00002078Henstridge</a>.</p>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00002079
2080<p>You can debug the SAX behaviour by using the <strong>testSAX</strong>
2081program located in the gnome-xml module (it's usually not shipped in the
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00002082binary packages of libxml, but you can find it in the tar source
Daniel Veillard402e8c82000-02-29 22:57:47 +00002083distribution). Here is the sequence of callbacks that would be reported by
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00002084testSAX when parsing the example XML document shown earlier:</p>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00002085<pre>SAX.setDocumentLocator()
2086SAX.startDocument()
2087SAX.getEntity(amp)
2088SAX.startElement(EXAMPLE, prop1='gnome is great', prop2='&amp;amp; linux too')
2089SAX.characters( , 3)
2090SAX.startElement(head)
2091SAX.characters( , 4)
2092SAX.startElement(title)
2093SAX.characters(Welcome to Gnome, 16)
2094SAX.endElement(title)
2095SAX.characters( , 3)
2096SAX.endElement(head)
2097SAX.characters( , 3)
2098SAX.startElement(chapter)
2099SAX.characters( , 4)
2100SAX.startElement(title)
2101SAX.characters(The Linux adventure, 19)
2102SAX.endElement(title)
2103SAX.characters( , 4)
2104SAX.startElement(p)
2105SAX.characters(bla bla bla ..., 15)
2106SAX.endElement(p)
2107SAX.characters( , 4)
2108SAX.startElement(image, href='linus.gif')
2109SAX.endElement(image)
2110SAX.characters( , 4)
2111SAX.startElement(p)
2112SAX.characters(..., 3)
2113SAX.endElement(p)
2114SAX.characters( , 3)
2115SAX.endElement(chapter)
2116SAX.characters( , 1)
2117SAX.endElement(EXAMPLE)
2118SAX.endDocument()</pre>
2119
Daniel Veillardec70e912001-02-26 20:10:45 +00002120<p>Most of the other interfaces of libxml are based on the DOM tree-building
2121facility, so nearly everything up to the end of this document presupposes the
2122use of the standard DOM tree build. Note that the DOM tree itself is built by
2123a set of registered default callbacks, without internal specific
2124interface.</p>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00002125
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002126<h2><a name="Validation">Validation &amp; DTDs</a></h2>
2127
2128<p>Table of Content:</p>
2129<ol>
2130 <li><a href="#General5">General overview</a></li>
2131 <li><a href="#definition">The definition</a></li>
2132 <li><a href="#Simple">Simple rules</a>
2133 <ol>
Daniel Veillard9c466822001-10-25 12:03:39 +00002134 <li><a href="#reference">How to reference a DTD from a document</a></li>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002135 <li><a href="#Declaring">Declaring elements</a></li>
2136 <li><a href="#Declaring1">Declaring attributes</a></li>
2137 </ol>
2138 </li>
2139 <li><a href="#Some">Some examples</a></li>
2140 <li><a href="#validate">How to validate</a></li>
2141 <li><a href="#Other">Other resources</a></li>
2142</ol>
2143
2144<h3><a name="General5">General overview</a></h3>
2145
2146<p>Well what is validation and what is a DTD ?</p>
2147
2148<p>DTD is the acronym for Document Type Definition. This is a description of
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00002149the content for a family of XML files. This is part of the XML 1.0
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +00002150specification, and allows one to describe and verify that a given document
2151instance conforms to the set of rules detailing its structure and content.</p>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002152
2153<p>Validation is the process of checking a document against a DTD (more
2154generally against a set of construction rules).</p>
2155
2156<p>The validation process and building DTDs are the two most difficult parts
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +00002157of the XML life cycle. Briefly a DTD defines all the possible elements to be
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002158found within your document, what is the formal shape of your document tree
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +00002159(by defining the allowed content of an element; either text, a regular
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002160expression for the allowed list of children, or mixed content i.e. both text
Daniel Veillard42766c02002-08-22 20:52:17 +00002161and children). The DTD also defines the valid attributes for all elements and
2162the types of those attributes.</p>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002163
2164<h3><a name="definition1">The definition</a></h3>
2165
2166<p>The <a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml">W3C XML Recommendation</a> (<a
2167href="http://www.xml.com/axml/axml.html">Tim Bray's annotated version of
2168Rev1</a>):</p>
2169<ul>
2170 <li><a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml#elemdecls">Declaring
2171 elements</a></li>
2172 <li><a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml#attdecls">Declaring
2173 attributes</a></li>
2174</ul>
2175
2176<p>(unfortunately) all this is inherited from the SGML world, the syntax is
2177ancient...</p>
2178
2179<h3><a name="Simple1">Simple rules</a></h3>
2180
Daniel Veillard42766c02002-08-22 20:52:17 +00002181<p>Writing DTDs can be done in many ways. The rules to build them if you need
2182something permanent or something which can evolve over time can be radically
2183different. Really complex DTDs like DocBook ones are flexible but quite
2184harder to design. I will just focus on DTDs for a formats with a fixed simple
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002185structure. It is just a set of basic rules, and definitely not exhaustive nor
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00002186usable for complex DTD design.</p>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002187
2188<h4><a name="reference1">How to reference a DTD from a document</a>:</h4>
2189
2190<p>Assuming the top element of the document is <code>spec</code> and the dtd
2191is placed in the file <code>mydtd</code> in the subdirectory
2192<code>dtds</code> of the directory from where the document were loaded:</p>
2193
2194<p><code>&lt;!DOCTYPE spec SYSTEM "dtds/mydtd"&gt;</code></p>
2195
2196<p>Notes:</p>
2197<ul>
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +00002198 <li>The system string is actually an URI-Reference (as defined in <a
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002199 href="http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2396.txt">RFC 2396</a>) so you can use a
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +00002200 full URL string indicating the location of your DTD on the Web. This is a
2201 really good thing to do if you want others to validate your document.</li>
2202 <li>It is also possible to associate a <code>PUBLIC</code> identifier (a
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00002203 magic string) so that the DTD is looked up in catalogs on the client side
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +00002204 without having to locate it on the web.</li>
2205 <li>A DTD contains a set of element and attribute declarations, but they
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00002206 don't define what the root of the document should be. This is explicitly
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002207 told to the parser/validator as the first element of the
2208 <code>DOCTYPE</code> declaration.</li>
2209</ul>
2210
2211<h4><a name="Declaring2">Declaring elements</a>:</h4>
2212
2213<p>The following declares an element <code>spec</code>:</p>
2214
2215<p><code>&lt;!ELEMENT spec (front, body, back?)&gt;</code></p>
2216
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +00002217<p>It also expresses that the spec element contains one <code>front</code>,
Daniel Veillardc0801af2002-05-28 16:28:42 +00002218one <code>body</code> and one optional <code>back</code> children elements in
2219this order. The declaration of one element of the structure and its content
2220are done in a single declaration. Similarly the following declares
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002221<code>div1</code> elements:</p>
2222
Daniel Veillard51737272002-01-23 23:10:38 +00002223<p><code>&lt;!ELEMENT div1 (head, (p | list | note)*, div2?)&gt;</code></p>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002224
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +00002225<p>which means div1 contains one <code>head</code> then a series of optional
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002226<code>p</code>, <code>list</code>s and <code>note</code>s and then an
2227optional <code>div2</code>. And last but not least an element can contain
2228text:</p>
2229
2230<p><code>&lt;!ELEMENT b (#PCDATA)&gt;</code></p>
2231
2232<p><code>b</code> contains text or being of mixed content (text and elements
2233in no particular order):</p>
2234
2235<p><code>&lt;!ELEMENT p (#PCDATA|a|ul|b|i|em)*&gt;</code></p>
2236
2237<p><code>p </code>can contain text or <code>a</code>, <code>ul</code>,
2238<code>b</code>, <code>i </code>or <code>em</code> elements in no particular
2239order.</p>
2240
2241<h4><a name="Declaring1">Declaring attributes</a>:</h4>
2242
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +00002243<p>Again the attributes declaration includes their content definition:</p>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002244
2245<p><code>&lt;!ATTLIST termdef name CDATA #IMPLIED&gt;</code></p>
2246
2247<p>means that the element <code>termdef</code> can have a <code>name</code>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00002248attribute containing text (<code>CDATA</code>) and which is optional
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002249(<code>#IMPLIED</code>). The attribute value can also be defined within a
2250set:</p>
2251
2252<p><code>&lt;!ATTLIST list type (bullets|ordered|glossary)
2253"ordered"&gt;</code></p>
2254
2255<p>means <code>list</code> element have a <code>type</code> attribute with 3
2256allowed values "bullets", "ordered" or "glossary" and which default to
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00002257"ordered" if the attribute is not explicitly specified.</p>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002258
2259<p>The content type of an attribute can be text (<code>CDATA</code>),
2260anchor/reference/references
2261(<code>ID</code>/<code>IDREF</code>/<code>IDREFS</code>), entity(ies)
2262(<code>ENTITY</code>/<code>ENTITIES</code>) or name(s)
2263(<code>NMTOKEN</code>/<code>NMTOKENS</code>). The following defines that a
2264<code>chapter</code> element can have an optional <code>id</code> attribute
2265of type <code>ID</code>, usable for reference from attribute of type
2266IDREF:</p>
2267
2268<p><code>&lt;!ATTLIST chapter id ID #IMPLIED&gt;</code></p>
2269
2270<p>The last value of an attribute definition can be <code>#REQUIRED
2271</code>meaning that the attribute has to be given, <code>#IMPLIED</code>
2272meaning that it is optional, or the default value (possibly prefixed by
2273<code>#FIXED</code> if it is the only allowed).</p>
2274
2275<p>Notes:</p>
2276<ul>
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +00002277 <li>Usually the attributes pertaining to a given element are declared in a
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002278 single expression, but it is just a convention adopted by a lot of DTD
2279 writers:
2280 <pre>&lt;!ATTLIST termdef
2281 id ID #REQUIRED
2282 name CDATA #IMPLIED&gt;</pre>
2283 <p>The previous construct defines both <code>id</code> and
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +00002284 <code>name</code> attributes for the element <code>termdef</code>.</p>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002285 </li>
2286</ul>
2287
2288<h3><a name="Some1">Some examples</a></h3>
2289
2290<p>The directory <code>test/valid/dtds/</code> in the libxml distribution
Daniel Veillard42766c02002-08-22 20:52:17 +00002291contains some complex DTD examples. The example in the file
2292<code>test/valid/dia.xml</code> shows an XML file where the simple DTD is
2293directly included within the document.</p>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002294
2295<h3><a name="validate1">How to validate</a></h3>
2296
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +00002297<p>The simplest way is to use the xmllint program included with libxml. The
2298<code>--valid</code> option turns-on validation of the files given as input.
2299For example the following validates a copy of the first revision of the XML
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +000023001.0 specification:</p>
2301
2302<p><code>xmllint --valid --noout test/valid/REC-xml-19980210.xml</code></p>
2303
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +00002304<p>the -- noout is used to disable output of the resulting tree.</p>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002305
Daniel Veillard42766c02002-08-22 20:52:17 +00002306<p>The <code>--dtdvalid dtd</code> allows validation of the document(s)
2307against a given DTD.</p>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002308
2309<p>Libxml exports an API to handle DTDs and validation, check the <a
2310href="http://xmlsoft.org/html/libxml-valid.html">associated
2311description</a>.</p>
2312
2313<h3><a name="Other1">Other resources</a></h3>
2314
2315<p>DTDs are as old as SGML. So there may be a number of examples on-line, I
2316will just list one for now, others pointers welcome:</p>
2317<ul>
2318 <li><a href="http://www.xml101.com:8081/dtd/">XML-101 DTD</a></li>
2319</ul>
2320
2321<p>I suggest looking at the examples found under test/valid/dtd and any of
2322the large number of books available on XML. The dia example in test/valid
2323should be both simple and complete enough to allow you to build your own.</p>
2324
2325<p></p>
2326
2327<h2><a name="Memory">Memory Management</a></h2>
2328
2329<p>Table of Content:</p>
2330<ol>
2331 <li><a href="#General3">General overview</a></li>
Daniel Veillard9c466822001-10-25 12:03:39 +00002332 <li><a href="#setting">Setting libxml set of memory routines</a></li>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002333 <li><a href="#cleanup">Cleaning up after parsing</a></li>
2334 <li><a href="#Debugging">Debugging routines</a></li>
2335 <li><a href="#General4">General memory requirements</a></li>
2336</ol>
2337
2338<h3><a name="General3">General overview</a></h3>
2339
2340<p>The module <code><a
2341href="http://xmlsoft.org/html/libxml-xmlmemory.html">xmlmemory.h</a></code>
2342provides the interfaces to the libxml memory system:</p>
2343<ul>
2344 <li>libxml does not use the libc memory allocator directly but xmlFree(),
2345 xmlMalloc() and xmlRealloc()</li>
2346 <li>those routines can be reallocated to a specific set of routine, by
2347 default the libc ones i.e. free(), malloc() and realloc()</li>
2348 <li>the xmlmemory.c module includes a set of debugging routine</li>
2349</ul>
2350
2351<h3><a name="setting">Setting libxml set of memory routines</a></h3>
2352
2353<p>It is sometimes useful to not use the default memory allocator, either for
2354debugging, analysis or to implement a specific behaviour on memory management
2355(like on embedded systems). Two function calls are available to do so:</p>
2356<ul>
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +00002357 <li><a href="http://xmlsoft.org/html/libxml-xmlmemory.html">xmlMemGet
2358 ()</a> which return the current set of functions in use by the parser</li>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002359 <li><a
2360 href="http://xmlsoft.org/html/libxml-xmlmemory.html">xmlMemSetup()</a>
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +00002361 which allow to set up a new set of memory allocation functions</li>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002362</ul>
2363
2364<p>Of course a call to xmlMemSetup() should probably be done before calling
2365any other libxml routines (unless you are sure your allocations routines are
2366compatibles).</p>
2367
2368<h3><a name="cleanup">Cleaning up after parsing</a></h3>
2369
2370<p>Libxml is not stateless, there is a few set of memory structures needing
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00002371allocation before the parser is fully functional (some encoding structures
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002372for example). This also mean that once parsing is finished there is a tiny
2373amount of memory (a few hundred bytes) which can be recollected if you don't
2374reuse the parser immediately:</p>
2375<ul>
2376 <li><a href="http://xmlsoft.org/html/libxml-parser.html">xmlCleanupParser
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +00002377 ()</a> is a centralized routine to free the parsing states. Note that it
2378 won't deallocate any produced tree if any (use the xmlFreeDoc() and
2379 related routines for this).</li>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002380 <li><a href="http://xmlsoft.org/html/libxml-parser.html">xmlInitParser
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +00002381 ()</a> is the dual routine allowing to preallocate the parsing state
2382 which can be useful for example to avoid initialization reentrancy
2383 problems when using libxml in multithreaded applications</li>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002384</ul>
2385
2386<p>Generally xmlCleanupParser() is safe, if needed the state will be rebuild
2387at the next invocation of parser routines, but be careful of the consequences
2388in multithreaded applications.</p>
2389
2390<h3><a name="Debugging">Debugging routines</a></h3>
2391
2392<p>When configured using --with-mem-debug flag (off by default), libxml uses
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00002393a set of memory allocation debugging routines keeping track of all allocated
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002394blocks and the location in the code where the routine was called. A couple of
2395other debugging routines allow to dump the memory allocated infos to a file
2396or call a specific routine when a given block number is allocated:</p>
2397<ul>
2398 <li><a
2399 href="http://xmlsoft.org/html/libxml-xmlmemory.html">xmlMallocLoc()</a>
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +00002400 <a
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002401 href="http://xmlsoft.org/html/libxml-xmlmemory.html">xmlReallocLoc()</a>
2402 and <a
2403 href="http://xmlsoft.org/html/libxml-xmlmemory.html">xmlMemStrdupLoc()</a>
2404 are the memory debugging replacement allocation routines</li>
2405 <li><a href="http://xmlsoft.org/html/libxml-xmlmemory.html">xmlMemoryDump
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +00002406 ()</a> dumps all the informations about the allocated memory block lefts
2407 in the <code>.memdump</code> file</li>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002408</ul>
2409
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00002410<p>When developing libxml memory debug is enabled, the tests programs call
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002411xmlMemoryDump () and the "make test" regression tests will check for any
2412memory leak during the full regression test sequence, this helps a lot
2413ensuring that libxml does not leak memory and bullet proof memory
2414allocations use (some libc implementations are known to be far too permissive
2415resulting in major portability problems!).</p>
2416
2417<p>If the .memdump reports a leak, it displays the allocation function and
2418also tries to give some informations about the content and structure of the
2419allocated blocks left. This is sufficient in most cases to find the culprit,
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00002420but not always. Assuming the allocation problem is reproducible, it is
2421possible to find more easily:</p>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002422<ol>
2423 <li>write down the block number xxxx not allocated</li>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00002424 <li>export the environment variable XML_MEM_BREAKPOINT=xxxx , the easiest
Daniel Veillard75794822002-04-11 16:24:32 +00002425 when using GDB is to simply give the command
2426 <p><code>set environment XML_MEM_BREAKPOINT xxxx</code></p>
2427 <p>before running the program.</p>
2428 </li>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002429 <li>run the program under a debugger and set a breakpoint on
2430 xmlMallocBreakpoint() a specific function called when this precise block
2431 is allocated</li>
2432 <li>when the breakpoint is reached you can then do a fine analysis of the
2433 allocation an step to see the condition resulting in the missing
2434 deallocation.</li>
2435</ol>
2436
2437<p>I used to use a commercial tool to debug libxml memory problems but after
2438noticing that it was not detecting memory leaks that simple mechanism was
Daniel Veillard75794822002-04-11 16:24:32 +00002439used and proved extremely efficient until now. Lately I have also used <a
2440href="http://developer.kde.org/~sewardj/">valgrind</a> with quite some
2441success, it is tied to the i386 architecture since it works by emulating the
2442processor and instruction set, it is slow but extremely efficient, i.e. it
2443spot memory usage errors in a very precise way.</p>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002444
2445<h3><a name="General4">General memory requirements</a></h3>
2446
2447<p>How much libxml memory require ? It's hard to tell in average it depends
2448of a number of things:</p>
2449<ul>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00002450 <li>the parser itself should work in a fixed amount of memory, except for
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002451 information maintained about the stacks of names and entities locations.
2452 The I/O and encoding handlers will probably account for a few KBytes.
2453 This is true for both the XML and HTML parser (though the HTML parser
2454 need more state).</li>
2455 <li>If you are generating the DOM tree then memory requirements will grow
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00002456 nearly linear with the size of the data. In general for a balanced
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002457 textual document the internal memory requirement is about 4 times the
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00002458 size of the UTF8 serialization of this document (example the XML-1.0
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002459 recommendation is a bit more of 150KBytes and takes 650KBytes of main
2460 memory when parsed). Validation will add a amount of memory required for
2461 maintaining the external Dtd state which should be linear with the
2462 complexity of the content model defined by the Dtd</li>
Daniel Veillardce192eb2003-04-16 15:58:05 +00002463 <li>If you need to work with fixed memory requirements or don't need the
2464 full DOM tree then using the <a href="xmlreader.html">xmlReader
2465 interface</a> is probably the best way to proceed, it still allows to
2466 validate or operate on subset of the tree if needed.</li>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002467 <li>If you don't care about the advanced features of libxml like
Daniel Veillardce192eb2003-04-16 15:58:05 +00002468 validation, DOM, XPath or XPointer, don't use entities, need to work with
2469 fixed memory requirements, and try to get the fastest parsing possible
2470 then the SAX interface should be used, but it has known restrictions.</li>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002471</ul>
2472
2473<p></p>
2474
2475<h2><a name="Encodings">Encodings support</a></h2>
2476
2477<p>Table of Content:</p>
2478<ol>
2479 <li><a href="encoding.html#What">What does internationalization support
2480 mean ?</a></li>
2481 <li><a href="encoding.html#internal">The internal encoding, how and
2482 why</a></li>
2483 <li><a href="encoding.html#implemente">How is it implemented ?</a></li>
2484 <li><a href="encoding.html#Default">Default supported encodings</a></li>
2485 <li><a href="encoding.html#extend">How to extend the existing
2486 support</a></li>
2487</ol>
2488
2489<h3><a name="What">What does internationalization support mean ?</a></h3>
2490
Daniel Veillard238836e2003-04-07 22:57:29 +00002491<p>If you are not really familiar with Internationalization (usual shorcut is
2492I18N) , Unicode, characters and glyphs, I suggest you read a <a
2493href="http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2003/04/06/Unicode">presentation</a>
2494by Tim Bray on Unicode and why you should care about it.</p>
2495
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002496<p>XML was designed from the start to allow the support of any character set
2497by using Unicode. Any conformant XML parser has to support the UTF-8 and
2498UTF-16 default encodings which can both express the full unicode ranges. UTF8
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00002499is a variable length encoding whose greatest points are to reuse the same
2500encoding for ASCII and to save space for Western encodings, but it is a bit
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002501more complex to handle in practice. UTF-16 use 2 bytes per characters (and
2502sometimes combines two pairs), it makes implementation easier, but looks a
2503bit overkill for Western languages encoding. Moreover the XML specification
2504allows document to be encoded in other encodings at the condition that they
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00002505are clearly labeled as such. For example the following is a wellformed XML
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002506document encoded in ISO-8859 1 and using accentuated letter that we French
2507likes for both markup and content:</p>
2508<pre>&lt;?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?&gt;
2509&lt;très&gt;là&lt;/très&gt;</pre>
2510
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00002511<p>Having internationalization support in libxml means the following:</p>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002512<ul>
2513 <li>the document is properly parsed</li>
2514 <li>informations about it's encoding are saved</li>
2515 <li>it can be modified</li>
2516 <li>it can be saved in its original encoding</li>
2517 <li>it can also be saved in another encoding supported by libxml (for
2518 example straight UTF8 or even an ASCII form)</li>
2519</ul>
2520
2521<p>Another very important point is that the whole libxml API, with the
2522exception of a few routines to read with a specific encoding or save to a
2523specific encoding, is completely agnostic about the original encoding of the
2524document.</p>
2525
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00002526<p>It should be noted too that the HTML parser embedded in libxml now obey
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002527the same rules too, the following document will be (as of 2.2.2) handled in
2528an internationalized fashion by libxml too:</p>
2529<pre>&lt;!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN"
2530 "http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd"&gt;
2531&lt;html lang="fr"&gt;
2532&lt;head&gt;
2533 &lt;META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Type" CONTENT="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1"&gt;
2534&lt;/head&gt;
2535&lt;body&gt;
2536&lt;p&gt;W3C crée des standards pour le Web.&lt;/body&gt;
2537&lt;/html&gt;</pre>
2538
2539<h3><a name="internal">The internal encoding, how and why</a></h3>
2540
2541<p>One of the core decision was to force all documents to be converted to a
2542default internal encoding, and that encoding to be UTF-8, here are the
2543rationale for those choices:</p>
2544<ul>
2545 <li>keeping the native encoding in the internal form would force the libxml
2546 users (or the code associated) to be fully aware of the encoding of the
2547 original document, for examples when adding a text node to a document,
2548 the content would have to be provided in the document encoding, i.e. the
2549 client code would have to check it before hand, make sure it's conformant
2550 to the encoding, etc ... Very hard in practice, though in some specific
2551 cases this may make sense.</li>
2552 <li>the second decision was which encoding. From the XML spec only UTF8 and
2553 UTF16 really makes sense as being the two only encodings for which there
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00002554 is mandatory support. UCS-4 (32 bits fixed size encoding) could be
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002555 considered an intelligent choice too since it's a direct Unicode mapping
2556 support. I selected UTF-8 on the basis of efficiency and compatibility
2557 with surrounding software:
2558 <ul>
2559 <li>UTF-8 while a bit more complex to convert from/to (i.e. slightly
2560 more costly to import and export CPU wise) is also far more compact
2561 than UTF-16 (and UCS-4) for a majority of the documents I see it used
2562 for right now (RPM RDF catalogs, advogato data, various configuration
2563 file formats, etc.) and the key point for today's computer
2564 architecture is efficient uses of caches. If one nearly double the
2565 memory requirement to store the same amount of data, this will trash
2566 caches (main memory/external caches/internal caches) and my take is
2567 that this harms the system far more than the CPU requirements needed
2568 for the conversion to UTF-8</li>
2569 <li>Most of libxml version 1 users were using it with straight ASCII
2570 most of the time, doing the conversion with an internal encoding
2571 requiring all their code to be rewritten was a serious show-stopper
2572 for using UTF-16 or UCS-4.</li>
2573 <li>UTF-8 is being used as the de-facto internal encoding standard for
2574 related code like the <a href="http://www.pango.org/">pango</a>
2575 upcoming Gnome text widget, and a lot of Unix code (yep another place
2576 where Unix programmer base takes a different approach from Microsoft
2577 - they are using UTF-16)</li>
2578 </ul>
2579 </li>
2580</ul>
2581
2582<p>What does this mean in practice for the libxml user:</p>
2583<ul>
2584 <li>xmlChar, the libxml data type is a byte, those bytes must be assembled
2585 as UTF-8 valid strings. The proper way to terminate an xmlChar * string
2586 is simply to append 0 byte, as usual.</li>
2587 <li>One just need to make sure that when using chars outside the ASCII set,
2588 the values has been properly converted to UTF-8</li>
2589</ul>
2590
2591<h3><a name="implemente">How is it implemented ?</a></h3>
2592
2593<p>Let's describe how all this works within libxml, basically the I18N
2594(internationalization) support get triggered only during I/O operation, i.e.
2595when reading a document or saving one. Let's look first at the reading
2596sequence:</p>
2597<ol>
2598 <li>when a document is processed, we usually don't know the encoding, a
2599 simple heuristic allows to detect UTF-18 and UCS-4 from whose where the
2600 ASCII range (0-0x7F) maps with ASCII</li>
2601 <li>the xml declaration if available is parsed, including the encoding
2602 declaration. At that point, if the autodetected encoding is different
2603 from the one declared a call to xmlSwitchEncoding() is issued.</li>
2604 <li>If there is no encoding declaration, then the input has to be in either
2605 UTF-8 or UTF-16, if it is not then at some point when processing the
2606 input, the converter/checker of UTF-8 form will raise an encoding error.
2607 You may end-up with a garbled document, or no document at all ! Example:
2608 <pre>~/XML -&gt; ./xmllint err.xml
2609err.xml:1: error: Input is not proper UTF-8, indicate encoding !
2610&lt;très&gt;là&lt;/très&gt;
2611 ^
2612err.xml:1: error: Bytes: 0xE8 0x73 0x3E 0x6C
2613&lt;très&gt;là&lt;/très&gt;
2614 ^</pre>
2615 </li>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00002616 <li>xmlSwitchEncoding() does an encoding name lookup, canonicalize it, and
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002617 then search the default registered encoding converters for that encoding.
2618 If it's not within the default set and iconv() support has been compiled
2619 it, it will ask iconv for such an encoder. If this fails then the parser
2620 will report an error and stops processing:
2621 <pre>~/XML -&gt; ./xmllint err2.xml
2622err2.xml:1: error: Unsupported encoding UnsupportedEnc
2623&lt;?xml version="1.0" encoding="UnsupportedEnc"?&gt;
2624 ^</pre>
2625 </li>
Daniel Veillard46c5c1d2002-05-20 07:15:54 +00002626 <li>From that point the encoder processes progressively the input (it is
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002627 plugged as a front-end to the I/O module) for that entity. It captures
2628 and convert on-the-fly the document to be parsed to UTF-8. The parser
2629 itself just does UTF-8 checking of this input and process it
2630 transparently. The only difference is that the encoding information has
2631 been added to the parsing context (more precisely to the input
2632 corresponding to this entity).</li>
2633 <li>The result (when using DOM) is an internal form completely in UTF-8
2634 with just an encoding information on the document node.</li>
2635</ol>
2636
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00002637<p>Ok then what happens when saving the document (assuming you
2638collected/built an xmlDoc DOM like structure) ? It depends on the function
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002639called, xmlSaveFile() will just try to save in the original encoding, while
2640xmlSaveFileTo() and xmlSaveFileEnc() can optionally save to a given
2641encoding:</p>
2642<ol>
2643 <li>if no encoding is given, libxml will look for an encoding value
2644 associated to the document and if it exists will try to save to that
2645 encoding,
2646 <p>otherwise everything is written in the internal form, i.e. UTF-8</p>
2647 </li>
2648 <li>so if an encoding was specified, either at the API level or on the
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00002649 document, libxml will again canonicalize the encoding name, lookup for a
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002650 converter in the registered set or through iconv. If not found the
2651 function will return an error code</li>
2652 <li>the converter is placed before the I/O buffer layer, as another kind of
2653 buffer, then libxml will simply push the UTF-8 serialization to through
2654 that buffer, which will then progressively be converted and pushed onto
2655 the I/O layer.</li>
2656 <li>It is possible that the converter code fails on some input, for example
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00002657 trying to push an UTF-8 encoded Chinese character through the UTF-8 to
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002658 ISO-8859-1 converter won't work. Since the encoders are progressive they
2659 will just report the error and the number of bytes converted, at that
2660 point libxml will decode the offending character, remove it from the
2661 buffer and replace it with the associated charRef encoding &amp;#123; and
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00002662 resume the conversion. This guarantees that any document will be saved
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002663 without losses (except for markup names where this is not legal, this is
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00002664 a problem in the current version, in practice avoid using non-ascii
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002665 characters for tags or attributes names @@). A special "ascii" encoding
2666 name is used to save documents to a pure ascii form can be used when
2667 portability is really crucial</li>
2668</ol>
2669
2670<p>Here is a few examples based on the same test document:</p>
2671<pre>~/XML -&gt; ./xmllint isolat1
2672&lt;?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?&gt;
2673&lt;très&gt;là&lt;/très&gt;
2674~/XML -&gt; ./xmllint --encode UTF-8 isolat1
2675&lt;?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?&gt;
2676&lt;très&gt;là  &lt;/très&gt;
2677~/XML -&gt; </pre>
2678
2679<p>The same processing is applied (and reuse most of the code) for HTML I18N
2680processing. Looking up and modifying the content encoding is a bit more
2681difficult since it is located in a &lt;meta&gt; tag under the &lt;head&gt;,
2682so a couple of functions htmlGetMetaEncoding() and htmlSetMetaEncoding() have
2683been provided. The parser also attempts to switch encoding on the fly when
2684detecting such a tag on input. Except for that the processing is the same
2685(and again reuses the same code).</p>
2686
2687<h3><a name="Default">Default supported encodings</a></h3>
2688
2689<p>libxml has a set of default converters for the following encodings
2690(located in encoding.c):</p>
2691<ol>
2692 <li>UTF-8 is supported by default (null handlers)</li>
2693 <li>UTF-16, both little and big endian</li>
2694 <li>ISO-Latin-1 (ISO-8859-1) covering most western languages</li>
2695 <li>ASCII, useful mostly for saving</li>
2696 <li>HTML, a specific handler for the conversion of UTF-8 to ASCII with HTML
2697 predefined entities like &amp;copy; for the Copyright sign.</li>
2698</ol>
2699
Daniel Veillardc0801af2002-05-28 16:28:42 +00002700<p>More over when compiled on an Unix platform with iconv support the full
2701set of encodings supported by iconv can be instantly be used by libxml. On a
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002702linux machine with glibc-2.1 the list of supported encodings and aliases fill
27033 full pages, and include UCS-4, the full set of ISO-Latin encodings, and the
2704various Japanese ones.</p>
2705
2706<h4>Encoding aliases</h4>
2707
2708<p>From 2.2.3, libxml has support to register encoding names aliases. The
2709goal is to be able to parse document whose encoding is supported but where
2710the name differs (for example from the default set of names accepted by
2711iconv). The following functions allow to register and handle new aliases for
2712existing encodings. Once registered libxml will automatically lookup the
2713aliases when handling a document:</p>
2714<ul>
2715 <li>int xmlAddEncodingAlias(const char *name, const char *alias);</li>
2716 <li>int xmlDelEncodingAlias(const char *alias);</li>
2717 <li>const char * xmlGetEncodingAlias(const char *alias);</li>
2718 <li>void xmlCleanupEncodingAliases(void);</li>
2719</ul>
2720
2721<h3><a name="extend">How to extend the existing support</a></h3>
2722
2723<p>Well adding support for new encoding, or overriding one of the encoders
2724(assuming it is buggy) should not be hard, just write an input and output
2725conversion routines to/from UTF-8, and register them using
2726xmlNewCharEncodingHandler(name, xxxToUTF8, UTF8Toxxx), and they will be
2727called automatically if the parser(s) encounter such an encoding name
2728(register it uppercase, this will help). The description of the encoders,
2729their arguments and expected return values are described in the encoding.h
2730header.</p>
2731
2732<p>A quick note on the topic of subverting the parser to use a different
2733internal encoding than UTF-8, in some case people will absolutely want to
2734keep the internal encoding different, I think it's still possible (but the
2735encoding must be compliant with ASCII on the same subrange) though I didn't
2736tried it. The key is to override the default conversion routines (by
2737registering null encoders/decoders for your charsets), and bypass the UTF-8
2738checking of the parser by setting the parser context charset
2739(ctxt-&gt;charset) to something different than XML_CHAR_ENCODING_UTF8, but
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00002740there is no guarantee that this will work. You may also have some troubles
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002741saving back.</p>
2742
2743<p>Basically proper I18N support is important, this requires at least
2744libxml-2.0.0, but a lot of features and corrections are really available only
2745starting 2.2.</p>
2746
2747<h2><a name="IO">I/O Interfaces</a></h2>
2748
2749<p>Table of Content:</p>
2750<ol>
2751 <li><a href="#General1">General overview</a></li>
2752 <li><a href="#basic">The basic buffer type</a></li>
2753 <li><a href="#Input">Input I/O handlers</a></li>
2754 <li><a href="#Output">Output I/O handlers</a></li>
2755 <li><a href="#entities">The entities loader</a></li>
2756 <li><a href="#Example2">Example of customized I/O</a></li>
2757</ol>
2758
2759<h3><a name="General1">General overview</a></h3>
2760
2761<p>The module <code><a
2762href="http://xmlsoft.org/html/libxml-xmlio.html">xmlIO.h</a></code> provides
2763the interfaces to the libxml I/O system. This consists of 4 main parts:</p>
2764<ul>
2765 <li>Entities loader, this is a routine which tries to fetch the entities
2766 (files) based on their PUBLIC and SYSTEM identifiers. The default loader
2767 don't look at the public identifier since libxml do not maintain a
2768 catalog. You can redefine you own entity loader by using
2769 <code>xmlGetExternalEntityLoader()</code> and
Daniel Veillard9c466822001-10-25 12:03:39 +00002770 <code>xmlSetExternalEntityLoader()</code>. <a href="#entities">Check the
2771 example</a>.</li>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002772 <li>Input I/O buffers which are a commodity structure used by the parser(s)
2773 input layer to handle fetching the informations to feed the parser. This
2774 provides buffering and is also a placeholder where the encoding
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00002775 converters to UTF8 are piggy-backed.</li>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002776 <li>Output I/O buffers are similar to the Input ones and fulfill similar
2777 task but when generating a serialization from a tree.</li>
2778 <li>A mechanism to register sets of I/O callbacks and associate them with
2779 specific naming schemes like the protocol part of the URIs.
2780 <p>This affect the default I/O operations and allows to use specific I/O
2781 handlers for certain names.</p>
2782 </li>
2783</ul>
2784
2785<p>The general mechanism used when loading http://rpmfind.net/xml.html for
2786example in the HTML parser is the following:</p>
2787<ol>
2788 <li>The default entity loader calls <code>xmlNewInputFromFile()</code> with
2789 the parsing context and the URI string.</li>
2790 <li>the URI string is checked against the existing registered handlers
2791 using their match() callback function, if the HTTP module was compiled
2792 in, it is registered and its match() function will succeeds</li>
2793 <li>the open() function of the handler is called and if successful will
2794 return an I/O Input buffer</li>
2795 <li>the parser will the start reading from this buffer and progressively
2796 fetch information from the resource, calling the read() function of the
2797 handler until the resource is exhausted</li>
2798 <li>if an encoding change is detected it will be installed on the input
2799 buffer, providing buffering and efficient use of the conversion
2800 routines</li>
2801 <li>once the parser has finished, the close() function of the handler is
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00002802 called once and the Input buffer and associated resources are
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002803 deallocated.</li>
2804</ol>
2805
2806<p>The user defined callbacks are checked first to allow overriding of the
2807default libxml I/O routines.</p>
2808
2809<h3><a name="basic">The basic buffer type</a></h3>
2810
2811<p>All the buffer manipulation handling is done using the
2812<code>xmlBuffer</code> type define in <code><a
2813href="http://xmlsoft.org/html/libxml-tree.html">tree.h</a> </code>which is a
2814resizable memory buffer. The buffer allocation strategy can be selected to be
2815either best-fit or use an exponential doubling one (CPU vs. memory use
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00002816trade-off). The values are <code>XML_BUFFER_ALLOC_EXACT</code> and
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002817<code>XML_BUFFER_ALLOC_DOUBLEIT</code>, and can be set individually or on a
2818system wide basis using <code>xmlBufferSetAllocationScheme()</code>. A number
2819of functions allows to manipulate buffers with names starting with the
2820<code>xmlBuffer...</code> prefix.</p>
2821
2822<h3><a name="Input">Input I/O handlers</a></h3>
2823
2824<p>An Input I/O handler is a simple structure
2825<code>xmlParserInputBuffer</code> containing a context associated to the
2826resource (file descriptor, or pointer to a protocol handler), the read() and
2827close() callbacks to use and an xmlBuffer. And extra xmlBuffer and a charset
2828encoding handler are also present to support charset conversion when
2829needed.</p>
2830
2831<h3><a name="Output">Output I/O handlers</a></h3>
2832
2833<p>An Output handler <code>xmlOutputBuffer</code> is completely similar to an
2834Input one except the callbacks are write() and close().</p>
2835
2836<h3><a name="entities">The entities loader</a></h3>
2837
2838<p>The entity loader resolves requests for new entities and create inputs for
2839the parser. Creating an input from a filename or an URI string is done
2840through the xmlNewInputFromFile() routine. The default entity loader do not
2841handle the PUBLIC identifier associated with an entity (if any). So it just
2842calls xmlNewInputFromFile() with the SYSTEM identifier (which is mandatory in
2843XML).</p>
2844
2845<p>If you want to hook up a catalog mechanism then you simply need to
2846override the default entity loader, here is an example:</p>
2847<pre>#include &lt;libxml/xmlIO.h&gt;
2848
2849xmlExternalEntityLoader defaultLoader = NULL;
2850
2851xmlParserInputPtr
2852xmlMyExternalEntityLoader(const char *URL, const char *ID,
2853 xmlParserCtxtPtr ctxt) {
2854 xmlParserInputPtr ret;
2855 const char *fileID = NULL;
2856 /* lookup for the fileID depending on ID */
2857
2858 ret = xmlNewInputFromFile(ctxt, fileID);
2859 if (ret != NULL)
2860 return(ret);
2861 if (defaultLoader != NULL)
2862 ret = defaultLoader(URL, ID, ctxt);
2863 return(ret);
2864}
2865
2866int main(..) {
2867 ...
2868
2869 /*
2870 * Install our own entity loader
2871 */
2872 defaultLoader = xmlGetExternalEntityLoader();
2873 xmlSetExternalEntityLoader(xmlMyExternalEntityLoader);
2874
2875 ...
2876}</pre>
2877
2878<h3><a name="Example2">Example of customized I/O</a></h3>
2879
2880<p>This example come from <a href="http://xmlsoft.org/messages/0708.html">a
2881real use case</a>, xmlDocDump() closes the FILE * passed by the application
2882and this was a problem. The <a
2883href="http://xmlsoft.org/messages/0711.html">solution</a> was to redefine a
2884new output handler with the closing call deactivated:</p>
2885<ol>
Daniel Veillardc0801af2002-05-28 16:28:42 +00002886 <li>First define a new I/O output allocator where the output don't close
2887 the file:
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002888 <pre>xmlOutputBufferPtr
2889xmlOutputBufferCreateOwn(FILE *file, xmlCharEncodingHandlerPtr encoder) {
2890    xmlOutputBufferPtr ret;
2891    
2892    if (xmlOutputCallbackInitialized == 0)
2893        xmlRegisterDefaultOutputCallbacks();
2894
2895    if (file == NULL) return(NULL);
2896    ret = xmlAllocOutputBuffer(encoder);
2897    if (ret != NULL) {
2898        ret-&gt;context = file;
2899        ret-&gt;writecallback = xmlFileWrite;
2900        ret-&gt;closecallback = NULL; /* No close callback */
2901    }
Daniel Veillardf83a2c72003-04-08 13:48:40 +00002902    return(ret);
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002903} </pre>
2904 </li>
2905 <li>And then use it to save the document:
2906 <pre>FILE *f;
2907xmlOutputBufferPtr output;
2908xmlDocPtr doc;
2909int res;
2910
2911f = ...
2912doc = ....
2913
2914output = xmlOutputBufferCreateOwn(f, NULL);
2915res = xmlSaveFileTo(output, doc, NULL);
2916 </pre>
2917 </li>
2918</ol>
2919
2920<h2><a name="Catalog">Catalog support</a></h2>
2921
2922<p>Table of Content:</p>
2923<ol>
2924 <li><a href="General2">General overview</a></li>
2925 <li><a href="#definition">The definition</a></li>
2926 <li><a href="#Simple">Using catalogs</a></li>
2927 <li><a href="#Some">Some examples</a></li>
2928 <li><a href="#reference">How to tune catalog usage</a></li>
2929 <li><a href="#validate">How to debug catalog processing</a></li>
2930 <li><a href="#Declaring">How to create and maintain catalogs</a></li>
2931 <li><a href="#implemento">The implementor corner quick review of the
2932 API</a></li>
2933 <li><a href="#Other">Other resources</a></li>
2934</ol>
2935
2936<h3><a name="General2">General overview</a></h3>
2937
2938<p>What is a catalog? Basically it's a lookup mechanism used when an entity
2939(a file or a remote resource) references another entity. The catalog lookup
2940is inserted between the moment the reference is recognized by the software
2941(XML parser, stylesheet processing, or even images referenced for inclusion
2942in a rendering) and the time where loading that resource is actually
2943started.</p>
2944
2945<p>It is basically used for 3 things:</p>
2946<ul>
2947 <li>mapping from "logical" names, the public identifiers and a more
2948 concrete name usable for download (and URI). For example it can associate
2949 the logical name
2950 <p>"-//OASIS//DTD DocBook XML V4.1.2//EN"</p>
2951 <p>of the DocBook 4.1.2 XML DTD with the actual URL where it can be
2952 downloaded</p>
2953 <p>http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/xml/4.1.2/docbookx.dtd</p>
2954 </li>
2955 <li>remapping from a given URL to another one, like an HTTP indirection
2956 saying that
2957 <p>"http://www.oasis-open.org/committes/tr.xsl"</p>
2958 <p>should really be looked at</p>
2959 <p>"http://www.oasis-open.org/committes/entity/stylesheets/base/tr.xsl"</p>
2960 </li>
2961 <li>providing a local cache mechanism allowing to load the entities
2962 associated to public identifiers or remote resources, this is a really
2963 important feature for any significant deployment of XML or SGML since it
2964 allows to avoid the aleas and delays associated to fetching remote
2965 resources.</li>
2966</ul>
2967
2968<h3><a name="definition">The definitions</a></h3>
2969
2970<p>Libxml, as of 2.4.3 implements 2 kind of catalogs:</p>
2971<ul>
2972 <li>the older SGML catalogs, the official spec is SGML Open Technical
2973 Resolution TR9401:1997, but is better understood by reading <a
2974 href="http://www.jclark.com/sp/catalog.htm">the SP Catalog page</a> from
2975 James Clark. This is relatively old and not the preferred mode of
2976 operation of libxml.</li>
2977 <li><a href="http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/entity/spec.html">XML
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +00002978 Catalogs</a> is far more flexible, more recent, uses an XML syntax and
2979 should scale quite better. This is the default option of libxml.</li>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002980</ul>
2981
2982<p></p>
2983
2984<h3><a name="Simple">Using catalog</a></h3>
2985
2986<p>In a normal environment libxml will by default check the presence of a
2987catalog in /etc/xml/catalog, and assuming it has been correctly populated,
2988the processing is completely transparent to the document user. To take a
2989concrete example, suppose you are authoring a DocBook document, this one
2990starts with the following DOCTYPE definition:</p>
2991<pre>&lt;?xml version='1.0'?&gt;
2992&lt;!DOCTYPE book PUBLIC "-//Norman Walsh//DTD DocBk XML V3.1.4//EN"
2993 "http://nwalsh.com/docbook/xml/3.1.4/db3xml.dtd"&gt;</pre>
2994
2995<p>When validating the document with libxml, the catalog will be
2996automatically consulted to lookup the public identifier "-//Norman Walsh//DTD
2997DocBk XML V3.1.4//EN" and the system identifier
2998"http://nwalsh.com/docbook/xml/3.1.4/db3xml.dtd", and if these entities have
2999been installed on your system and the catalogs actually point to them, libxml
3000will fetch them from the local disk.</p>
3001
3002<p style="font-size: 10pt"><strong>Note</strong>: Really don't use this
3003DOCTYPE example it's a really old version, but is fine as an example.</p>
3004
3005<p>Libxml will check the catalog each time that it is requested to load an
3006entity, this includes DTD, external parsed entities, stylesheets, etc ... If
3007your system is correctly configured all the authoring phase and processing
3008should use only local files, even if your document stays portable because it
3009uses the canonical public and system ID, referencing the remote document.</p>
3010
3011<h3><a name="Some">Some examples:</a></h3>
3012
3013<p>Here is a couple of fragments from XML Catalogs used in libxml early
3014regression tests in <code>test/catalogs</code> :</p>
3015<pre>&lt;?xml version="1.0"?&gt;
3016&lt;!DOCTYPE catalog PUBLIC
3017 "-//OASIS//DTD Entity Resolution XML Catalog V1.0//EN"
3018 "http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/entity/release/1.0/catalog.dtd"&gt;
3019&lt;catalog xmlns="urn:oasis:names:tc:entity:xmlns:xml:catalog"&gt;
3020 &lt;public publicId="-//OASIS//DTD DocBook XML V4.1.2//EN"
3021 uri="http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/xml/4.1.2/docbookx.dtd"/&gt;
3022...</pre>
3023
3024<p>This is the beginning of a catalog for DocBook 4.1.2, XML Catalogs are
3025written in XML, there is a specific namespace for catalog elements
3026"urn:oasis:names:tc:entity:xmlns:xml:catalog". The first entry in this
3027catalog is a <code>public</code> mapping it allows to associate a Public
3028Identifier with an URI.</p>
3029<pre>...
3030 &lt;rewriteSystem systemIdStartString="http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/"
3031 rewritePrefix="file:///usr/share/xml/docbook/"/&gt;
3032...</pre>
3033
3034<p>A <code>rewriteSystem</code> is a very powerful instruction, it says that
3035any URI starting with a given prefix should be looked at another URI
3036constructed by replacing the prefix with an new one. In effect this acts like
3037a cache system for a full area of the Web. In practice it is extremely useful
3038with a file prefix if you have installed a copy of those resources on your
3039local system.</p>
3040<pre>...
3041&lt;delegatePublic publicIdStartString="-//OASIS//DTD XML Catalog //"
3042 catalog="file:///usr/share/xml/docbook.xml"/&gt;
3043&lt;delegatePublic publicIdStartString="-//OASIS//ENTITIES DocBook XML"
3044 catalog="file:///usr/share/xml/docbook.xml"/&gt;
3045&lt;delegatePublic publicIdStartString="-//OASIS//DTD DocBook XML"
3046 catalog="file:///usr/share/xml/docbook.xml"/&gt;
3047&lt;delegateSystem systemIdStartString="http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/"
3048 catalog="file:///usr/share/xml/docbook.xml"/&gt;
3049&lt;delegateURI uriStartString="http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/"
3050 catalog="file:///usr/share/xml/docbook.xml"/&gt;
3051...</pre>
3052
3053<p>Delegation is the core features which allows to build a tree of catalogs,
3054easier to maintain than a single catalog, based on Public Identifier, System
3055Identifier or URI prefixes it instructs the catalog software to look up
3056entries in another resource. This feature allow to build hierarchies of
3057catalogs, the set of entries presented should be sufficient to redirect the
3058resolution of all DocBook references to the specific catalog in
3059<code>/usr/share/xml/docbook.xml</code> this one in turn could delegate all
3060references for DocBook 4.2.1 to a specific catalog installed at the same time
3061as the DocBook resources on the local machine.</p>
3062
3063<h3><a name="reference">How to tune catalog usage:</a></h3>
3064
3065<p>The user can change the default catalog behaviour by redirecting queries
3066to its own set of catalogs, this can be done by setting the
3067<code>XML_CATALOG_FILES</code> environment variable to a list of catalogs, an
3068empty one should deactivate loading the default <code>/etc/xml/catalog</code>
3069default catalog</p>
3070
3071<h3><a name="validate">How to debug catalog processing:</a></h3>
3072
3073<p>Setting up the <code>XML_DEBUG_CATALOG</code> environment variable will
3074make libxml output debugging informations for each catalog operations, for
3075example:</p>
3076<pre>orchis:~/XML -&gt; xmllint --memory --noout test/ent2
3077warning: failed to load external entity "title.xml"
3078orchis:~/XML -&gt; export XML_DEBUG_CATALOG=
3079orchis:~/XML -&gt; xmllint --memory --noout test/ent2
3080Failed to parse catalog /etc/xml/catalog
3081Failed to parse catalog /etc/xml/catalog
3082warning: failed to load external entity "title.xml"
3083Catalogs cleanup
3084orchis:~/XML -&gt; </pre>
3085
3086<p>The test/ent2 references an entity, running the parser from memory makes
3087the base URI unavailable and the the "title.xml" entity cannot be loaded.
3088Setting up the debug environment variable allows to detect that an attempt is
3089made to load the <code>/etc/xml/catalog</code> but since it's not present the
3090resolution fails.</p>
3091
3092<p>But the most advanced way to debug XML catalog processing is to use the
3093<strong>xmlcatalog</strong> command shipped with libxml2, it allows to load
3094catalogs and make resolution queries to see what is going on. This is also
3095used for the regression tests:</p>
3096<pre>orchis:~/XML -&gt; ./xmlcatalog test/catalogs/docbook.xml \
3097 "-//OASIS//DTD DocBook XML V4.1.2//EN"
3098http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/xml/4.1.2/docbookx.dtd
3099orchis:~/XML -&gt; </pre>
3100
3101<p>For debugging what is going on, adding one -v flags increase the verbosity
3102level to indicate the processing done (adding a second flag also indicate
3103what elements are recognized at parsing):</p>
3104<pre>orchis:~/XML -&gt; ./xmlcatalog -v test/catalogs/docbook.xml \
3105 "-//OASIS//DTD DocBook XML V4.1.2//EN"
3106Parsing catalog test/catalogs/docbook.xml's content
3107Found public match -//OASIS//DTD DocBook XML V4.1.2//EN
3108http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/xml/4.1.2/docbookx.dtd
3109Catalogs cleanup
3110orchis:~/XML -&gt; </pre>
3111
3112<p>A shell interface is also available to debug and process multiple queries
3113(and for regression tests):</p>
3114<pre>orchis:~/XML -&gt; ./xmlcatalog -shell test/catalogs/docbook.xml \
3115 "-//OASIS//DTD DocBook XML V4.1.2//EN"
3116&gt; help
3117Commands available:
3118public PublicID: make a PUBLIC identifier lookup
3119system SystemID: make a SYSTEM identifier lookup
3120resolve PublicID SystemID: do a full resolver lookup
3121add 'type' 'orig' 'replace' : add an entry
3122del 'values' : remove values
3123dump: print the current catalog state
3124debug: increase the verbosity level
3125quiet: decrease the verbosity level
3126exit: quit the shell
3127&gt; public "-//OASIS//DTD DocBook XML V4.1.2//EN"
3128http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/xml/4.1.2/docbookx.dtd
3129&gt; quit
3130orchis:~/XML -&gt; </pre>
3131
3132<p>This should be sufficient for most debugging purpose, this was actually
3133used heavily to debug the XML Catalog implementation itself.</p>
3134
3135<h3><a name="Declaring">How to create and maintain</a> catalogs:</h3>
3136
3137<p>Basically XML Catalogs are XML files, you can either use XML tools to
3138manage them or use <strong>xmlcatalog</strong> for this. The basic step is
3139to create a catalog the -create option provide this facility:</p>
3140<pre>orchis:~/XML -&gt; ./xmlcatalog --create tst.xml
3141&lt;?xml version="1.0"?&gt;
3142&lt;!DOCTYPE catalog PUBLIC "-//OASIS//DTD Entity Resolution XML Catalog V1.0//EN"
3143 "http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/entity/release/1.0/catalog.dtd"&gt;
3144&lt;catalog xmlns="urn:oasis:names:tc:entity:xmlns:xml:catalog"/&gt;
3145orchis:~/XML -&gt; </pre>
3146
3147<p>By default xmlcatalog does not overwrite the original catalog and save the
3148result on the standard output, this can be overridden using the -noout
3149option. The <code>-add</code> command allows to add entries in the
3150catalog:</p>
3151<pre>orchis:~/XML -&gt; ./xmlcatalog --noout --create --add "public" \
3152 "-//OASIS//DTD DocBook XML V4.1.2//EN" \
3153 http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/xml/4.1.2/docbookx.dtd tst.xml
3154orchis:~/XML -&gt; cat tst.xml
3155&lt;?xml version="1.0"?&gt;
3156&lt;!DOCTYPE catalog PUBLIC "-//OASIS//DTD Entity Resolution XML Catalog V1.0//EN" \
3157 "http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/entity/release/1.0/catalog.dtd"&gt;
3158&lt;catalog xmlns="urn:oasis:names:tc:entity:xmlns:xml:catalog"&gt;
3159&lt;public publicId="-//OASIS//DTD DocBook XML V4.1.2//EN"
3160 uri="http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/xml/4.1.2/docbookx.dtd"/&gt;
3161&lt;/catalog&gt;
3162orchis:~/XML -&gt; </pre>
3163
3164<p>The <code>-add</code> option will always take 3 parameters even if some of
3165the XML Catalog constructs (like nextCatalog) will have only a single
3166argument, just pass a third empty string, it will be ignored.</p>
3167
3168<p>Similarly the <code>-del</code> option remove matching entries from the
3169catalog:</p>
3170<pre>orchis:~/XML -&gt; ./xmlcatalog --del \
3171 "http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/xml/4.1.2/docbookx.dtd" tst.xml
3172&lt;?xml version="1.0"?&gt;
3173&lt;!DOCTYPE catalog PUBLIC "-//OASIS//DTD Entity Resolution XML Catalog V1.0//EN"
3174 "http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/entity/release/1.0/catalog.dtd"&gt;
3175&lt;catalog xmlns="urn:oasis:names:tc:entity:xmlns:xml:catalog"/&gt;
3176orchis:~/XML -&gt; </pre>
3177
3178<p>The catalog is now empty. Note that the matching of <code>-del</code> is
3179exact and would have worked in a similar fashion with the Public ID
3180string.</p>
3181
3182<p>This is rudimentary but should be sufficient to manage a not too complex
3183catalog tree of resources.</p>
3184
3185<h3><a name="implemento">The implementor corner quick review of the
3186API:</a></h3>
3187
3188<p>First, and like for every other module of libxml, there is an
3189automatically generated <a href="html/libxml-catalog.html">API page for
3190catalog support</a>.</p>
3191
3192<p>The header for the catalog interfaces should be included as:</p>
3193<pre>#include &lt;libxml/catalog.h&gt;</pre>
3194
3195<p>The API is voluntarily kept very simple. First it is not obvious that
3196applications really need access to it since it is the default behaviour of
3197libxml (Note: it is possible to completely override libxml default catalog by
3198using <a href="html/libxml-parser.html">xmlSetExternalEntityLoader</a> to
3199plug an application specific resolver).</p>
3200
3201<p>Basically libxml support 2 catalog lists:</p>
3202<ul>
3203 <li>the default one, global shared by all the application</li>
3204 <li>a per-document catalog, this one is built if the document uses the
3205 <code>oasis-xml-catalog</code> PIs to specify its own catalog list, it is
3206 associated to the parser context and destroyed when the parsing context
3207 is destroyed.</li>
3208</ul>
3209
3210<p>the document one will be used first if it exists.</p>
3211
3212<h4>Initialization routines:</h4>
3213
3214<p>xmlInitializeCatalog(), xmlLoadCatalog() and xmlLoadCatalogs() should be
3215used at startup to initialize the catalog, if the catalog should be
3216initialized with specific values xmlLoadCatalog() or xmlLoadCatalogs()
3217should be called before xmlInitializeCatalog() which would otherwise do a
3218default initialization first.</p>
3219
3220<p>The xmlCatalogAddLocal() call is used by the parser to grow the document
3221own catalog list if needed.</p>
3222
3223<h4>Preferences setup:</h4>
3224
3225<p>The XML Catalog spec requires the possibility to select default
3226preferences between public and system delegation,
3227xmlCatalogSetDefaultPrefer() allows this, xmlCatalogSetDefaults() and
3228xmlCatalogGetDefaults() allow to control if XML Catalogs resolution should
3229be forbidden, allowed for global catalog, for document catalog or both, the
3230default is to allow both.</p>
3231
3232<p>And of course xmlCatalogSetDebug() allows to generate debug messages
3233(through the xmlGenericError() mechanism).</p>
3234
3235<h4>Querying routines:</h4>
3236
3237<p>xmlCatalogResolve(), xmlCatalogResolveSystem(), xmlCatalogResolvePublic()
3238and xmlCatalogResolveURI() are relatively explicit if you read the XML
3239Catalog specification they correspond to section 7 algorithms, they should
3240also work if you have loaded an SGML catalog with a simplified semantic.</p>
3241
3242<p>xmlCatalogLocalResolve() and xmlCatalogLocalResolveURI() are the same but
3243operate on the document catalog list</p>
3244
3245<h4>Cleanup and Miscellaneous:</h4>
3246
3247<p>xmlCatalogCleanup() free-up the global catalog, xmlCatalogFreeLocal() is
3248the per-document equivalent.</p>
3249
3250<p>xmlCatalogAdd() and xmlCatalogRemove() are used to dynamically modify the
3251first catalog in the global list, and xmlCatalogDump() allows to dump a
3252catalog state, those routines are primarily designed for xmlcatalog, I'm not
3253sure that exposing more complex interfaces (like navigation ones) would be
3254really useful.</p>
3255
3256<p>The xmlParseCatalogFile() is a function used to load XML Catalog files,
3257it's similar as xmlParseFile() except it bypass all catalog lookups, it's
3258provided because this functionality may be useful for client tools.</p>
3259
3260<h4>threaded environments:</h4>
3261
3262<p>Since the catalog tree is built progressively, some care has been taken to
3263try to avoid troubles in multithreaded environments. The code is now thread
3264safe assuming that the libxml library has been compiled with threads
3265support.</p>
3266
3267<p></p>
3268
3269<h3><a name="Other">Other resources</a></h3>
3270
3271<p>The XML Catalog specification is relatively recent so there isn't much
3272literature to point at:</p>
3273<ul>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00003274 <li>You can find a good rant from Norm Walsh about <a
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00003275 href="http://www.arbortext.com/Think_Tank/XML_Resources/Issue_Three/issue_three.html">the
3276 need for catalogs</a>, it provides a lot of context informations even if
Daniel Veillard93d3a472002-04-26 14:04:55 +00003277 I don't agree with everything presented. Norm also wrote a more recent
3278 article <a
3279 href="http://wwws.sun.com/software/xml/developers/resolver/article/">XML
3280 entities and URI resolvers</a> describing them.</li>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00003281 <li>An <a href="http://home.ccil.org/~cowan/XML/XCatalog.html">old XML
3282 catalog proposal</a> from John Cowan</li>
3283 <li>The <a href="http://www.rddl.org/">Resource Directory Description
3284 Language</a> (RDDL) another catalog system but more oriented toward
3285 providing metadata for XML namespaces.</li>
3286 <li>the page from the OASIS Technical <a
3287 href="http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/entity/">Committee on Entity
3288 Resolution</a> who maintains XML Catalog, you will find pointers to the
3289 specification update, some background and pointers to others tools
3290 providing XML Catalog support</li>
Daniel Veillard35e937a2002-01-19 22:21:54 +00003291 <li>Here is a <a href="buildDocBookCatalog">shell script</a> to generate
3292 XML Catalogs for DocBook 4.1.2 . If it can write to the /etc/xml/
3293 directory, it will set-up /etc/xml/catalog and /etc/xml/docbook based on
3294 the resources found on the system. Otherwise it will just create
3295 ~/xmlcatalog and ~/dbkxmlcatalog and doing:
Daniel Veillardc575b992002-02-08 13:28:40 +00003296 <p><code>export XMLCATALOG=$HOME/xmlcatalog</code></p>
Daniel Veillard35e937a2002-01-19 22:21:54 +00003297 <p>should allow to process DocBook documentations without requiring
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00003298 network accesses for the DTD or stylesheets</p>
Daniel Veillard35e937a2002-01-19 22:21:54 +00003299 </li>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00003300 <li>I have uploaded <a href="ftp://xmlsoft.org/test/dbk412catalog.tar.gz">a
Daniel Veillard35e937a2002-01-19 22:21:54 +00003301 small tarball</a> containing XML Catalogs for DocBook 4.1.2 which seems
3302 to work fine for me too</li>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00003303 <li>The <a href="http://www.xmlsoft.org/xmlcatalog_man.html">xmlcatalog
3304 manual page</a></li>
3305</ul>
3306
3307<p>If you have suggestions for corrections or additions, simply contact
3308me:</p>
3309
3310<h2><a name="library">The parser interfaces</a></h2>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003311
3312<p>This section is directly intended to help programmers getting bootstrapped
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +00003313using the XML library from the C language. It is not intended to be
3314extensive. I hope the automatically generated documents will provide the
3315completeness required, but as a separate set of documents. The interfaces of
3316the XML library are by principle low level, there is nearly zero abstraction.
3317Those interested in a higher level API should <a href="#DOM">look at
3318DOM</a>.</p>
Daniel Veillardccb09631998-10-27 06:21:04 +00003319
Daniel Veillard9cb5ff42001-01-29 08:22:21 +00003320<p>The <a href="html/libxml-parser.html">parser interfaces for XML</a> are
3321separated from the <a href="html/libxml-htmlparser.html">HTML parser
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00003322interfaces</a>. Let's have a look at how the XML parser can be called:</p>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +00003323
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00003324<h3><a name="Invoking">Invoking the parser : the pull method</a></h3>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003325
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00003326<p>Usually, the first thing to do is to read an XML input. The parser accepts
3327documents either from in-memory strings or from files. The functions are
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003328defined in "parser.h":</p>
Daniel Veillard10c6a8f1998-10-28 01:00:12 +00003329<dl>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003330 <dt><code>xmlDocPtr xmlParseMemory(char *buffer, int size);</code></dt>
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00003331 <dd><p>Parse a null-terminated string containing the document.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003332 </dd>
Daniel Veillard10c6a8f1998-10-28 01:00:12 +00003333</dl>
3334<dl>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003335 <dt><code>xmlDocPtr xmlParseFile(const char *filename);</code></dt>
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +00003336 <dd><p>Parse an XML document contained in a (possibly compressed)
3337 file.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003338 </dd>
Daniel Veillard10c6a8f1998-10-28 01:00:12 +00003339</dl>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003340
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00003341<p>The parser returns a pointer to the document structure (or NULL in case of
Daniel Veillard10c6a8f1998-10-28 01:00:12 +00003342failure).</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003343
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00003344<h3 id="Invoking1">Invoking the parser: the push method</h3>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +00003345
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +00003346<p>In order for the application to keep the control when the document is
3347being fetched (which is common for GUI based programs) libxml provides a push
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00003348interface, too, as of version 1.8.3. Here are the interface functions:</p>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +00003349<pre>xmlParserCtxtPtr xmlCreatePushParserCtxt(xmlSAXHandlerPtr sax,
3350 void *user_data,
3351 const char *chunk,
3352 int size,
3353 const char *filename);
3354int xmlParseChunk (xmlParserCtxtPtr ctxt,
3355 const char *chunk,
3356 int size,
3357 int terminate);</pre>
3358
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00003359<p>and here is a simple example showing how to use the interface:</p>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +00003360<pre> FILE *f;
3361
3362 f = fopen(filename, "r");
3363 if (f != NULL) {
3364 int res, size = 1024;
3365 char chars[1024];
3366 xmlParserCtxtPtr ctxt;
3367
3368 res = fread(chars, 1, 4, f);
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00003369 if (res &gt; 0) {
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +00003370 ctxt = xmlCreatePushParserCtxt(NULL, NULL,
3371 chars, res, filename);
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00003372 while ((res = fread(chars, 1, size, f)) &gt; 0) {
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +00003373 xmlParseChunk(ctxt, chars, res, 0);
3374 }
3375 xmlParseChunk(ctxt, chars, 0, 1);
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00003376 doc = ctxt-&gt;myDoc;
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +00003377 xmlFreeParserCtxt(ctxt);
3378 }
3379 }</pre>
3380
Daniel Veillardec70e912001-02-26 20:10:45 +00003381<p>The HTML parser embedded into libxml also has a push interface; the
3382functions are just prefixed by "html" rather than "xml".</p>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +00003383
3384<h3 id="Invoking2">Invoking the parser: the SAX interface</h3>
3385
Daniel Veillardec70e912001-02-26 20:10:45 +00003386<p>The tree-building interface makes the parser memory-hungry, first loading
3387the document in memory and then building the tree itself. Reading a document
3388without building the tree is possible using the SAX interfaces (see SAX.h and
3389<a href="http://www.daa.com.au/~james/gnome/xml-sax/xml-sax.html">James
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00003390Henstridge's documentation</a>). Note also that the push interface can be
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +00003391limited to SAX: just use the two first arguments of
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +00003392<code>xmlCreatePushParserCtxt()</code>.</p>
Daniel Veillardccb09631998-10-27 06:21:04 +00003393
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +00003394<h3><a name="Building">Building a tree from scratch</a></h3>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003395
3396<p>The other way to get an XML tree in memory is by building it. Basically
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +00003397there is a set of functions dedicated to building new elements. (These are
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +00003398also described in &lt;libxml/tree.h&gt;.) For example, here is a piece of
3399code that produces the XML document used in the previous examples:</p>
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00003400<pre> #include &lt;libxml/tree.h&gt;
Daniel Veillard361d8452000-04-03 19:48:13 +00003401 xmlDocPtr doc;
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +00003402 xmlNodePtr tree, subtree;
3403
3404 doc = xmlNewDoc("1.0");
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00003405 doc-&gt;children = xmlNewDocNode(doc, NULL, "EXAMPLE", NULL);
3406 xmlSetProp(doc-&gt;children, "prop1", "gnome is great");
3407 xmlSetProp(doc-&gt;children, "prop2", "&amp; linux too");
3408 tree = xmlNewChild(doc-&gt;children, NULL, "head", NULL);
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +00003409 subtree = xmlNewChild(tree, NULL, "title", "Welcome to Gnome");
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00003410 tree = xmlNewChild(doc-&gt;children, NULL, "chapter", NULL);
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +00003411 subtree = xmlNewChild(tree, NULL, "title", "The Linux adventure");
3412 subtree = xmlNewChild(tree, NULL, "p", "bla bla bla ...");
3413 subtree = xmlNewChild(tree, NULL, "image", NULL);
3414 xmlSetProp(subtree, "href", "linus.gif");</pre>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003415
3416<p>Not really rocket science ...</p>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +00003417
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +00003418<h3><a name="Traversing">Traversing the tree</a></h3>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003419
Daniel Veillard9cb5ff42001-01-29 08:22:21 +00003420<p>Basically by <a href="html/libxml-tree.html">including "tree.h"</a> your
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +00003421code has access to the internal structure of all the elements of the tree.
3422The names should be somewhat simple like <strong>parent</strong>,
Daniel Veillard306be992000-07-03 12:38:45 +00003423<strong>children</strong>, <strong>next</strong>, <strong>prev</strong>,
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00003424<strong>properties</strong>, etc... For example, still with the previous
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +00003425example:</p>
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00003426<pre><code>doc-&gt;children-&gt;children-&gt;children</code></pre>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003427
3428<p>points to the title element,</p>
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +00003429<pre>doc-&gt;children-&gt;children-&gt;next-&gt;children-&gt;children</pre>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003430
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +00003431<p>points to the text node containing the chapter title "The Linux
3432adventure".</p>
Daniel Veillard10c6a8f1998-10-28 01:00:12 +00003433
Daniel Veillardb24054a1999-12-18 15:32:46 +00003434<p><strong>NOTE</strong>: XML allows <em>PI</em>s and <em>comments</em> to be
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00003435present before the document root, so <code>doc-&gt;children</code> may point
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +00003436to an element which is not the document Root Element; a function
Daniel Veillard5cb5ab81999-12-21 15:35:29 +00003437<code>xmlDocGetRootElement()</code> was added for this purpose.</p>
Daniel Veillardb24054a1999-12-18 15:32:46 +00003438
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +00003439<h3><a name="Modifying">Modifying the tree</a></h3>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003440
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00003441<p>Functions are provided for reading and writing the document content. Here
Daniel Veillard9cb5ff42001-01-29 08:22:21 +00003442is an excerpt from the <a href="html/libxml-tree.html">tree API</a>:</p>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +00003443<dl>
Daniel Veillarddd6b3671999-09-23 22:19:22 +00003444 <dt><code>xmlAttrPtr xmlSetProp(xmlNodePtr node, const xmlChar *name, const
3445 xmlChar *value);</code></dt>
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +00003446 <dd><p>This sets (or changes) an attribute carried by an ELEMENT node.
3447 The value can be NULL.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003448 </dd>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +00003449</dl>
3450<dl>
Daniel Veillarddd6b3671999-09-23 22:19:22 +00003451 <dt><code>const xmlChar *xmlGetProp(xmlNodePtr node, const xmlChar
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003452 *name);</code></dt>
Daniel Veillardc92c3042000-09-29 02:42:04 +00003453 <dd><p>This function returns a pointer to new copy of the property
3454 content. Note that the user must deallocate the result.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003455 </dd>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +00003456</dl>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003457
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +00003458<p>Two functions are provided for reading and writing the text associated
3459with elements:</p>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +00003460<dl>
Daniel Veillarddd6b3671999-09-23 22:19:22 +00003461 <dt><code>xmlNodePtr xmlStringGetNodeList(xmlDocPtr doc, const xmlChar
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003462 *value);</code></dt>
Daniel Veillardec70e912001-02-26 20:10:45 +00003463 <dd><p>This function takes an "external" string and converts it to one
3464 text node or possibly to a list of entity and text nodes. All
3465 non-predefined entity references like &amp;Gnome; will be stored
3466 internally as entity nodes, hence the result of the function may not be
3467 a single node.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003468 </dd>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +00003469</dl>
3470<dl>
Daniel Veillarddd6b3671999-09-23 22:19:22 +00003471 <dt><code>xmlChar *xmlNodeListGetString(xmlDocPtr doc, xmlNodePtr list, int
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003472 inLine);</code></dt>
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +00003473 <dd><p>This function is the inverse of
3474 <code>xmlStringGetNodeList()</code>. It generates a new string
3475 containing the content of the text and entity nodes. Note the extra
3476 argument inLine. If this argument is set to 1, the function will expand
3477 entity references. For example, instead of returning the &amp;Gnome;
3478 XML encoding in the string, it will substitute it with its value (say,
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +00003479 "GNU Network Object Model Environment").</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003480 </dd>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +00003481</dl>
Daniel Veillard10c6a8f1998-10-28 01:00:12 +00003482
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +00003483<h3><a name="Saving">Saving a tree</a></h3>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003484
3485<p>Basically 3 options are possible:</p>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +00003486<dl>
Daniel Veillarddd6b3671999-09-23 22:19:22 +00003487 <dt><code>void xmlDocDumpMemory(xmlDocPtr cur, xmlChar**mem, int
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003488 *size);</code></dt>
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00003489 <dd><p>Returns a buffer into which the document has been saved.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003490 </dd>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +00003491</dl>
3492<dl>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003493 <dt><code>extern void xmlDocDump(FILE *f, xmlDocPtr doc);</code></dt>
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00003494 <dd><p>Dumps a document to an open file descriptor.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003495 </dd>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +00003496</dl>
3497<dl>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003498 <dt><code>int xmlSaveFile(const char *filename, xmlDocPtr cur);</code></dt>
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +00003499 <dd><p>Saves the document to a file. In this case, the compression
3500 interface is triggered if it has been turned on.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003501 </dd>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +00003502</dl>
Daniel Veillard10c6a8f1998-10-28 01:00:12 +00003503
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +00003504<h3><a name="Compressio">Compression</a></h3>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003505
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00003506<p>The library transparently handles compression when doing file-based
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +00003507accesses. The level of compression on saves can be turned on either globally
3508or individually for one file:</p>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +00003509<dl>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003510 <dt><code>int xmlGetDocCompressMode (xmlDocPtr doc);</code></dt>
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00003511 <dd><p>Gets the document compression ratio (0-9).</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003512 </dd>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +00003513</dl>
3514<dl>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003515 <dt><code>void xmlSetDocCompressMode (xmlDocPtr doc, int mode);</code></dt>
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00003516 <dd><p>Sets the document compression ratio.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003517 </dd>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +00003518</dl>
3519<dl>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003520 <dt><code>int xmlGetCompressMode(void);</code></dt>
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00003521 <dd><p>Gets the default compression ratio.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003522 </dd>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +00003523</dl>
3524<dl>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003525 <dt><code>void xmlSetCompressMode(int mode);</code></dt>
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00003526 <dd><p>Sets the default compression ratio.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003527 </dd>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +00003528</dl>
3529
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +00003530<h2><a name="Entities">Entities or no entities</a></h2>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00003531
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00003532<p>Entities in principle are similar to simple C macros. An entity defines an
3533abbreviation for a given string that you can reuse many times throughout the
3534content of your document. Entities are especially useful when a given string
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +00003535may occur frequently within a document, or to confine the change needed to a
3536document to a restricted area in the internal subset of the document (at the
3537beginning). Example:</p>
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00003538<pre>1 &lt;?xml version="1.0"?&gt;
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +000035392 &lt;!DOCTYPE EXAMPLE SYSTEM "example.dtd" [
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +000035403 &lt;!ENTITY xml "Extensible Markup Language"&gt;
35414 ]&gt;
35425 &lt;EXAMPLE&gt;
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +000035436 &amp;xml;
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +000035447 &lt;/EXAMPLE&gt;</pre>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00003545
3546<p>Line 3 declares the xml entity. Line 6 uses the xml entity, by prefixing
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +00003547its name with '&amp;' and following it by ';' without any spaces added. There
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00003548are 5 predefined entities in libxml allowing you to escape characters with
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00003549predefined meaning in some parts of the xml document content:
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00003550<strong>&amp;lt;</strong> for the character '&lt;', <strong>&amp;gt;</strong>
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00003551for the character '&gt;', <strong>&amp;apos;</strong> for the character ''',
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00003552<strong>&amp;quot;</strong> for the character '"', and
3553<strong>&amp;amp;</strong> for the character '&amp;'.</p>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00003554
3555<p>One of the problems related to entities is that you may want the parser to
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +00003556substitute an entity's content so that you can see the replacement text in
3557your application. Or you may prefer to keep entity references as such in the
3558content to be able to save the document back without losing this usually
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +00003559precious information (if the user went through the pain of explicitly
3560defining entities, he may have a a rather negative attitude if you blindly
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00003561substitute them as saving time). The <a
Daniel Veillard9cb5ff42001-01-29 08:22:21 +00003562href="html/libxml-parser.html#XMLSUBSTITUTEENTITIESDEFAULT">xmlSubstituteEntitiesDefault()</a>
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00003563function allows you to check and change the behaviour, which is to not
3564substitute entities by default.</p>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00003565
3566<p>Here is the DOM tree built by libxml for the previous document in the
3567default case:</p>
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00003568<pre>/gnome/src/gnome-xml -&gt; ./xmllint --debug test/ent1
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00003569DOCUMENT
3570version=1.0
3571 ELEMENT EXAMPLE
3572 TEXT
3573 content=
3574 ENTITY_REF
3575 INTERNAL_GENERAL_ENTITY xml
3576 content=Extensible Markup Language
3577 TEXT
3578 content=</pre>
3579
3580<p>And here is the result when substituting entities:</p>
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00003581<pre>/gnome/src/gnome-xml -&gt; ./tester --debug --noent test/ent1
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00003582DOCUMENT
3583version=1.0
3584 ELEMENT EXAMPLE
3585 TEXT
3586 content= Extensible Markup Language</pre>
3587
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00003588<p>So, entities or no entities? Basically, it depends on your use case. I
3589suggest that you keep the non-substituting default behaviour and avoid using
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00003590entities in your XML document or data if you are not willing to handle the
3591entity references elements in the DOM tree.</p>
3592
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +00003593<p>Note that at save time libxml enforces the conversion of the predefined
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00003594entities where necessary to prevent well-formedness problems, and will also
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +00003595transparently replace those with chars (i.e. it will not generate entity
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00003596reference elements in the DOM tree or call the reference() SAX callback when
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00003597finding them in the input).</p>
3598
Daniel Veillard7b9c4b72000-08-25 16:26:50 +00003599<p><span style="background-color: #FF0000">WARNING</span>: handling entities
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +00003600on top of the libxml SAX interface is difficult!!! If you plan to use
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00003601non-predefined entities in your documents, then the learning curve to handle
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +00003602then using the SAX API may be long. If you plan to use complex documents, I
Daniel Veillard7b9c4b72000-08-25 16:26:50 +00003603strongly suggest you consider using the DOM interface instead and let libxml
Daniel Veillard8c6d6af2000-08-25 17:14:13 +00003604deal with the complexity rather than trying to do it yourself.</p>
Daniel Veillard7b9c4b72000-08-25 16:26:50 +00003605
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +00003606<h2><a name="Namespaces">Namespaces</a></h2>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00003607
Daniel Veillardec303412000-03-24 13:41:54 +00003608<p>The libxml library implements <a
3609href="http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml-names/">XML namespaces</a> support by
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00003610recognizing namespace constructs in the input, and does namespace lookup
Daniel Veillardec303412000-03-24 13:41:54 +00003611automatically when building the DOM tree. A namespace declaration is
3612associated with an in-memory structure and all elements or attributes within
3613that namespace point to it. Hence testing the namespace is a simple and fast
3614equality operation at the user level.</p>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00003615
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +00003616<p>I suggest that people using libxml use a namespace, and declare it in the
3617root element of their document as the default namespace. Then they don't need
3618to use the prefix in the content but we will have a basis for future semantic
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +00003619refinement and merging of data from different sources. This doesn't increase
Daniel Veillardec70e912001-02-26 20:10:45 +00003620the size of the XML output significantly, but significantly increases its
3621value in the long-term. Example:</p>
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00003622<pre>&lt;mydoc xmlns="http://mydoc.example.org/schemas/"&gt;
3623 &lt;elem1&gt;...&lt;/elem1&gt;
3624 &lt;elem2&gt;...&lt;/elem2&gt;
3625&lt;/mydoc&gt;</pre>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00003626
Daniel Veillardec70e912001-02-26 20:10:45 +00003627<p>The namespace value has to be an absolute URL, but the URL doesn't have to
3628point to any existing resource on the Web. It will bind all the element and
Daniel Veillardc0801af2002-05-28 16:28:42 +00003629attributes with that URL. I suggest to use an URL within a domain you
3630control, and that the URL should contain some kind of version information if
3631possible. For example, <code>"http://www.gnome.org/gnumeric/1.0/"</code> is a
3632good namespace scheme.</p>
Daniel Veillardec303412000-03-24 13:41:54 +00003633
3634<p>Then when you load a file, make sure that a namespace carrying the
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00003635version-independent prefix is installed on the root element of your document,
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00003636and if the version information don't match something you know, warn the user
3637and be liberal in what you accept as the input. Also do *not* try to base
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00003638namespace checking on the prefix value. &lt;foo:text&gt; may be exactly the
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +00003639same as &lt;bar:text&gt; in another document. What really matters is the URI
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00003640associated with the element or the attribute, not the prefix string (which is
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +00003641just a shortcut for the full URI). In libxml, element and attributes have an
Daniel Veillardec303412000-03-24 13:41:54 +00003642<code>ns</code> field pointing to an xmlNs structure detailing the namespace
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +00003643prefix and its URI.</p>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00003644
3645<p>@@Interfaces@@</p>
3646
3647<p>@@Examples@@</p>
3648
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +00003649<p>Usually people object to using namespaces together with validity checking.
3650I will try to make sure that using namespaces won't break validity checking,
3651so even if you plan to use or currently are using validation I strongly
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +00003652suggest adding namespaces to your document. A default namespace scheme
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00003653<code>xmlns="http://...."</code> should not break validity even on less
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +00003654flexible parsers. Using namespaces to mix and differentiate content coming
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +00003655from multiple DTDs will certainly break current validation schemes. I will
3656try to provide ways to do this, but this may not be portable or
3657standardized.</p>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00003658
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00003659<h2><a name="Upgrading">Upgrading 1.x code</a></h2>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00003660
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00003661<p>Incompatible changes:</p>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00003662
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00003663<p>Version 2 of libxml is the first version introducing serious backward
3664incompatible changes. The main goals were:</p>
3665<ul>
3666 <li>a general cleanup. A number of mistakes inherited from the very early
3667 versions couldn't be changed due to compatibility constraints. Example
3668 the "childs" element in the nodes.</li>
3669 <li>Uniformization of the various nodes, at least for their header and link
3670 parts (doc, parent, children, prev, next), the goal is a simpler
3671 programming model and simplifying the task of the DOM implementors.</li>
3672 <li>better conformances to the XML specification, for example version 1.x
3673 had an heuristic to try to detect ignorable white spaces. As a result the
3674 SAX event generated were ignorableWhitespace() while the spec requires
3675 character() in that case. This also mean that a number of DOM node
3676 containing blank text may populate the DOM tree which were not present
3677 before.</li>
3678</ul>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00003679
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00003680<h3>How to fix libxml-1.x code:</h3>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00003681
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00003682<p>So client code of libxml designed to run with version 1.x may have to be
3683changed to compile against version 2.x of libxml. Here is a list of changes
3684that I have collected, they may not be sufficient, so in case you find other
3685change which are required, <a href="mailto:Daniel.Ïeillardw3.org">drop me a
3686mail</a>:</p>
3687<ol>
3688 <li>The package name have changed from libxml to libxml2, the library name
3689 is now -lxml2 . There is a new xml2-config script which should be used to
3690 select the right parameters libxml2</li>
3691 <li>Node <strong>childs</strong> field has been renamed
3692 <strong>children</strong> so s/childs/children/g should be applied
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00003693 (probability of having "childs" anywhere else is close to 0+</li>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00003694 <li>The document don't have anymore a <strong>root</strong> element it has
3695 been replaced by <strong>children</strong> and usually you will get a
3696 list of element here. For example a Dtd element for the internal subset
3697 and it's declaration may be found in that list, as well as processing
3698 instructions or comments found before or after the document root element.
3699 Use <strong>xmlDocGetRootElement(doc)</strong> to get the root element of
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00003700 a document. Alternatively if you are sure to not reference DTDs nor have
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00003701 PIs or comments before or after the root element
3702 s/-&gt;root/-&gt;children/g will probably do it.</li>
3703 <li>The white space issue, this one is more complex, unless special case of
3704 validating parsing, the line breaks and spaces usually used for indenting
3705 and formatting the document content becomes significant. So they are
3706 reported by SAX and if your using the DOM tree, corresponding nodes are
3707 generated. Too approach can be taken:
3708 <ol>
3709 <li>lazy one, use the compatibility call
3710 <strong>xmlKeepBlanksDefault(0)</strong> but be aware that you are
3711 relying on a special (and possibly broken) set of heuristics of
3712 libxml to detect ignorable blanks. Don't complain if it breaks or
3713 make your application not 100% clean w.r.t. to it's input.</li>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00003714 <li>the Right Way: change you code to accept possibly insignificant
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00003715 blanks characters, or have your tree populated with weird blank text
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00003716 nodes. You can spot them using the commodity function
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00003717 <strong>xmlIsBlankNode(node)</strong> returning 1 for such blank
3718 nodes.</li>
3719 </ol>
3720 <p>Note also that with the new default the output functions don't add any
3721 extra indentation when saving a tree in order to be able to round trip
3722 (read and save) without inflating the document with extra formatting
3723 chars.</p>
3724 </li>
3725 <li>The include path has changed to $prefix/libxml/ and the includes
3726 themselves uses this new prefix in includes instructions... If you are
3727 using (as expected) the
3728 <pre>xml2-config --cflags</pre>
3729 <p>output to generate you compile commands this will probably work out of
3730 the box</p>
3731 </li>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00003732 <li>xmlDetectCharEncoding takes an extra argument indicating the length in
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00003733 byte of the head of the document available for character detection.</li>
3734</ol>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00003735
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00003736<h3>Ensuring both libxml-1.x and libxml-2.x compatibility</h3>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00003737
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00003738<p>Two new version of libxml (1.8.11) and libxml2 (2.3.4) have been released
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00003739to allow smooth upgrade of existing libxml v1code while retaining
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00003740compatibility. They offers the following:</p>
3741<ol>
3742 <li>similar include naming, one should use
3743 <strong>#include&lt;libxml/...&gt;</strong> in both cases.</li>
3744 <li>similar identifiers defined via macros for the child and root fields:
3745 respectively <strong>xmlChildrenNode</strong> and
3746 <strong>xmlRootNode</strong></li>
3747 <li>a new macro <strong>LIBXML_TEST_VERSION</strong> which should be
3748 inserted once in the client code</li>
3749</ol>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00003750
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00003751<p>So the roadmap to upgrade your existing libxml applications is the
3752following:</p>
3753<ol>
3754 <li>install the libxml-1.8.8 (and libxml-devel-1.8.8) packages</li>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00003755 <li>find all occurrences where the xmlDoc <strong>root</strong> field is
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00003756 used and change it to <strong>xmlRootNode</strong></li>
Daniel Veillardc0801af2002-05-28 16:28:42 +00003757 <li>similarly find all occurrences where the xmlNode
3758 <strong>childs</strong> field is used and change it to
3759 <strong>xmlChildrenNode</strong></li>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00003760 <li>add a <strong>LIBXML_TEST_VERSION</strong> macro somewhere in your
3761 <strong>main()</strong> or in the library init entry point</li>
3762 <li>Recompile, check compatibility, it should still work</li>
Daniel Veillardc0801af2002-05-28 16:28:42 +00003763 <li>Change your configure script to look first for xml2-config and fall
3764 back using xml-config . Use the --cflags and --libs output of the command
3765 as the Include and Linking parameters needed to use libxml.</li>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00003766 <li>install libxml2-2.3.x and libxml2-devel-2.3.x (libxml-1.8.y and
3767 libxml-devel-1.8.y can be kept simultaneously)</li>
3768 <li>remove your config.cache, relaunch your configuration mechanism, and
3769 recompile, if steps 2 and 3 were done right it should compile as-is</li>
3770 <li>Test that your application is still running correctly, if not this may
3771 be due to extra empty nodes due to formating spaces being kept in libxml2
3772 contrary to libxml1, in that case insert xmlKeepBlanksDefault(1) in your
3773 code before calling the parser (next to
3774 <strong>LIBXML_TEST_VERSION</strong> is a fine place).</li>
3775</ol>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00003776
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00003777<p>Following those steps should work. It worked for some of my own code.</p>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00003778
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00003779<p>Let me put some emphasis on the fact that there is far more changes from
3780libxml 1.x to 2.x than the ones you may have to patch for. The overall code
3781has been considerably cleaned up and the conformance to the XML specification
3782has been drastically improved too. Don't take those changes as an excuse to
3783not upgrade, it may cost a lot on the long term ...</p>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00003784
Daniel Veillard52dcab32001-10-30 12:51:17 +00003785<h2><a name="Thread">Thread safety</a></h2>
3786
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00003787<p>Starting with 2.4.7, libxml makes provisions to ensure that concurrent
Daniel Veillard52dcab32001-10-30 12:51:17 +00003788threads can safely work in parallel parsing different documents. There is
3789however a couple of things to do to ensure it:</p>
3790<ul>
3791 <li>configure the library accordingly using the --with-threads options</li>
3792 <li>call xmlInitParser() in the "main" thread before using any of the
3793 libxml API (except possibly selecting a different memory allocator)</li>
3794</ul>
3795
3796<p>Note that the thread safety cannot be ensured for multiple threads sharing
3797the same document, the locking must be done at the application level, libxml
3798exports a basic mutex and reentrant mutexes API in &lt;libxml/threads.h&gt;.
3799The parts of the library checked for thread safety are:</p>
3800<ul>
3801 <li>concurrent loading</li>
3802 <li>file access resolution</li>
3803 <li>catalog access</li>
3804 <li>catalog building</li>
3805 <li>entities lookup/accesses</li>
3806 <li>validation</li>
3807 <li>global variables per-thread override</li>
3808 <li>memory handling</li>
3809</ul>
3810
3811<p>XPath is supposed to be thread safe now, but this wasn't tested
3812seriously.</p>
3813
Daniel Veillard35008381999-10-25 13:15:52 +00003814<h2><a name="DOM"></a><a name="Principles">DOM Principles</a></h2>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003815
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +00003816<p><a href="http://www.w3.org/DOM/">DOM</a> stands for the <em>Document
3817Object Model</em>; this is an API for accessing XML or HTML structured
3818documents. Native support for DOM in Gnome is on the way (module gnome-dom),
3819and will be based on gnome-xml. This will be a far cleaner interface to
3820manipulate XML files within Gnome since it won't expose the internal
3821structure.</p>
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +00003822
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00003823<p>The current DOM implementation on top of libxml is the <a
Daniel Veillarda47fb3d2001-03-25 17:23:49 +00003824href="http://cvs.gnome.org/lxr/source/gdome2/">gdome2 Gnome module</a>, this
3825is a full DOM interface, thanks to Paolo Casarini, check the <a
3826href="http://www.cs.unibo.it/~casarini/gdome2/">Gdome2 homepage</a> for more
3827informations.</p>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00003828
Daniel Veillard35008381999-10-25 13:15:52 +00003829<h2><a name="Example"></a><a name="real">A real example</a></h2>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003830
3831<p>Here is a real size example, where the actual content of the application
3832data is not kept in the DOM tree but uses internal structures. It is based on
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +00003833a proposal to keep a database of jobs related to Gnome, with an XML based
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003834storage structure. Here is an <a href="gjobs.xml">XML encoded jobs
3835base</a>:</p>
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00003836<pre>&lt;?xml version="1.0"?&gt;
3837&lt;gjob:Helping xmlns:gjob="http://www.gnome.org/some-location"&gt;
3838 &lt;gjob:Jobs&gt;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +00003839
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00003840 &lt;gjob:Job&gt;
3841 &lt;gjob:Project ID="3"/&gt;
3842 &lt;gjob:Application&gt;GBackup&lt;/gjob:Application&gt;
3843 &lt;gjob:Category&gt;Development&lt;/gjob:Category&gt;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +00003844
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00003845 &lt;gjob:Update&gt;
3846 &lt;gjob:Status&gt;Open&lt;/gjob:Status&gt;
3847 &lt;gjob:Modified&gt;Mon, 07 Jun 1999 20:27:45 -0400 MET DST&lt;/gjob:Modified&gt;
3848 &lt;gjob:Salary&gt;USD 0.00&lt;/gjob:Salary&gt;
3849 &lt;/gjob:Update&gt;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +00003850
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00003851 &lt;gjob:Developers&gt;
3852 &lt;gjob:Developer&gt;
3853 &lt;/gjob:Developer&gt;
3854 &lt;/gjob:Developers&gt;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +00003855
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00003856 &lt;gjob:Contact&gt;
3857 &lt;gjob:Person&gt;Nathan Clemons&lt;/gjob:Person&gt;
3858 &lt;gjob:Email&gt;nathan@windsofstorm.net&lt;/gjob:Email&gt;
3859 &lt;gjob:Company&gt;
3860 &lt;/gjob:Company&gt;
3861 &lt;gjob:Organisation&gt;
3862 &lt;/gjob:Organisation&gt;
3863 &lt;gjob:Webpage&gt;
3864 &lt;/gjob:Webpage&gt;
3865 &lt;gjob:Snailmail&gt;
3866 &lt;/gjob:Snailmail&gt;
3867 &lt;gjob:Phone&gt;
3868 &lt;/gjob:Phone&gt;
3869 &lt;/gjob:Contact&gt;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +00003870
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00003871 &lt;gjob:Requirements&gt;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +00003872 The program should be released as free software, under the GPL.
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00003873 &lt;/gjob:Requirements&gt;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +00003874
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00003875 &lt;gjob:Skills&gt;
3876 &lt;/gjob:Skills&gt;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +00003877
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00003878 &lt;gjob:Details&gt;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +00003879 A GNOME based system that will allow a superuser to configure
3880 compressed and uncompressed files and/or file systems to be backed
3881 up with a supported media in the system. This should be able to
3882 perform via find commands generating a list of files that are passed
3883 to tar, dd, cpio, cp, gzip, etc., to be directed to the tape machine
3884 or via operations performed on the filesystem itself. Email
3885 notification and GUI status display very important.
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00003886 &lt;/gjob:Details&gt;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +00003887
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00003888 &lt;/gjob:Job&gt;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +00003889
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00003890 &lt;/gjob:Jobs&gt;
3891&lt;/gjob:Helping&gt;</pre>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003892
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +00003893<p>While loading the XML file into an internal DOM tree is a matter of
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00003894calling only a couple of functions, browsing the tree to gather the data and
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +00003895generate the internal structures is harder, and more error prone.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003896
3897<p>The suggested principle is to be tolerant with respect to the input
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +00003898structure. For example, the ordering of the attributes is not significant,
3899the XML specification is clear about it. It's also usually a good idea not to
Daniel Veillardec70e912001-02-26 20:10:45 +00003900depend on the order of the children of a given node, unless it really makes
3901things harder. Here is some code to parse the information for a person:</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003902<pre>/*
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +00003903 * A person record
3904 */
3905typedef struct person {
3906 char *name;
3907 char *email;
3908 char *company;
3909 char *organisation;
3910 char *smail;
3911 char *webPage;
3912 char *phone;
3913} person, *personPtr;
3914
3915/*
3916 * And the code needed to parse it
3917 */
3918personPtr parsePerson(xmlDocPtr doc, xmlNsPtr ns, xmlNodePtr cur) {
3919 personPtr ret = NULL;
3920
3921DEBUG("parsePerson\n");
3922 /*
3923 * allocate the struct
3924 */
3925 ret = (personPtr) malloc(sizeof(person));
3926 if (ret == NULL) {
3927 fprintf(stderr,"out of memory\n");
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003928 return(NULL);
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +00003929 }
3930 memset(ret, 0, sizeof(person));
3931
3932 /* We don't care what the top level element name is */
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00003933 cur = cur-&gt;xmlChildrenNode;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +00003934 while (cur != NULL) {
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00003935 if ((!strcmp(cur-&gt;name, "Person")) &amp;&amp; (cur-&gt;ns == ns))
3936 ret-&gt;name = xmlNodeListGetString(doc, cur-&gt;xmlChildrenNode, 1);
3937 if ((!strcmp(cur-&gt;name, "Email")) &amp;&amp; (cur-&gt;ns == ns))
3938 ret-&gt;email = xmlNodeListGetString(doc, cur-&gt;xmlChildrenNode, 1);
3939 cur = cur-&gt;next;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +00003940 }
3941
3942 return(ret);
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003943}</pre>
3944
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +00003945<p>Here are a couple of things to notice:</p>
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +00003946<ul>
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +00003947 <li>Usually a recursive parsing style is the more convenient one: XML data
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00003948 is by nature subject to repetitive constructs and usually exhibits highly
3949 structured patterns.</li>
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +00003950 <li>The two arguments of type <em>xmlDocPtr</em> and <em>xmlNsPtr</em>,
3951 i.e. the pointer to the global XML document and the namespace reserved to
3952 the application. Document wide information are needed for example to
3953 decode entities and it's a good coding practice to define a namespace for
3954 your application set of data and test that the element and attributes
3955 you're analyzing actually pertains to your application space. This is
3956 done by a simple equality test (cur-&gt;ns == ns).</li>
Daniel Veillardec70e912001-02-26 20:10:45 +00003957 <li>To retrieve text and attributes value, you can use the function
3958 <em>xmlNodeListGetString</em> to gather all the text and entity reference
3959 nodes generated by the DOM output and produce an single text string.</li>
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +00003960</ul>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003961
3962<p>Here is another piece of code used to parse another level of the
3963structure:</p>
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00003964<pre>#include &lt;libxml/tree.h&gt;
Daniel Veillard361d8452000-04-03 19:48:13 +00003965/*
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +00003966 * a Description for a Job
3967 */
3968typedef struct job {
3969 char *projectID;
3970 char *application;
3971 char *category;
3972 personPtr contact;
3973 int nbDevelopers;
3974 personPtr developers[100]; /* using dynamic alloc is left as an exercise */
3975} job, *jobPtr;
3976
3977/*
3978 * And the code needed to parse it
3979 */
3980jobPtr parseJob(xmlDocPtr doc, xmlNsPtr ns, xmlNodePtr cur) {
3981 jobPtr ret = NULL;
3982
3983DEBUG("parseJob\n");
3984 /*
3985 * allocate the struct
3986 */
3987 ret = (jobPtr) malloc(sizeof(job));
3988 if (ret == NULL) {
3989 fprintf(stderr,"out of memory\n");
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003990 return(NULL);
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +00003991 }
3992 memset(ret, 0, sizeof(job));
3993
3994 /* We don't care what the top level element name is */
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00003995 cur = cur-&gt;xmlChildrenNode;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +00003996 while (cur != NULL) {
3997
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00003998 if ((!strcmp(cur-&gt;name, "Project")) &amp;&amp; (cur-&gt;ns == ns)) {
3999 ret-&gt;projectID = xmlGetProp(cur, "ID");
4000 if (ret-&gt;projectID == NULL) {
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00004001 fprintf(stderr, "Project has no ID\n");
4002 }
4003 }
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00004004 if ((!strcmp(cur-&gt;name, "Application")) &amp;&amp; (cur-&gt;ns == ns))
4005 ret-&gt;application = xmlNodeListGetString(doc, cur-&gt;xmlChildrenNode, 1);
4006 if ((!strcmp(cur-&gt;name, "Category")) &amp;&amp; (cur-&gt;ns == ns))
4007 ret-&gt;category = xmlNodeListGetString(doc, cur-&gt;xmlChildrenNode, 1);
4008 if ((!strcmp(cur-&gt;name, "Contact")) &amp;&amp; (cur-&gt;ns == ns))
4009 ret-&gt;contact = parsePerson(doc, ns, cur);
4010 cur = cur-&gt;next;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +00004011 }
4012
4013 return(ret);
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00004014}</pre>
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +00004015
Daniel Veillardec70e912001-02-26 20:10:45 +00004016<p>Once you are used to it, writing this kind of code is quite simple, but
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00004017boring. Ultimately, it could be possible to write stubbers taking either C
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +00004018data structure definitions, a set of XML examples or an XML DTD and produce
4019the code needed to import and export the content between C data and XML
4020storage. This is left as an exercise to the reader :-)</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00004021
Daniel Veillard6f0adb52000-07-03 11:41:26 +00004022<p>Feel free to use <a href="example/gjobread.c">the code for the full C
4023parsing example</a> as a template, it is also available with Makefile in the
4024Gnome CVS base under gnome-xml/example</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00004025
Daniel Veillardc310d562000-06-23 18:32:15 +00004026<h2><a name="Contributi">Contributions</a></h2>
4027<ul>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00004028 <li>Bjorn Reese, William Brack and Thomas Broyer have provided a number of
4029 patches, Gary Pennington worked on the validation API, threading support
4030 and Solaris port.</li>
4031 <li>John Fleck helps maintaining the documentation and man pages.</li>
Daniel Veillard7b4b2f92003-01-06 13:11:20 +00004032 <li><a href="mailto:igor@zlatkovic.com">Igor Zlatkovic</a> is now the
4033 maintainer of the Windows port, <a
4034 href="http://www.zlatkovic.com/projects/libxml/index.html">he provides
4035 binaries</a></li>
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +00004036 <li><a href="mailto:Gary.Pennington@sun.com">Gary Pennington</a> provides
4037 <a href="http://garypennington.net/libxml2/">Solaris binaries</a></li>
Daniel Veillarde356c282001-03-10 12:32:04 +00004038 <li><a
4039 href="http://mail.gnome.org/archives/xml/2001-March/msg00014.html">Matt
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00004040 Sergeant</a> developed <a
4041 href="http://axkit.org/download/">XML::LibXSLT</a>, a Perl wrapper for
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +00004042 libxml2/libxslt as part of the <a href="http://axkit.com/">AxKit XML
4043 application server</a></li>
4044 <li><a href="mailto:fnatter@gmx.net">Felix Natter</a> and <a
4045 href="mailto:geertk@ai.rug.nl">Geert Kloosterman</a> provide <a
Daniel Veillardca989762001-06-23 17:39:29 +00004046 href="libxml-doc.el">an emacs module</a> to lookup libxml(2) functions
Daniel Veillard3f6f7f62000-06-30 17:58:25 +00004047 documentation</li>
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +00004048 <li><a href="mailto:sherwin@nlm.nih.gov">Ziying Sherwin</a> provided <a
4049 href="http://xmlsoft.org/messages/0488.html">man pages</a></li>
Daniel Veillard5168dbf2001-07-07 00:18:23 +00004050 <li>there is a module for <a
4051 href="http://acs-misc.sourceforge.net/nsxml.html">libxml/libxslt support
4052 in OpenNSD/AOLServer</a></li>
Daniel Veillard2d347fa2002-03-17 10:34:11 +00004053 <li><a href="mailto:dkuhlman@cutter.rexx.com">Dave Kuhlman</a> provided the
4054 first version of libxml/libxslt <a
4055 href="http://www.rexx.com/~dkuhlman">wrappers for Python</a></li>
Daniel Veillard1aadc442001-11-28 13:10:32 +00004056 <li>Petr Kozelka provides <a
4057 href="http://sourceforge.net/projects/libxml2-pas">Pascal units to glue
4058 libxml2</a> with Kylix and Delphi and other Pascal compilers</li>
Daniel Veillard2d347fa2002-03-17 10:34:11 +00004059 <li><a href="mailto:aleksey@aleksey.com">Aleksey Sanin</a> implemented the
4060 <a href="http://www.w3.org/Signature/">XML Canonicalization and XML
4061 Digital Signature</a> <a
4062 href="http://www.aleksey.com/xmlsec/">implementations for libxml2</a></li>
Daniel Veillard17bed982003-02-24 20:11:43 +00004063 <li><a href="mailto:Steve.Ball@zveno.com">Steve Ball</a>, <a
4064 href="http://www.zveno.com/">Zveno</a> and contributors maintain <a
4065 href="http://tclxml.sourceforge.net/">tcl bindings for libxml2 and
4066 libxslt</a>, as well as <a
4067 href="http://tclxml.sf.net/tkxmllint.html">tkxmllint</a> a GUI for
4068 xmllint and <a href="http://tclxml.sf.net/tkxsltproc.html">tkxsltproc</a>
4069 a GUI for xsltproc.</li>
Daniel Veillardc310d562000-06-23 18:32:15 +00004070</ul>
4071
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00004072<p></p>
Daniel Veillardccb09631998-10-27 06:21:04 +00004073</body>
4074</html>