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4<head>
Daniel Veillardec78c0f2000-08-25 10:25:23 +00005 <title>The XML C library for Gnome</title>
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Daniel Veillardec78c0f2000-08-25 10:25:23 +000011<h1 align="center">The XML C library for Gnome</h1>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +000012
Daniel Veillard9c466822001-10-25 12:03:39 +000013<h1>Note: this is the flat content of the <a href="index.html">web
14site</a></h1>
15
Daniel Veillardc9484202001-10-24 12:35:52 +000016<h1 style="text-align: center">libxml, a.k.a. gnome-xml</h1>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +000017
18<p></p>
Daniel Veillard9c466822001-10-25 12:03:39 +000019
20<p>Libxml is the XML C library developped for the Gnome project. XML itself
21is a metalanguage to design markup languages, i.e. text language where
22semantic and structure are added to the content using extra "markup"
23information enclosed between angle bracket. 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
25variety of language binding</a> makes it available in other environments.</p>
Daniel Veillard9c466822001-10-25 12:03:39 +000026
27<p>Libxml2 implements a number of existing standards related to markup
28languages:</p>
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +000029<ul>
Daniel Veillard9c466822001-10-25 12:03:39 +000030 <li>the XML standard: <a
31 href="http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml">http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml</a></li>
32 <li>Namespaces in XML: <a
33 href="http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml-names/">http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml-names/</a></li>
34 <li>XML Base: <a
35 href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xmlbase/">http://www.w3.org/TR/xmlbase/</a></li>
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +000036 <li><a href="http://www.cis.ohio-state.edu/rfc/rfc2396.txt">RFC 2396</a> :
37 Uniform Resource Identifiers <a
Daniel Veillard9c466822001-10-25 12:03:39 +000038 href="http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2396.txt">http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2396.txt</a></li>
39 <li>XML Path Language (XPath) 1.0: <a
40 href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xpath">http://www.w3.org/TR/xpath</a></li>
41 <li>HTML4 parser: <a
42 href="http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/">http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/</a></li>
43 <li>most of XML Pointer Language (XPointer) Version 1.0: <a
44 href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xptr">http://www.w3.org/TR/xptr</a></li>
45 <li>XML Inclusions (XInclude) Version 1.0: <a
46 href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xinclude/">http://www.w3.org/TR/xinclude/</a></li>
47 <li>[ISO-8859-1], <a
48 href="http://www.cis.ohio-state.edu/rfc/rfc2044.txt">rfc2044</a> [UTF-8]
49 and <a href="http://www.cis.ohio-state.edu/rfc/rfc2781.txt">rfc2781</a>
50 [UTF-16] core encodings</li>
51 <li>part of SGML Open Technical Resolution TR9401:1997</li>
52 <li>XML Catalogs Working Draft 06 August 2001: <a
53 href="http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/entity/spec-2001-08-06.html">http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/entity/spec-2001-08-06.html</a></li>
Daniel Veillard5c396542002-03-15 07:57:50 +000054 <li>Canonical XML Version 1.0: <a
55 href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xml-c14n">http://www.w3.org/TR/xml-c14n</a>
Daniel Veillard2d347fa2002-03-17 10:34:11 +000056 and the Exclusive XML Canonicalization CR draft <a
57 href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xml-exc-c14n">http://www.w3.org/TR/xml-exc-c14n</a></li>
Daniel Veillard96984452000-08-31 13:50:12 +000058</ul>
59
Daniel Veillard9c466822001-10-25 12:03:39 +000060<p>In most cases libxml tries to implement the specifications in a relatively
Daniel Veillarda5393562002-02-20 11:40:49 +000061strict way. As of release 2.4.16, libxml2 passes all 1800+ tests from the <a
62href="http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/xml-conformance/">OASIS XML Tests
63Suite</a>.</p>
Daniel Veillard5b16f582002-02-20 11:38:46 +000064
65<p>To some extent libxml2 provide some support for the following other
66specification but don't claim to implement them:</p>
Daniel Veillard9c466822001-10-25 12:03:39 +000067<ul>
68 <li>Document Object Model (DOM) <a
69 href="http://www.w3.org/TR/DOM-Level-2-Core/">http://www.w3.org/TR/DOM-Level-2-Core/</a>
70 it doesn't implement the API itself, gdome2 does this in top of
71 libxml2</li>
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +000072 <li><a href="http://www.cis.ohio-state.edu/rfc/rfc959.txt">RFC 959</a> :
73 libxml implements a basic FTP client code</li>
74 <li><a href="http://www.cis.ohio-state.edu/rfc/rfc1945.txt">RFC 1945</a> :
75 HTTP/1.0, again a basic HTTP client code</li>
Daniel Veillard9c466822001-10-25 12:03:39 +000076 <li>SAX: a minimal SAX implementation compatible with early expat
77 versions</li>
78 <li>DocBook SGML v4: libxml2 includes a hackish parser to transition to
79 XML</li>
80</ul>
81
Daniel Veillard2d347fa2002-03-17 10:34:11 +000082<p>Libxml2 is known to be very portable, the library should build and work
83without serious troubles on a variety of systems (Linux, Unix, Windows,
84CygWin, MacOs, MacOsX, RISC Os, OS/2, VMS, QNX, MVS, ...)</p>
Daniel Veillard9c466822001-10-25 12:03:39 +000085
Daniel Veillard96984452000-08-31 13:50:12 +000086<p>Separate documents:</p>
87<ul>
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +000088 <li><a href="http://xmlsoft.org/XSLT/">the libxslt page</a> providing an
Daniel Veillard2d347fa2002-03-17 10:34:11 +000089 implementation of XSLT 1.0 and common extensions like EXSLT for
90 libxml2</li>
Daniel Veillardc6271d22001-10-27 07:50:58 +000091 <li><a href="http://www.cs.unibo.it/~casarini/gdome2/">the gdome2 page</a>
Daniel Veillard2d347fa2002-03-17 10:34:11 +000092 : a standard DOM2 implementation for libxml2</li>
93 <li><a href="http://www.aleksey.com/xmlsec/">the XMLSec page</a>: an
94 implementation of <a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xmldsig-core/">W3C XML
95 Digital Signature</a> for libxml2</li>
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +000096</ul>
97
98<h2><a name="Introducti">Introduction</a></h2>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +000099
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +0000100<p>This document describes libxml, the <a
Daniel Veillardec78c0f2000-08-25 10:25:23 +0000101href="http://www.w3.org/XML/">XML</a> C library developped for the <a
102href="http://www.gnome.org/">Gnome</a> project. <a
103href="http://www.w3.org/XML/">XML is a standard</a> for building tag-based
104structured documents/data.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000105
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000106<p>Here are some key points about libxml:</p>
107<ul>
Daniel Veillard2d347fa2002-03-17 10:34:11 +0000108 <li>Libxml exports Push (progressive) and Pull (blocking) type parser
109 interfaces for both XML and HTML.</li>
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000110 <li>Libxml can do DTD validation at parse time, using a parsed document
111 instance, or with an arbitrary DTD.</li>
Daniel Veillard2d347fa2002-03-17 10:34:11 +0000112 <li>Libxml includes complete <a
Daniel Veillard8c2ecaf2001-07-10 17:53:07 +0000113 href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xpath">XPath</a>, <a
114 href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xptr">XPointer</a> and <a
115 href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xinclude">XInclude</a> implementations.</li>
Daniel Veillardec78c0f2000-08-25 10:25:23 +0000116 <li>It is written in plain C, making as few assumptions as possible, and
Daniel Veillard189446d2000-10-13 10:23:06 +0000117 sticking closely to ANSI C/POSIX for easy embedding. Works on
Daniel Veillardab8500d2000-10-15 21:06:19 +0000118 Linux/Unix/Windows, ported to a number of other platforms.</li>
Daniel Veillardec70e912001-02-26 20:10:45 +0000119 <li>Basic support for HTTP and FTP client allowing aplications to fetch
120 remote resources</li>
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000121 <li>The design is modular, most of the extensions can be compiled out.</li>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000122 <li>The internal document repesentation is as close as possible to the <a
123 href="http://www.w3.org/DOM/">DOM</a> interfaces.</li>
124 <li>Libxml also has a <a href="http://www.megginson.com/SAX/index.html">SAX
Daniel Veillard402e8c82000-02-29 22:57:47 +0000125 like interface</a>; the interface is designed to be compatible with <a
126 href="http://www.jclark.com/xml/expat.html">Expat</a>.</li>
Daniel Veillardc575b992002-02-08 13:28:40 +0000127 <li>This library is released under the <a
128 href="http://www.opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.html">MIT
129 Licence</a> see the Copyright file in the distribution for the precise
130 wording.</li>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000131</ul>
Daniel Veillardccb09631998-10-27 06:21:04 +0000132
Daniel Veillarde0c1d722001-03-21 10:28:36 +0000133<p>Warning: unless you are forced to because your application links with a
Daniel Veillard2d347fa2002-03-17 10:34:11 +0000134Gnome-1.X library requiring it, <strong><span
Daniel Veillarde0c1d722001-03-21 10:28:36 +0000135style="background-color: #FF0000">Do Not Use libxml1</span></strong>, use
136libxml2</p>
137
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000138<h2><a name="FAQ">FAQ</a></h2>
139
140<p>Table of Content:</p>
141<ul>
142 <li><a href="FAQ.html#Licence">Licence(s)</a></li>
143 <li><a href="FAQ.html#Installati">Installation</a></li>
144 <li><a href="FAQ.html#Compilatio">Compilation</a></li>
145 <li><a href="FAQ.html#Developer">Developer corner</a></li>
146</ul>
147
148<h3><a name="Licence">Licence</a>(s)</h3>
149<ol>
150 <li><em>Licensing Terms for libxml</em>
Daniel Veillardc575b992002-02-08 13:28:40 +0000151 <p>libxml is released under the <a
152 href="http://www.opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.html">MIT
153 Licence</a>, see the file Copyright in the distribution for the precise
154 wording</p>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000155 </li>
156 <li><em>Can I embed libxml in a proprietary application ?</em>
Daniel Veillardc575b992002-02-08 13:28:40 +0000157 <p>Yes. The MIT Licence allows you to also keep proprietary the changes
158 you made to libxml, but it would be graceful to provide back bugfixes and
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000159 improvements as patches for possible incorporation in the main
160 development tree</p>
161 </li>
162</ol>
163
164<h3><a name="Installati">Installation</a></h3>
165<ol>
166 <li>Unless you are forced to because your application links with a Gnome
167 library requiring it, <strong><span style="background-color: #FF0000">Do
168 Not Use libxml1</span></strong>, use libxml2</li>
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +0000169 <li><em>Where can I get libxml</em> ?
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000170 <p>The original distribution comes from <a
171 href="ftp://rpmfind.net/pub/libxml/">rpmfind.net</a> or <a
172 href="ftp://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/stable/sources/libxml/">gnome.org</a></p>
173 <p>Most linux and Bsd distribution includes libxml, this is probably the
174 safer way for end-users</p>
175 <p>David Doolin provides precompiled Windows versions at <a
176 href="http://www.ce.berkeley.edu/~doolin/code/libxmlwin32/ ">http://www.ce.berkeley.edu/~doolin/code/libxmlwin32/</a></p>
177 </li>
178 <li><em>I see libxml and libxml2 releases, which one should I install ?</em>
179 <ul>
180 <li>If you are not concerned by any existing backward compatibility
181 with existing application, install libxml2 only</li>
182 <li>If you are not doing development, you can safely install both.
183 usually the packages <a
184 href="http://rpmfind.net/linux/RPM/libxml.html">libxml</a> and <a
185 href="http://rpmfind.net/linux/RPM/libxml2.html">libxml2</a> are
186 compatible (this is not the case for development packages)</li>
187 <li>If you are a developer and your system provides separate packaging
188 for shared libraries and the development components, it is possible
189 to install libxml and libxml2, and also <a
190 href="http://rpmfind.net/linux/RPM/libxml-devel.html">libxml-devel</a>
191 and <a
192 href="http://rpmfind.net/linux/RPM/libxml2-devel.html">libxml2-devel</a>
193 too for libxml2 &gt;= 2.3.0</li>
194 <li>If you are developing a new application, please develop against
195 libxml2(-devel)</li>
196 </ul>
197 </li>
198 <li><em>I can't install the libxml package it conflicts with libxml0</em>
199 <p>You probably have an old libxml0 package used to provide the shared
200 library for libxml.so.0, you can probably safely remove it. Anyway the
201 libxml packages provided on <a
202 href="ftp://rpmfind.net/pub/libxml/">rpmfind.net</a> provides
203 libxml.so.0</p>
204 </li>
205 <li><em>I can't install the libxml(2) RPM package due to failed
206 dependancies</em>
207 <p>The most generic solution is to refetch the latest src.rpm , and
208 rebuild it locally with</p>
209 <p><code>rpm --rebuild libxml(2)-xxx.src.rpm</code></p>
210 <p>if everything goes well it will generate two binary rpm (one providing
211 the shared libs and xmllint, and the other one, the -devel package
212 providing includes, static libraries and scripts needed to build
213 applications with libxml(2)) that you can install locally.</p>
214 </li>
215</ol>
216
217<h3><a name="Compilatio">Compilation</a></h3>
218<ol>
219 <li><em>What is the process to compile libxml ?</em>
220 <p>As most UNIX libraries libxml follows the "standard":</p>
221 <p><code>gunzip -c xxx.tar.gz | tar xvf -</code></p>
222 <p><code>cd libxml-xxxx</code></p>
223 <p><code>./configure --help</code></p>
224 <p>to see the options, then the compilation/installation proper</p>
225 <p><code>./configure [possible options]</code></p>
226 <p><code>make</code></p>
227 <p><code>make install</code></p>
228 <p>At that point you may have to rerun ldconfig or similar utility to
229 update your list of installed shared libs.</p>
230 </li>
231 <li><em>What other libraries are needed to compile/install libxml ?</em>
232 <p>Libxml does not requires any other library, the normal C ANSI API
233 should be sufficient (please report any violation to this rule you may
234 find).</p>
235 <p>However if found at configuration time libxml will detect and use the
236 following libs:</p>
237 <ul>
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +0000238 <li><a href="http://www.info-zip.org/pub/infozip/zlib/">libz</a> : a
239 highly portable and available widely compression library</li>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000240 <li>iconv: a powerful character encoding conversion library. It's
241 included by default on recent glibc libraries, so it doesn't need to
242 be installed specifically on linux. It seems it's now <a
243 href="http://www.opennc.org/onlinepubs/7908799/xsh/iconv.html">part
244 of the official UNIX</a> specification. Here is one <a
245 href="http://clisp.cons.org/~haible/packages-libiconv.html">implementation
246 of the library</a> which source can be found <a
247 href="ftp://ftp.ilog.fr/pub/Users/haible/gnu/">here</a>.</li>
248 </ul>
249 </li>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000250 <li><em>make check fails on some platforms</em>
251 <p>Sometime the regression tests results don't completely match the value
252 produced by the parser, and the makefile uses diff to print the delta. On
253 some platforms the diff return breaks the compilation process, if the
Daniel Veillarde46182c2002-02-12 14:29:11 +0000254 diff is small this is probably not a serious problem.</p>
255 <p>Sometimes (especially on Solaris) make checks fails due to limitations
256 in make. Try using GNU-make instead.</p>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000257 </li>
258 <li><em>I use the CVS version and there is no configure script</em>
259 <p>The configure (and other Makefiles) are generated. Use the autogen.sh
260 script to regenerate the configure and Makefiles, like:</p>
261 <p><code>./autogen.sh --prefix=/usr --disable-shared</code></p>
262 </li>
263 <li><em>I have troubles when running make tests with gcc-3.0</em>
264 <p>It seems the initial release of gcc-3.0 has a problem with the
265 optimizer which miscompiles the URI module. Please use another
266 compiler</p>
267 </li>
268</ol>
269
270<h3><a name="Developer">Developer</a> corner</h3>
271<ol>
272 <li><em>xmlDocDump() generates output on one line</em>
273 <p>libxml will not <strong>invent</strong> spaces in the content of a
274 document since <strong>all spaces in the content of a document are
275 significant</strong>. If you build a tree from the API and want
276 indentation:</p>
277 <ol>
278 <li>the correct way is to generate those yourself too</li>
279 <li>the dangerous way is to ask libxml to add those blanks to your
280 content <strong>modifying the content of your document in the
281 process</strong>. The result may not be what you expect. There is
282 <strong>NO</strong> way to guarantee that such a modification won't
283 impact other part of the content of your document. See <a
284 href="http://xmlsoft.org/html/libxml-parser.html#XMLKEEPBLANKSDEFAULT">xmlKeepBlanksDefault
285 ()</a> and <a
286 href="http://xmlsoft.org/html/libxml-tree.html#XMLSAVEFORMATFILE">xmlSaveFormatFile
287 ()</a></li>
288 </ol>
289 </li>
290 <li>Extra nodes in the document:
291 <p><em>For a XML file as below:</em></p>
292 <pre>&lt;?xml version="1.0"?&gt;
293&lt;PLAN xmlns="http://www.argus.ca/autotest/1.0/"&gt;
294&lt;NODE CommFlag="0"/&gt;
295&lt;NODE CommFlag="1"/&gt;
296&lt;/PLAN&gt;</pre>
297 <p><em>after parsing it with the function
298 pxmlDoc=xmlParseFile(...);</em></p>
299 <p><em>I want to the get the content of the first node (node with the
300 CommFlag="0")</em></p>
301 <p><em>so I did it as following;</em></p>
302 <pre>xmlNodePtr pode;
303pnode=pxmlDoc-&gt;children-&gt;children;</pre>
304 <p><em>but it does not work. If I change it to</em></p>
305 <pre>pnode=pxmlDoc-&gt;children-&gt;children-&gt;next;</pre>
306 <p><em>then it works. Can someone explain it to me.</em></p>
307 <p></p>
308 <p>In XML all characters in the content of the document are significant
309 <strong>including blanks and formatting line breaks</strong>.</p>
310 <p>The extra nodes you are wondering about are just that, text nodes with
311 the formatting spaces wich are part of the document but that people tend
312 to forget. There is a function <a
313 href="http://xmlsoft.org/html/libxml-parser.html">xmlKeepBlanksDefault
314 ()</a> to remove those at parse time, but that's an heuristic, and its
315 use should be limited to case where you are sure there is no
316 mixed-content in the document.</p>
317 </li>
318 <li><em>I get compilation errors of existing code like when accessing
319 <strong>root</strong> or <strong>childs fields</strong> of nodes</em>
320 <p>You are compiling code developed for libxml version 1 and using a
321 libxml2 development environment. Either switch back to libxml v1 devel or
322 even better fix the code to compile with libxml2 (or both) by <a
323 href="upgrade.html">following the instructions</a>.</p>
324 </li>
325 <li><em>I get compilation errors about non existing
326 <strong>xmlRootNode</strong> or <strong>xmlChildrenNode</strong>
327 fields</em>
328 <p>The source code you are using has been <a
329 href="upgrade.html">upgraded</a> to be able to compile with both libxml
330 and libxml2, but you need to install a more recent version:
331 libxml(-devel) &gt;= 1.8.8 or libxml2(-devel) &gt;= 2.1.0</p>
332 </li>
333 <li><em>XPath implementation looks seriously broken</em>
334 <p>XPath implementation prior to 2.3.0 was really incomplete, upgrade to
Daniel Veillard2d347fa2002-03-17 10:34:11 +0000335 a recent version, there is no known bug in the current version.</p>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000336 </li>
337 <li><em>The example provided in the web page does not compile</em>
338 <p>It's hard to maintain the documentation in sync with the code
339 &lt;grin/&gt; ...</p>
340 <p>Check the previous points 1/ and 2/ raised before, and send
341 patches.</p>
342 </li>
343 <li><em>Where can I get more examples and informations than in the web
344 page</em>
345 <p>Ideally a libxml book would be nice. I have no such plan ... But you
346 can:</p>
347 <ul>
348 <li>check more deeply the <a href="html/libxml-lib.html">existing
349 generated doc</a></li>
350 <li>looks for examples of use for libxml function using the Gnome code
351 for example the following will query the full Gnome CVs base for the
352 use of the <strong>xmlAddChild()</strong> function:
353 <p><a
354 href="http://cvs.gnome.org/lxr/search?string=xmlAddChild">http://cvs.gnome.org/lxr/search?string=xmlAddChild</a></p>
355 <p>This may be slow, a large hardware donation to the gnome project
356 could cure this :-)</p>
357 </li>
358 <li><a
359 href="http://cvs.gnome.org/bonsai/rview.cgi?cvsroot=/cvs/gnome&amp;dir=gnome-xml">Browse
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +0000360 the libxml source</a> , I try to write code as clean and documented
Daniel Veillard2d347fa2002-03-17 10:34:11 +0000361 as possible, so looking at it may be helpful. Especially the code of
362 xmllint.c and of the various testXXX.c tests programs should provide
363 good example on how to do things with the library.</li>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000364 </ul>
365 </li>
366 <li>What about C++ ?
367 <p>libxml is written in pure C in order to allow easy reuse on a number
368 of platforms, including embedded systems. I don't intend to convert to
369 C++.</p>
370 <p>There is however a C++ wrapper provided by Ari Johnson
371 &lt;ari@btigate.com&gt; which may fullfill your needs:</p>
372 <p>Website: <a
373 href="http://lusis.org/~ari/xml++/">http://lusis.org/~ari/xml++/</a></p>
374 <p>Download: <a
375 href="http://lusis.org/~ari/xml++/libxml++.tar.gz">http://lusis.org/~ari/xml++/libxml++.tar.gz</a></p>
376 </li>
377 <li>How to validate a document a posteriori ?
378 <p>It is possible to validate documents which had not been validated at
379 initial parsing time or documents who have been built from scratch using
380 the API. Use the <a
381 href="http://xmlsoft.org/html/libxml-valid.html#XMLVALIDATEDTD">xmlValidateDtd()</a>
382 function. It is also possible to simply add a Dtd to an existing
383 document:</p>
384 <pre>xmlDocPtr doc; /* your existing document */
385 xmlDtdPtr dtd = xmlParseDTD(NULL, filename_of_dtd); /* parse the DTD */
386 dtd-&gt;name = xmlStrDup((xmlChar*)"root_name"); /* use the given root */
387
388 doc-&gt;intSubset = dtd;
389 if (doc-&gt;children == NULL) xmlAddChild((xmlNodePtr)doc, (xmlNodePtr)dtd);
390 else xmlAddPrevSibling(doc-&gt;children, (xmlNodePtr)dtd);
391 </pre>
392 </li>
393 <li>etc ...</li>
394</ol>
395
396<p></p>
397
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000398<h2><a name="Documentat">Documentation</a></h2>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000399
Daniel Veillard402e8c82000-02-29 22:57:47 +0000400<p>There are some on-line resources about using libxml:</p>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000401<ol>
Daniel Veillard365e13b2000-07-02 07:56:37 +0000402 <li>Check the <a href="FAQ.html">FAQ</a></li>
Daniel Veillardc19fccc2000-07-03 11:52:01 +0000403 <li>Check the <a href="http://xmlsoft.org/html/libxml-lib.html">extensive
Daniel Veillard8c6d6af2000-08-25 17:14:13 +0000404 documentation</a> automatically extracted from code comments (using <a
405 href="http://cvs.gnome.org/bonsai/rview.cgi?cvsroot=/cvs/gnome&amp;dir=gtk-doc">gtk
406 doc</a>).</li>
Daniel Veillard8d869642000-07-14 12:12:59 +0000407 <li>Look at the documentation about <a href="encoding.html">libxml
408 internationalization support</a></li>
Daniel Veillardbc66f852002-01-14 09:49:20 +0000409 <li>This page provides a global overview and <a href="example.html">some
Daniel Veillard402e8c82000-02-29 22:57:47 +0000410 examples</a> on how to use libxml.</li>
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +0000411 <li><a href="mailto:james@daa.com.au">James Henstridge</a> wrote <a
Daniel Veillard402e8c82000-02-29 22:57:47 +0000412 href="http://www.daa.com.au/~james/gnome/xml-sax/xml-sax.html">some nice
413 documentation</a> explaining how to use the libxml SAX interface.</li>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000414 <li>George Lebl wrote <a
415 href="http://www-4.ibm.com/software/developer/library/gnome3/">an article
Daniel Veillard402e8c82000-02-29 22:57:47 +0000416 for IBM developerWorks</a> about using libxml.</li>
Daniel Veillardec303412000-03-24 13:41:54 +0000417 <li>Check <a href="http://cvs.gnome.org/lxr/source/gnome-xml/TODO">the TODO
418 file</a></li>
419 <li>Read the <a href="upgrade.html">1.x to 2.x upgrade path</a>. If you are
420 starting a new project using libxml you should really use the 2.x
421 version.</li>
Daniel Veillard845cce42002-01-09 11:51:37 +0000422 <li>And don't forget to look at the <a
423 href="http://mail.gnome.org/archives/xml/">mailing-list archive</a>.</li>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000424</ol>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000425
Daniel Veillardd5f97f82000-09-17 16:38:14 +0000426<h2><a name="Reporting">Reporting bugs and getting help</a></h2>
Daniel Veillard4c3a2031999-11-19 17:46:26 +0000427
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000428<p>Well, bugs or missing features are always possible, and I will make a
429point of fixing them in a timely fashion. The best way to report a bug is to
430use the <a href="http://bugzilla.gnome.org/buglist.cgi?product=libxml">Gnome
431bug tracking database</a> (make sure to use the "libxml" module name). I look
432at reports there regularly and it's good to have a reminder when a bug is
Daniel Veillard51095312001-10-28 18:51:57 +0000433still open. Be sure to specify that the bug is for the package libxml.</p>
Daniel Veillard4c3a2031999-11-19 17:46:26 +0000434
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000435<p>There is also a mailing-list <a
Daniel Veillard3197f162001-04-04 00:40:08 +0000436href="mailto:xml@gnome.org">xml@gnome.org</a> for libxml, with an <a
437href="http://mail.gnome.org/archives/xml/">on-line archive</a> (<a
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000438href="http://xmlsoft.org/messages">old</a>). To subscribe to this list,
439please visit the <a
440href="http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/xml">associated Web</a> page and
441follow the instructions. <strong>Do not send code, I won't debug it</strong>
442(but patches are really appreciated!).</p>
Daniel Veillard234547b2001-07-05 09:46:10 +0000443
Daniel Veillard008186f2001-09-13 14:24:44 +0000444<p>Check the following <strong><span style="color: #FF0000">before
445posting</span></strong>:</p>
Daniel Veillard234547b2001-07-05 09:46:10 +0000446<ul>
Daniel Veillarddadd0872001-09-15 09:21:44 +0000447 <li>read the <a href="FAQ.html">FAQ</a></li>
Daniel Veillard234547b2001-07-05 09:46:10 +0000448 <li>make sure you are <a href="ftp://xmlsoft.org/">using a recent
449 version</a>, and that the problem still shows up in those</li>
450 <li>check the <a href="http://mail.gnome.org/archives/xml/">list
451 archives</a> to see if the problem was reported already, in this case
Daniel Veillarde7ead2d2001-08-22 23:44:09 +0000452 there is probably a fix available, similary check the <a
453 href="http://bugzilla.gnome.org/buglist.cgi?product=libxml">registered
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000454 open bugs</a></li>
Daniel Veillard234547b2001-07-05 09:46:10 +0000455 <li>make sure you can reproduce the bug with xmllint or one of the test
456 programs found in source in the distribution</li>
457 <li>Please send the command showing the error as well as the input (as an
458 attachement)</li>
459</ul>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000460
Daniel Veillarddadd0872001-09-15 09:21:44 +0000461<p>Then send the bug with associated informations to reproduce it to the <a
Daniel Veillard33a67802001-03-07 09:44:02 +0000462href="mailto:xml@gnome.org">xml@gnome.org</a> list; if it's really libxml
Daniel Veillard008186f2001-09-13 14:24:44 +0000463related I will approve it.. Please do not send me mail directly, it makes
464things really harder to track and in some cases I'm not the best person to
465answer a given question, ask the list instead.</p>
Daniel Veillard4c3a2031999-11-19 17:46:26 +0000466
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000467<p>Of course, bugs reported with a suggested patch for fixing them will
Daniel Veillardec303412000-03-24 13:41:54 +0000468probably be processed faster.</p>
469
470<p>If you're looking for help, a quick look at <a
Daniel Veillardf7ed3362001-08-17 12:01:21 +0000471href="http://mail.gnome.org/archives/xml/">the list archive</a> may actually
Daniel Veillardec303412000-03-24 13:41:54 +0000472provide the answer, I usually send source samples when answering libxml usage
Daniel Veillard6f0adb52000-07-03 11:41:26 +0000473questions. The <a href="http://xmlsoft.org/html/book1.html">auto-generated
Daniel Veillardec303412000-03-24 13:41:54 +0000474documentantion</a> is not as polished as I would like (i need to learn more
475about Docbook), but it's a good starting point.</p>
476
Daniel Veillardd5f97f82000-09-17 16:38:14 +0000477<h2><a name="help">How to help</a></h2>
478
479<p>You can help the project in various ways, the best thing to do first is to
480subscribe to the mailing-list as explained before, check the <a
Daniel Veillardf7ed3362001-08-17 12:01:21 +0000481href="http://mail.gnome.org/archives/xml/">archives </a>and the <a
482href="http://bugzilla.gnome.org/buglist.cgi?product=libxml">Gnome bug
Daniel Veillardd5f97f82000-09-17 16:38:14 +0000483database:</a>:</p>
484<ol>
485 <li>provide patches when you find problems</li>
Daniel Veillard189446d2000-10-13 10:23:06 +0000486 <li>provide the diffs when you port libxml to a new platform. They may not
Daniel Veillardab8500d2000-10-15 21:06:19 +0000487 be integrated in all cases but help pinpointing portability problems
488 and</li>
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000489 <li>provide documentation fixes (either as patches to the code comments or
Daniel Veillardd5f97f82000-09-17 16:38:14 +0000490 as HTML diffs).</li>
491 <li>provide new documentations pieces (translations, examples, etc ...)</li>
492 <li>Check the TODO file and try to close one of the items</li>
493 <li>take one of the points raised in the archive or the bug database and
Daniel Veillarde7ead2d2001-08-22 23:44:09 +0000494 provide a fix. <a href="mailto:daniel@veillard.com">Get in touch with me
495 </a>before to avoid synchronization problems and check that the suggested
496 fix will fit in nicely :-)</li>
Daniel Veillardd5f97f82000-09-17 16:38:14 +0000497</ol>
498
Daniel Veillard10a2c651999-12-12 13:03:50 +0000499<h2><a name="Downloads">Downloads</a></h2>
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000500
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000501<p>The latest versions of libxml can be found on <a
Daniel Veillard20c8cf22001-06-26 22:47:36 +0000502href="ftp://xmlsoft.org/">xmlsoft.org</a> (<a
503href="ftp://speakeasy.rpmfind.net/pub/libxml/">Seattle</a>, <a
504href="ftp://fr.rpmfind.net/pub/libxml/">France</a>) or on the <a
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000505href="ftp://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/MIRRORS.html">Gnome FTP server</a> either
Daniel Veillard10a2c651999-12-12 13:03:50 +0000506as a <a href="ftp://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/stable/sources/libxml/">source
Daniel Veillard306be992000-07-03 12:38:45 +0000507archive</a> or <a
Daniel Veillarda41123c2001-04-22 19:31:20 +0000508href="ftp://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/stable/redhat/i386/libxml/">RPM
Daniel Veillard0bfbb422002-04-26 09:21:45 +0000509packages</a>, Antonin Sprinzl also provide <a
510href="ftp://gd.tuwien.ac.at/pub/libxml/">a mirror in Austria</a>. (NOTE that
511you need both the <a
Daniel Veillardc19fccc2000-07-03 11:52:01 +0000512href="http://rpmfind.net/linux/RPM/libxml2.html">libxml(2)</a> and <a
513href="http://rpmfind.net/linux/RPM/libxml2-devel.html">libxml(2)-devel</a>
Daniel Veillard95189532001-07-26 18:30:26 +0000514packages installed to compile applications using libxml.) <a
Daniel Veillardb2fb8ed2002-04-01 09:33:12 +0000515href="mailto:igor@stud.fh-frankfurt.de">Igor Zlatkovic</a> is now the
516maintainer of the Windows port, <a
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000517href="http://www.fh-frankfurt.de/~igor/projects/libxml/index.html">he
Daniel Veillardc6271d22001-10-27 07:50:58 +0000518provides binaries</a>. <a href="mailto:Gary.Pennington@sun.com">Gary
Daniel Veillard1aadc442001-11-28 13:10:32 +0000519Pennington</a> provides <a href="http://garypennington.net/libxml2/">Solaris
520binaries</a>.</p>
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000521
Daniel Veillard6c8b1172000-03-01 00:40:41 +0000522<p><a name="Snapshot">Snapshot:</a></p>
523<ul>
524 <li>Code from the W3C cvs base libxml <a
Daniel Veillard33a67802001-03-07 09:44:02 +0000525 href="ftp://xmlsoft.org/cvs-snapshot.tar.gz">cvs-snapshot.tar.gz</a></li>
Daniel Veillard6c8b1172000-03-01 00:40:41 +0000526 <li>Docs, content of the web site, the list archive included <a
Daniel Veillard33a67802001-03-07 09:44:02 +0000527 href="ftp://xmlsoft.org/libxml-docs.tar.gz">libxml-docs.tar.gz</a></li>
Daniel Veillard6c8b1172000-03-01 00:40:41 +0000528</ul>
529
Daniel Veillardc6271d22001-10-27 07:50:58 +0000530<p><a name="Contribs">Contributions:</a></p>
Daniel Veillard6c8b1172000-03-01 00:40:41 +0000531
532<p>I do accept external contributions, especially if compiling on another
Daniel Veillardc6271d22001-10-27 07:50:58 +0000533platform, get in touch with me to upload the package, wrappers for various
Daniel Veillard51095312001-10-28 18:51:57 +0000534languages have been provided, and can be found in the <a
535href="contribs.html">contrib section</a></p>
Daniel Veillard6c8b1172000-03-01 00:40:41 +0000536
Daniel Veillard82687162001-01-22 15:32:01 +0000537<p>Libxml is also available from CVS:</p>
Daniel Veillard10a2c651999-12-12 13:03:50 +0000538<ul>
Daniel Veillard10a2c651999-12-12 13:03:50 +0000539 <li><p>The <a
540 href="http://cvs.gnome.org/bonsai/rview.cgi?cvsroot=/cvs/gnome&amp;dir=gnome-xml">Gnome
Daniel Veillard402e8c82000-02-29 22:57:47 +0000541 CVS base</a>. Check the <a
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000542 href="http://developer.gnome.org/tools/cvs.html">Gnome CVS Tools</a>
543 page; the CVS module is <b>gnome-xml</b>.</p>
Daniel Veillard10a2c651999-12-12 13:03:50 +0000544 </li>
Daniel Veillard82687162001-01-22 15:32:01 +0000545 <li>The <strong>libxslt</strong> module is also present there</li>
Daniel Veillard10a2c651999-12-12 13:03:50 +0000546</ul>
547
548<h2><a name="News">News</a></h2>
549
Daniel Veillard944b5ff1999-12-15 19:08:24 +0000550<h3>CVS only : check the <a
551href="http://cvs.gnome.org/lxr/source/gnome-xml/ChangeLog">Changelog</a> file
Daniel Veillard189446d2000-10-13 10:23:06 +0000552for a really accurate description</h3>
Daniel Veillardab8500d2000-10-15 21:06:19 +0000553
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000554<p>Items floating around but not actively worked on, get in touch with me if
Daniel Veillardab8500d2000-10-15 21:06:19 +0000555you want to test those</p>
556<ul>
Daniel Veillardcf27f7c2002-04-30 07:12:39 +0000557 <li>Finishing up <a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xmlschema-1/">XML
558 Schemas</a> and <a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xinclude">XInclude</a></li>
559</ul>
560
561<h3>2.4.21: Apr 29 2002</h3>
562
563<p>This release is both a bug fix release and also contains the early XML
564Schemas <a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xmlschema-1/">structures</a> and <a
565href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xmlschema-2/">datatypes</a> code, beware, all
566interfaces are likely to change, there is huge holes, it is clearly a work in
567progress and don't even think of putting this code in a production system,
568it's actually not compiled in by default. The real fixes are: </p>
569<ul>
570 <li>a couple of bugs or limitations introduced in 2.4.20</li>
571 <li>patches for Borland C++ and MSC by Igor</li>
572 <li>some fixes on XPath strings and conformance patches by Richard
573 Jinks</li>
574 <li>patch from Aleksey for the ExcC14N specification</li>
575 <li>OSF/1 bug fix by Bjorn</li>
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +0000576</ul>
577
Daniel Veillarda7084cd2002-04-15 17:12:47 +0000578<h3>2.4.20: Apr 15 2002</h3>
579<ul>
580 <li>bug fixes: file descriptor leak, XPath, HTML ouput, DTD validation</li>
581 <li>XPath conformance testing by Richard Jinks</li>
582 <li>Portability fixes: Solaris, MPE/iX, Windows, OSF/1, python bindings,
583 libxml.m4</li>
584</ul>
585
Daniel Veillard19274092002-03-25 16:48:03 +0000586<h3>2.4.19: Mar 25 2002</h3>
587<ul>
588 <li>bug fixes: half a dozen XPath bugs, Validation, ISO-Latin to UTF8
589 encoder</li>
590 <li>portability fixes in the HTTP code</li>
Daniel Veillardb2fb8ed2002-04-01 09:33:12 +0000591 <li>memory allocation checks using valgrind, and profiling tests</li>
Daniel Veillard19274092002-03-25 16:48:03 +0000592 <li>revamp of the Windows build and Makefiles</li>
593</ul>
594
Daniel Veillard34ce8be2002-03-18 19:37:11 +0000595<h3>2.4.18: Mar 18 2002</h3>
596<ul>
597 <li>bug fixes: tree, SAX, canonicalization, validation, portability,
598 xpath</li>
599 <li>removed the --with-buffer option it was becoming unmaintainable</li>
600 <li>serious cleanup of the Python makefiles</li>
601 <li>speedup patch to XPath very effective for DocBook stylesheets</li>
602 <li>Fixes for Windows build, cleanup of the documentation</li>
603</ul>
604
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +0000605<h3>2.4.17: Mar 8 2002</h3>
606<ul>
607 <li>a lot of bug fixes, including "namespace nodes have no parents in
608 XPath"</li>
609 <li>fixed/improved the Python wrappers, added more examples and more
610 regression tests, XPath extension functions can now return node-sets</li>
611 <li>added the XML Canonalization support from Aleksey Sanin</li>
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000612</ul>
613
Daniel Veillard5f4b5992002-02-20 10:22:49 +0000614<h3>2.4.16: Feb 20 2002</h3>
615<ul>
616 <li>a lot of bug fixes, most of them were triggered by the XML Testsuite
617 from OASIS and W3C. Compliance has been significantly improved.</li>
618 <li>a couple of portability fixes too.</li>
619</ul>
620
Daniel Veillard397ff112002-02-11 18:27:20 +0000621<h3>2.4.15: Feb 11 2002</h3>
622<ul>
623 <li>Fixed the Makefiles, especially the python module ones</li>
624 <li>A few bug fixes and cleanup</li>
625 <li>Includes cleanup</li>
626</ul>
627
Daniel Veillardb6c1e2f2002-02-08 14:52:52 +0000628<h3>2.4.14: Feb 8 2002</h3>
629<ul>
630 <li>Change of Licence to the <a
631 href="http://www.opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.html">MIT
632 Licence</a> basisally for integration in XFree86 codebase, and removing
633 confusion around the previous dual-licencing</li>
634 <li>added Python bindings, beta software but should already be quite
635 complete</li>
636 <li>a large number of fixes and cleanups, especially for all tree
637 manipulations</li>
638 <li>cleanup of the headers, generation of a reference API definition in
639 XML</li>
640</ul>
641
642<h3>2.4.13: Jan 14 2002</h3>
Daniel Veillard744683d2002-01-14 17:30:20 +0000643<ul>
644 <li>update of the documentation: John Fleck and Charlie Bozeman</li>
645 <li>cleanup of timing code from Justin Fletcher</li>
646 <li>fixes for Windows and initial thread support on Win32: Igor and Serguei
647 Narojnyi</li>
648 <li>Cygwin patch from Robert Collins</li>
649 <li>added xmlSetEntityReferenceFunc() for Keith Isdale work on xsldbg</li>
650</ul>
651
Daniel Veillardef90ba72001-12-07 14:24:22 +0000652<h3>2.4.12: Dec 7 2001</h3>
653<ul>
654 <li>a few bug fixes: thread (Gary Pennington), xmllint (Geert Kloosterman),
655 XML parser (Robin Berjon), XPointer (Danny Jamshy), I/O cleanups
656 (robert)</li>
657 <li>Eric Lavigne contributed project files for MacOS</li>
658 <li>some makefiles cleanups</li>
659</ul>
660
Daniel Veillarda4871052001-11-26 13:19:48 +0000661<h3>2.4.11: Nov 26 2001</h3>
662<ul>
663 <li>fixed a couple of errors in the includes, fixed a few bugs, some code
664 cleanups</li>
665 <li>xmllint man pages improvement by Heiko Rupp</li>
666 <li>updated VMS build instructions from John A Fotheringham</li>
667 <li>Windows Makefiles updates from Igor</li>
668</ul>
669
Daniel Veillard43d3f612001-11-10 11:57:23 +0000670<h3>2.4.10: Nov 10 2001</h3>
671<ul>
672 <li>URI escaping fix (Joel Young)</li>
673 <li>added xmlGetNodePath() (for paths or XPointers generation)</li>
674 <li>Fixes namespace handling problems when using DTD and validation</li>
675 <li>improvements on xmllint: Morus Walter patches for --format and
676 --encode, Stefan Kost and Heiko Rupp improvements on the --shell</li>
677 <li>fixes for xmlcatalog linking pointed by Weiqi Gao</li>
678 <li>fixes to the HTML parser</li>
679</ul>
680
681<h3>2.4.9: Nov 6 2001</h3>
682<ul>
683 <li>fixes more catalog bugs</li>
684 <li>avoid a compilation problem, improve xmlGetLineNo()</li>
685</ul>
686
Daniel Veillarded421aa2001-11-04 21:22:45 +0000687<h3>2.4.8: Nov 4 2001</h3>
688<ul>
689 <li>fixed SGML catalogs broken in previous release, updated xmlcatalog
690 tool</li>
691 <li>fixed a compile errors and some includes troubles.</li>
692</ul>
693
Daniel Veillard52dcab32001-10-30 12:51:17 +0000694<h3>2.4.7: Oct 30 2001</h3>
695<ul>
696 <li>exported some debugging interfaces</li>
697 <li>serious rewrite of the catalog code</li>
698 <li>integrated Gary Pennington thread safety patch, added configure option
699 and regression tests</li>
700 <li>removed an HTML parser bug</li>
701 <li>fixed a couple of potentially serious validation bugs</li>
702 <li>integrated the SGML DocBook support in xmllint</li>
703 <li>changed the nanoftp anonymous login passwd</li>
704 <li>some I/O cleanup and a couple of interfaces for Perl wrapper</li>
705 <li>general bug fixes</li>
706 <li>updated xmllint man page by John Fleck</li>
707 <li>some VMS and Windows updates</li>
708</ul>
709
Daniel Veillard60087f32001-10-10 09:45:09 +0000710<h3>2.4.6: Oct 10 2001</h3>
711<ul>
Daniel Veillard52dcab32001-10-30 12:51:17 +0000712 <li>added an updated man pages by John Fleck</li>
Daniel Veillard60087f32001-10-10 09:45:09 +0000713 <li>portability and configure fixes</li>
714 <li>an infinite loop on the HTML parser was removed (William)</li>
715 <li>Windows makefile patches from Igor</li>
716 <li>fixed half a dozen bugs reported fof libxml or libxslt</li>
717 <li>updated xmlcatalog to be able to modify SGML super catalogs</li>
718</ul>
719
Daniel Veillarddadd0872001-09-15 09:21:44 +0000720<h3>2.4.5: Sep 14 2001</h3>
721<ul>
722 <li>Remove a few annoying bugs in 2.4.4</li>
723 <li>forces the HTML serializer to output decimal charrefs since some
724 version of Netscape can't handle hexadecimal ones</li>
725</ul>
726
727<h3>1.8.16: Sep 14 2001</h3>
728<ul>
729 <li>maintenance release of the old libxml1 branch, couple of bug and
730 portability fixes</li>
731</ul>
732
Daniel Veillard04382ae2001-09-12 18:51:30 +0000733<h3>2.4.4: Sep 12 2001</h3>
734<ul>
735 <li>added --convert to xmlcatalog, bug fixes and cleanups of XML
736 Catalog</li>
737 <li>a few bug fixes and some portability changes</li>
738 <li>some documentation cleanups</li>
739</ul>
740
Daniel Veillard39936902001-08-24 00:49:01 +0000741<h3>2.4.3: Aug 23 2001</h3>
742<ul>
743 <li>XML Catalog support see the doc</li>
744 <li>New NaN/Infinity floating point code</li>
745 <li>A few bug fixes</li>
746</ul>
747
748<h3>2.4.2: Aug 15 2001</h3>
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000749<ul>
750 <li>adds xmlLineNumbersDefault() to control line number generation</li>
751 <li>lot of bug fixes</li>
752 <li>the Microsoft MSC projects files shuld now be up to date</li>
753 <li>inheritance of namespaces from DTD defaulted attributes</li>
754 <li>fixes a serious potential security bug</li>
755 <li>added a --format option to xmllint</li>
756</ul>
757
758<h3>2.4.1: July 24 2001</h3>
759<ul>
760 <li>possibility to keep line numbers in the tree</li>
761 <li>some computation NaN fixes</li>
762 <li>extension of the XPath API</li>
763 <li>cleanup for alpha and ia64 targets</li>
764 <li>patch to allow saving through HTTP PUT or POST</li>
Daniel Veillard09ab7e12001-07-10 15:49:44 +0000765</ul>
766
767<h3>2.4.0: July 10 2001</h3>
768<ul>
769 <li>Fixed a few bugs in XPath, validation, and tree handling.</li>
770 <li>Fixed XML Base implementation, added a coupel of examples to the
771 regression tests</li>
772 <li>A bit of cleanup</li>
Daniel Veillardab8500d2000-10-15 21:06:19 +0000773</ul>
774
Daniel Veillard5b43fde2001-07-05 23:31:40 +0000775<h3>2.3.14: July 5 2001</h3>
776<ul>
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000777 <li>fixed some entities problems and reduce mem requirement when
778 substituing them</li>
Daniel Veillard5b43fde2001-07-05 23:31:40 +0000779 <li>lots of improvements in the XPath queries interpreter can be
780 substancially faster</li>
781 <li>Makefiles and configure cleanups</li>
782 <li>Fixes to XPath variable eval, and compare on empty node set</li>
783 <li>HTML tag closing bug fixed</li>
784 <li>Fixed an URI reference computating problem when validating</li>
785</ul>
786
Daniel Veillard2adbb512001-06-28 16:20:36 +0000787<h3>2.3.13: June 28 2001</h3>
788<ul>
789 <li>2.3.12 configure.in was broken as well as the push mode XML parser</li>
790 <li>a few more fixes for compilation on Windows MSC by Yon Derek</li>
791</ul>
792
793<h3>1.8.14: June 28 2001</h3>
794<ul>
795 <li>Zbigniew Chyla gave a patch to use the old XML parser in push mode</li>
796 <li>Small Makefile fix</li>
797</ul>
798
Daniel Veillard11648102001-06-26 16:08:24 +0000799<h3>2.3.12: June 26 2001</h3>
800<ul>
801 <li>lots of cleanup</li>
802 <li>a couple of validation fix</li>
803 <li>fixed line number counting</li>
804 <li>fixed serious problems in the XInclude processing</li>
805 <li>added support for UTF8 BOM at beginning of entities</li>
806 <li>fixed a strange gcc optimizer bugs in xpath handling of float, gcc-3.0
807 miscompile uri.c (William), Thomas Leitner provided a fix for the
808 optimizer on Tru64</li>
809 <li>incorporated Yon Derek and Igor Zlatkovic fixes and improvements for
810 compilation on Windows MSC</li>
811 <li>update of libxml-doc.el (Felix Natter)</li>
812 <li>fixed 2 bugs in URI normalization code</li>
813</ul>
814
Daniel Veillarde3c81b52001-06-17 14:50:34 +0000815<h3>2.3.11: June 17 2001</h3>
816<ul>
817 <li>updates to trio, Makefiles and configure should fix some portability
818 problems (alpha)</li>
819 <li>fixed some HTML serialization problems (pre, script, and block/inline
820 handling), added encoding aware APIs, cleanup of this code</li>
821 <li>added xmlHasNsProp()</li>
822 <li>implemented a specific PI for encoding support in the DocBook SGML
823 parser</li>
824 <li>some XPath fixes (-Infinity, / as a function parameter and namespaces
825 node selection)</li>
826 <li>fixed a performance problem and an error in the validation code</li>
827 <li>fixed XInclude routine to implement the recursive behaviour</li>
828 <li>fixed xmlFreeNode problem when libxml is included statically twice</li>
829 <li>added --version to xmllint for bug reports</li>
830</ul>
831
Daniel Veillard2e4f1882001-06-01 10:11:57 +0000832<h3>2.3.10: June 1 2001</h3>
833<ul>
834 <li>fixed the SGML catalog support</li>
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000835 <li>a number of reported bugs got fixed, in XPath, iconv detection,
836 XInclude processing</li>
Daniel Veillard2e4f1882001-06-01 10:11:57 +0000837 <li>XPath string function should now handle unicode correctly</li>
838</ul>
839
Daniel Veillard4623acd2001-05-19 15:13:15 +0000840<h3>2.3.9: May 19 2001</h3>
841
842<p>Lots of bugfixes, and added a basic SGML catalog support:</p>
843<ul>
844 <li>HTML push bugfix #54891 and another patch from Jonas Borgström</li>
845 <li>some serious speed optimisation again</li>
846 <li>some documentation cleanups</li>
847 <li>trying to get better linking on solaris (-R)</li>
848 <li>XPath API cleanup from Thomas Broyer</li>
849 <li>Validation bug fixed #54631, added a patch from Gary Pennington, fixed
850 xmlValidGetValidElements()</li>
851 <li>Added an INSTALL file</li>
852 <li>Attribute removal added to API: #54433</li>
853 <li>added a basic support for SGML catalogs</li>
854 <li>fixed xmlKeepBlanksDefault(0) API</li>
855 <li>bugfix in xmlNodeGetLang()</li>
856 <li>fixed a small configure portability problem</li>
857 <li>fixed an inversion of SYSTEM and PUBLIC identifier in HTML document</li>
858</ul>
859
Daniel Veillarda265af72001-05-14 11:13:58 +0000860<h3>1.8.13: May 14 2001</h3>
861<ul>
862 <li>bugfixes release of the old libxml1 branch used by Gnome</li>
863</ul>
864
Daniel Veillard3bbbe6f2001-05-03 11:15:37 +0000865<h3>2.3.8: May 3 2001</h3>
866<ul>
867 <li>Integrated an SGML DocBook parser for the Gnome project</li>
868 <li>Fixed a few things in the HTML parser</li>
869 <li>Fixed some XPath bugs raised by XSLT use, tried to fix the floating
870 point portability issue</li>
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000871 <li>Speed improvement (8M/s for SAX, 3M/s for DOM, 1.5M/s for
872 DOM+validation using the XML REC as input and a 700MHz celeron).</li>
Daniel Veillard3bbbe6f2001-05-03 11:15:37 +0000873 <li>incorporated more Windows cleanup</li>
874 <li>added xmlSaveFormatFile()</li>
875 <li>fixed problems in copying nodes with entities references (gdome)</li>
876 <li>removed some troubles surrounding the new validation module</li>
877</ul>
878
Daniel Veillarda41123c2001-04-22 19:31:20 +0000879<h3>2.3.7: April 22 2001</h3>
880<ul>
881 <li>lots of small bug fixes, corrected XPointer</li>
882 <li>Non determinist content model validation support</li>
883 <li>added xmlDocCopyNode for gdome2</li>
884 <li>revamped the way the HTML parser handles end of tags</li>
885 <li>XPath: corrctions of namespacessupport and number formatting</li>
886 <li>Windows: Igor Zlatkovic patches for MSC compilation</li>
887 <li>HTML ouput fixes from P C Chow and William M. Brack</li>
888 <li>Improved validation speed sensible for DocBook</li>
889 <li>fixed a big bug with ID declared in external parsed entities</li>
890 <li>portability fixes, update of Trio from Bjorn Reese</li>
891</ul>
892
Daniel Veillardafc73112001-04-11 11:51:41 +0000893<h3>2.3.6: April 8 2001</h3>
894<ul>
895 <li>Code cleanup using extreme gcc compiler warning options, found and
896 cleared half a dozen potential problem</li>
897 <li>the Eazel team found an XML parser bug</li>
898 <li>cleaned up the user of some of the string formatting function. used the
899 trio library code to provide the one needed when the platform is missing
900 them</li>
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000901 <li>xpath: removed a memory leak and fixed the predicate evaluation
902 problem, extended the testsuite and cleaned up the result. XPointer seems
903 broken ...</li>
Daniel Veillardafc73112001-04-11 11:51:41 +0000904</ul>
905
Daniel Veillard56a4cb82001-03-24 17:00:36 +0000906<h3>2.3.5: Mar 23 2001</h3>
907<ul>
908 <li>Biggest change is separate parsing and evaluation of XPath expressions,
909 there is some new APIs for this too</li>
910 <li>included a number of bug fixes(XML push parser, 51876, notations,
911 52299)</li>
912 <li>Fixed some portability issues</li>
913</ul>
914
Daniel Veillarde356c282001-03-10 12:32:04 +0000915<h3>2.3.4: Mar 10 2001</h3>
916<ul>
917 <li>Fixed bugs #51860 and #51861</li>
918 <li>Added a global variable xmlDefaultBufferSize to allow default buffer
919 size to be application tunable.</li>
920 <li>Some cleanup in the validation code, still a bug left and this part
921 should probably be rewritten to support ambiguous content model :-\</li>
922 <li>Fix a couple of serious bugs introduced or raised by changes in 2.3.3
923 parser</li>
924 <li>Fixed another bug in xmlNodeGetContent()</li>
925 <li>Bjorn fixed XPath node collection and Number formatting</li>
926 <li>Fixed a loop reported in the HTML parsing</li>
927 <li>blank space are reported even if the Dtd content model proves that they
928 are formatting spaces, this is for XmL conformance</li>
929</ul>
930
Daniel Veillardb402c072001-03-01 17:28:58 +0000931<h3>2.3.3: Mar 1 2001</h3>
932<ul>
933 <li>small change in XPath for XSLT</li>
934 <li>documentation cleanups</li>
935 <li>fix in validation by Gary Pennington</li>
936 <li>serious parsing performances improvements</li>
937</ul>
938
Daniel Veillardec70e912001-02-26 20:10:45 +0000939<h3>2.3.2: Feb 24 2001</h3>
Daniel Veillard71681102001-02-24 17:48:53 +0000940<ul>
941 <li>chasing XPath bugs, found a bunch, completed some TODO</li>
942 <li>fixed a Dtd parsing bug</li>
943 <li>fixed a bug in xmlNodeGetContent</li>
944 <li>ID/IDREF support partly rewritten by Gary Pennington</li>
945</ul>
946
Daniel Veillardec70e912001-02-26 20:10:45 +0000947<h3>2.3.1: Feb 15 2001</h3>
Daniel Veillard6e6a6cc2001-02-15 15:55:44 +0000948<ul>
949 <li>some XPath and HTML bug fixes for XSLT</li>
950 <li>small extension of the hash table interfaces for DOM gdome2
951 implementation</li>
952 <li>A few bug fixes</li>
953</ul>
954
Daniel Veillardec70e912001-02-26 20:10:45 +0000955<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 +0000956<ul>
957 <li>Lots of XPath bug fixes</li>
958 <li>Add a mode with Dtd lookup but without validation error reporting for
959 XSLT</li>
960 <li>Add support for text node without escaping (XSLT)</li>
961 <li>bug fixes for xmlCheckFilename</li>
962 <li>validation code bug fixes from Gary Pennington</li>
963 <li>Patch from Paul D. Smith correcting URI path normalization</li>
964 <li>Patch to allow simultaneous install of libxml-devel and
965 libxml2-devel</li>
966 <li>the example Makefile is now fixed</li>
967 <li>added HTML to the RPM packages</li>
968 <li>tree copying bugfixes</li>
969 <li>updates to Windows makefiles</li>
970 <li>optimisation patch from Bjorn Reese</li>
971</ul>
972
Daniel Veillardec70e912001-02-26 20:10:45 +0000973<h3>2.2.11: Jan 4 2001</h3>
Daniel Veillard503b8932001-01-05 06:36:31 +0000974<ul>
975 <li>bunch of bug fixes (memory I/O, xpath, ftp/http, ...)</li>
976 <li>added htmlHandleOmittedElem()</li>
977 <li>Applied Bjorn Reese's IPV6 first patch</li>
978 <li>Applied Paul D. Smith patches for validation of XInclude results</li>
Daniel Veillard82687162001-01-22 15:32:01 +0000979 <li>added XPointer xmlns() new scheme support</li>
Daniel Veillard503b8932001-01-05 06:36:31 +0000980</ul>
981
Daniel Veillard2ddd23d2000-11-25 10:42:19 +0000982<h3>2.2.10: Nov 25 2000</h3>
Daniel Veillard9d343c42000-11-25 10:12:43 +0000983<ul>
984 <li>Fix the Windows problems of 2.2.8</li>
985 <li>integrate OpenVMS patches</li>
986 <li>better handling of some nasty HTML input</li>
987 <li>Improved the XPointer implementation</li>
988 <li>integrate a number of provided patches</li>
989</ul>
990
Daniel Veillard2ddd23d2000-11-25 10:42:19 +0000991<h3>2.2.9: Nov 25 2000</h3>
992<ul>
993 <li>erroneous release :-(</li>
994</ul>
995
Daniel Veillard28929b22000-11-13 18:22:49 +0000996<h3>2.2.8: Nov 13 2000</h3>
997<ul>
998 <li>First version of <a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xinclude">XInclude</a>
999 support</li>
1000 <li>Patch in conditional section handling</li>
1001 <li>updated MS compiler project</li>
1002 <li>fixed some XPath problems</li>
1003 <li>added an URI escaping function</li>
1004 <li>some other bug fixes</li>
1005</ul>
1006
1007<h3>2.2.7: Oct 31 2000</h3>
1008<ul>
1009 <li>added message redirection</li>
1010 <li>XPath improvements (thanks TOM !)</li>
1011 <li>xmlIOParseDTD() added</li>
1012 <li>various small fixes in the HTML, URI, HTTP and XPointer support</li>
1013 <li>some cleanup of the Makefile, autoconf and the distribution content</li>
1014</ul>
1015
Daniel Veillard29a11cc2000-10-25 13:32:39 +00001016<h3>2.2.6: Oct 25 2000:</h3>
1017<ul>
1018 <li>Added an hash table module, migrated a number of internal structure to
1019 those</li>
1020 <li>Fixed a posteriori validation problems</li>
1021 <li>HTTP module cleanups</li>
1022 <li>HTML parser improvements (tag errors, script/style handling, attribute
1023 normalization)</li>
1024 <li>coalescing of adjacent text nodes</li>
1025 <li>couple of XPath bug fixes, exported the internal API</li>
1026</ul>
1027
Daniel Veillardab8500d2000-10-15 21:06:19 +00001028<h3>2.2.5: Oct 15 2000:</h3>
Daniel Veillard4c3a2031999-11-19 17:46:26 +00001029<ul>
Daniel Veillard189446d2000-10-13 10:23:06 +00001030 <li>XPointer implementation and testsuite</li>
1031 <li>Lot of XPath fixes, added variable and functions registration, more
1032 tests</li>
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +00001033 <li>Portability fixes, lots of enhancements toward an easy Windows build
1034 and release</li>
Daniel Veillard189446d2000-10-13 10:23:06 +00001035 <li>Late validation fixes</li>
1036 <li>Integrated a lot of contributed patches</li>
1037 <li>added memory management docs</li>
Daniel Veillardab8500d2000-10-15 21:06:19 +00001038 <li>a performance problem when using large buffer seems fixed</li>
Daniel Veillard189446d2000-10-13 10:23:06 +00001039</ul>
1040
1041<h3>2.2.4: Oct 1 2000:</h3>
1042<ul>
1043 <li>main XPath problem fixed</li>
1044 <li>Integrated portability patches for Windows</li>
1045 <li>Serious bug fixes on the URI and HTML code</li>
Daniel Veillard361d8452000-04-03 19:48:13 +00001046</ul>
1047
Daniel Veillardd5f97f82000-09-17 16:38:14 +00001048<h3>2.2.3: Sep 17 2000</h3>
1049<ul>
1050 <li>bug fixes</li>
1051 <li>cleanup of entity handling code</li>
1052 <li>overall review of all loops in the parsers, all sprintf usage has been
1053 checked too</li>
1054 <li>Far better handling of larges Dtd. Validating against Docbook XML Dtd
1055 works smoothly now.</li>
1056</ul>
1057
1058<h3>1.8.10: Sep 6 2000</h3>
1059<ul>
1060 <li>bug fix release for some Gnome projects</li>
1061</ul>
1062
1063<h3>2.2.2: August 12 2000</h3>
Daniel Veillard786d7c82000-08-12 23:38:57 +00001064<ul>
1065 <li>mostly bug fixes</li>
Daniel Veillardec78c0f2000-08-25 10:25:23 +00001066 <li>started adding routines to access xml parser context options</li>
Daniel Veillard786d7c82000-08-12 23:38:57 +00001067</ul>
1068
Daniel Veillardd5f97f82000-09-17 16:38:14 +00001069<h3>2.2.1: July 21 2000</h3>
Daniel Veillarda2679fa2000-07-22 02:38:15 +00001070<ul>
1071 <li>a purely bug fixes release</li>
1072 <li>fixed an encoding support problem when parsing from a memory block</li>
1073 <li>fixed a DOCTYPE parsing problem</li>
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +00001074 <li>removed a bug in the function allowing to override the memory
1075 allocation routines</li>
Daniel Veillarda2679fa2000-07-22 02:38:15 +00001076</ul>
1077
Daniel Veillardd5f97f82000-09-17 16:38:14 +00001078<h3>2.2.0: July 14 2000</h3>
Daniel Veillard94e90602000-07-17 14:38:19 +00001079<ul>
1080 <li>applied a lot of portability fixes</li>
1081 <li>better encoding support/cleanup and saving (content is now always
1082 encoded in UTF-8)</li>
1083 <li>the HTML parser now correctly handles encodings</li>
1084 <li>added xmlHasProp()</li>
1085 <li>fixed a serious problem with &amp;#38;</li>
1086 <li>propagated the fix to FTP client</li>
1087 <li>cleanup, bugfixes, etc ...</li>
1088 <li>Added a page about <a href="encoding.html">libxml Internationalization
1089 support</a></li>
1090</ul>
1091
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00001092<h3>1.8.9: July 9 2000</h3>
1093<ul>
1094 <li>fixed the spec the RPMs should be better</li>
1095 <li>fixed a serious bug in the FTP implementation, released 1.8.9 to solve
1096 rpmfind users problem</li>
1097</ul>
1098
Daniel Veillard6388e172000-07-03 16:07:19 +00001099<h3>2.1.1: July 1 2000</h3>
1100<ul>
1101 <li>fixes a couple of bugs in the 2.1.0 packaging</li>
1102 <li>improvements on the HTML parser</li>
1103</ul>
1104
Daniel Veillard3f6f7f62000-06-30 17:58:25 +00001105<h3>2.1.0 and 1.8.8: June 29 2000</h3>
1106<ul>
1107 <li>1.8.8 is mostly a comodity package for upgrading to libxml2 accoding to
1108 <a href="upgrade.html">new instructions</a>. It fixes a nasty problem
1109 about &amp;#38; charref parsing</li>
1110 <li>2.1.0 also ease the upgrade from libxml v1 to the recent version. it
1111 also contains numerous fixes and enhancements:
1112 <ul>
1113 <li>added xmlStopParser() to stop parsing</li>
1114 <li>improved a lot parsing speed when there is large CDATA blocs</li>
1115 <li>includes XPath patches provided by Picdar Technology</li>
1116 <li>tried to fix as much as possible DtD validation and namespace
1117 related problems</li>
1118 <li>output to a given encoding has been added/tested</li>
1119 <li>lot of various fixes</li>
1120 </ul>
1121 </li>
1122</ul>
1123
Daniel Veillarde0aed302000-04-16 08:52:20 +00001124<h3>2.0.0: Apr 12 2000</h3>
Daniel Veillard361d8452000-04-03 19:48:13 +00001125<ul>
1126 <li>First public release of libxml2. If you are using libxml, it's a good
Daniel Veillarde0aed302000-04-16 08:52:20 +00001127 idea to check the 1.x to 2.x upgrade instructions. NOTE: while initally
1128 scheduled for Apr 3 the relase occured only on Apr 12 due to massive
1129 workload.</li>
Daniel Veillard361d8452000-04-03 19:48:13 +00001130 <li>The include are now located under $prefix/include/libxml (instead of
Daniel Veillarde0aed302000-04-16 08:52:20 +00001131 $prefix/include/gnome-xml), they also are referenced by
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00001132 <pre>#include &lt;libxml/xxx.h&gt;</pre>
Daniel Veillarde0aed302000-04-16 08:52:20 +00001133 <p>instead of</p>
Daniel Veillard361d8452000-04-03 19:48:13 +00001134 <pre>#include "xxx.h"</pre>
1135 </li>
Daniel Veillard8f621982000-03-20 13:07:15 +00001136 <li>a new URI module for parsing URIs and following strictly RFC 2396</li>
1137 <li>the memory allocation routines used by libxml can now be overloaded
1138 dynamically by using xmlMemSetup()</li>
Daniel Veillard361d8452000-04-03 19:48:13 +00001139 <li>The previously CVS only tool tester has been renamed
1140 <strong>xmllint</strong> and is now installed as part of the libxml2
1141 package</li>
Daniel Veillarde0aed302000-04-16 08:52:20 +00001142 <li>The I/O interface has been revamped. There is now ways to plug in
1143 specific I/O modules, either at the URI scheme detection level using
1144 xmlRegisterInputCallbacks() or by passing I/O functions when creating a
1145 parser context using xmlCreateIOParserCtxt()</li>
1146 <li>there is a C preprocessor macro LIBXML_VERSION providing the version
1147 number of the libxml module in use</li>
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +00001148 <li>a number of optional features of libxml can now be excluded at
1149 configure time (FTP/HTTP/HTML/XPath/Debug)</li>
Daniel Veillardedfb29b2000-03-14 19:59:05 +00001150</ul>
1151
1152<h3>2.0.0beta: Mar 14 2000</h3>
1153<ul>
1154 <li>This is a first Beta release of libxml version 2</li>
Daniel Veillarde356c282001-03-10 12:32:04 +00001155 <li>It's available only from<a href="ftp://xmlsoft.org/">xmlsoft.org
1156 FTP</a>, it's packaged as libxml2-2.0.0beta and available as tar and
1157 RPMs</li>
Daniel Veillardedfb29b2000-03-14 19:59:05 +00001158 <li>This version is now the head in the Gnome CVS base, the old one is
1159 available under the tag LIB_XML_1_X</li>
1160 <li>This includes a very large set of changes. Froma programmatic point of
1161 view applications should not have to be modified too much, check the <a
1162 href="upgrade.html">upgrade page</a></li>
1163 <li>Some interfaces may changes (especially a bit about encoding).</li>
1164 <li>the updates includes:
Daniel Veillard6c8b1172000-03-01 00:40:41 +00001165 <ul>
Daniel Veillardedfb29b2000-03-14 19:59:05 +00001166 <li>fix I18N support. ISO-Latin-x/UTF-8/UTF-16 (nearly) seems correctly
1167 handled now</li>
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +00001168 <li>Better handling of entities, especially well formedness checking
1169 and proper PEref extensions in external subsets</li>
Daniel Veillard6c8b1172000-03-01 00:40:41 +00001170 <li>DTD conditional sections</li>
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +00001171 <li>Validation now correcly handle entities content</li>
Daniel Veillard6c8b1172000-03-01 00:40:41 +00001172 <li><a href="http://rpmfind.net/tools/gdome/messages/0039.html">change
1173 structures to accomodate DOM</a></li>
Daniel Veillard6c8b1172000-03-01 00:40:41 +00001174 </ul>
1175 </li>
Daniel Veillardedfb29b2000-03-14 19:59:05 +00001176 <li>Serious progress were made toward compliance, <a
1177 href="conf/result.html">here are the result of the test</a> against the
1178 OASIS testsuite (except the japanese tests since I don't support that
1179 encoding yet). This URL is rebuilt every couple of hours using the CVS
1180 head version.</li>
Daniel Veillarde41f2b72000-01-30 20:00:07 +00001181</ul>
1182
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +00001183<h3>1.8.7: Mar 6 2000</h3>
1184<ul>
1185 <li>This is a bug fix release:</li>
1186 <li>It is possible to disable the ignorable blanks heuristic used by
1187 libxml-1.x, a new function xmlKeepBlanksDefault(0) will allow this. Note
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +00001188 that for adherence to XML spec, this behaviour will be disabled by
1189 default in 2.x . The same function will allow to keep compatibility for
1190 old code.</li>
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00001191 <li>Blanks in &lt;a&gt; &lt;/a&gt; constructs are not ignored anymore,
1192 avoiding heuristic is really the Right Way :-\</li>
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +00001193 <li>The unchecked use of snprintf which was breaking libxml-1.8.6
1194 compilation on some platforms has been fixed</li>
1195 <li>nanoftp.c nanohttp.c: Fixed '#' and '?' stripping when processing
1196 URIs</li>
1197</ul>
1198
Daniel Veillarde41f2b72000-01-30 20:00:07 +00001199<h3>1.8.6: Jan 31 2000</h3>
1200<ul>
1201 <li>added a nanoFTP transport module, debugged until the new version of <a
1202 href="http://rpmfind.net/linux/rpm2html/rpmfind.html">rpmfind</a> can use
1203 it without troubles</li>
Daniel Veillardda07c342000-01-25 18:31:22 +00001204</ul>
1205
1206<h3>1.8.5: Jan 21 2000</h3>
1207<ul>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +00001208 <li>adding APIs to parse a well balanced chunk of XML (production <a
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +00001209 href="http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml#NT-content">[43] content</a> of the
1210 XML spec)</li>
Daniel Veillard461a66c2000-01-18 18:01:01 +00001211 <li>fixed a hideous bug in xmlGetProp pointed by Rune.Djurhuus@fast.no</li>
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00001212 <li>Jody Goldberg &lt;jgoldberg@home.com&gt; provided another patch trying
1213 to solve the zlib checks problems</li>
Daniel Veillard461a66c2000-01-18 18:01:01 +00001214 <li>The current state in gnome CVS base is expected to ship as 1.8.5 with
1215 gnumeric soon</li>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +00001216</ul>
1217
1218<h3>1.8.4: Jan 13 2000</h3>
1219<ul>
1220 <li>bug fixes, reintroduced xmlNewGlobalNs(), fixed xmlNewNs()</li>
1221 <li>all exit() call should have been removed from libxml</li>
1222 <li>fixed a problem with INCLUDE_WINSOCK on WIN32 platform</li>
1223 <li>added newDocFragment()</li>
Daniel Veillardf84f71f2000-01-05 19:54:23 +00001224</ul>
1225
1226<h3>1.8.3: Jan 5 2000</h3>
1227<ul>
1228 <li>a Push interface for the XML and HTML parsers</li>
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +00001229 <li>a shell-like interface to the document tree (try tester --shell :-)</li>
Daniel Veillarddbfd6411999-12-28 16:35:14 +00001230 <li>lots of bug fixes and improvement added over XMas hollidays</li>
Daniel Veillard437b87b2000-01-03 17:30:46 +00001231 <li>fixed the DTD parsing code to work with the xhtml DTD</li>
Daniel Veillardf84f71f2000-01-05 19:54:23 +00001232 <li>added xmlRemoveProp(), xmlRemoveID() and xmlRemoveRef()</li>
1233 <li>Fixed bugs in xmlNewNs()</li>
Daniel Veillard437b87b2000-01-03 17:30:46 +00001234 <li>External entity loading code has been revamped, now it uses
Daniel Veillardf84f71f2000-01-05 19:54:23 +00001235 xmlLoadExternalEntity(), some fix on entities processing were added</li>
Daniel Veillard437b87b2000-01-03 17:30:46 +00001236 <li>cleaned up WIN32 includes of socket stuff</li>
Daniel Veillard5cb5ab81999-12-21 15:35:29 +00001237</ul>
1238
1239<h3>1.8.2: Dec 21 1999</h3>
1240<ul>
Daniel Veillardb24054a1999-12-18 15:32:46 +00001241 <li>I got another problem with includes and C++, I hope this issue is fixed
1242 for good this time</li>
Daniel Veillard5cb5ab81999-12-21 15:35:29 +00001243 <li>Added a few tree modification functions: xmlReplaceNode,
1244 xmlAddPrevSibling, xmlAddNextSibling, xmlNodeSetName and
1245 xmlDocSetRootElement</li>
1246 <li>Tried to improve the HTML output with help from <a
1247 href="mailto:clahey@umich.edu">Chris Lahey</a></li>
Daniel Veillarde4e51311999-12-18 15:32:46 +00001248</ul>
Daniel Veillardb24054a1999-12-18 15:32:46 +00001249
Daniel Veillarde4e51311999-12-18 15:32:46 +00001250<h3>1.8.1: Dec 18 1999</h3>
1251<ul>
1252 <li>various patches to avoid troubles when using libxml with C++ compilers
1253 the "namespace" keyword and C escaping in include files</li>
1254 <li>a problem in one of the core macros IS_CHAR was corrected</li>
1255 <li>fixed a bug introduced in 1.8.0 breaking default namespace processing,
1256 and more specifically the Dia application</li>
Daniel Veillard944b5ff1999-12-15 19:08:24 +00001257 <li>fixed a posteriori validation (validation after parsing, or by using a
1258 Dtd not specified in the original document)</li>
Daniel Veillardb24054a1999-12-18 15:32:46 +00001259 <li>fixed a bug in</li>
Daniel Veillard10a2c651999-12-12 13:03:50 +00001260</ul>
1261
1262<h3>1.8.0: Dec 12 1999</h3>
1263<ul>
1264 <li>cleanup, especially memory wise</li>
1265 <li>the parser should be more reliable, especially the HTML one, it should
1266 not crash, whatever the input !</li>
1267 <li>Integrated various patches, especially a speedup improvement for large
1268 dataset from <a href="mailto:cnygard@bellatlantic.net">Carl Nygard</a>,
1269 configure with --with-buffers to enable them.</li>
1270 <li>attribute normalization, oops should have been added long ago !</li>
1271 <li>attributes defaulted from Dtds should be available, xmlSetProp() now
1272 does entities escapting by default.</li>
Daniel Veillard4c3a2031999-11-19 17:46:26 +00001273</ul>
Daniel Veillard35008381999-10-25 13:15:52 +00001274
1275<h3>1.7.4: Oct 25 1999</h3>
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +00001276<ul>
Daniel Veillard35008381999-10-25 13:15:52 +00001277 <li>Lots of HTML improvement</li>
1278 <li>Fixed some errors when saving both XML and HTML</li>
1279 <li>More examples, the regression tests should now look clean</li>
1280 <li>Fixed a bug with contiguous charref</li>
1281</ul>
1282
1283<h3>1.7.3: Sep 29 1999</h3>
1284<ul>
1285 <li>portability problems fixed</li>
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +00001286 <li>snprintf was used unconditionnally, leading to link problems on system
Daniel Veillard35008381999-10-25 13:15:52 +00001287 were it's not available, fixed</li>
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +00001288</ul>
1289
1290<h3>1.7.1: Sep 24 1999</h3>
1291<ul>
1292 <li>The basic type for strings manipulated by libxml has been renamed in
1293 1.7.1 from <strong>CHAR</strong> to <strong>xmlChar</strong>. The reason
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +00001294 is that CHAR was conflicting with a predefined type on Windows. However
1295 on non WIN32 environment, compatibility is provided by the way of a
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +00001296 <strong>#define </strong>.</li>
1297 <li>Changed another error : the use of a structure field called errno, and
1298 leading to troubles on platforms where it's a macro</li>
1299</ul>
1300
1301<h3>1.7.0: sep 23 1999</h3>
1302<ul>
1303 <li>Added the ability to fetch remote DTD or parsed entities, see the <a
Daniel Veillard9cb5ff42001-01-29 08:22:21 +00001304 href="html/libxml-nanohttp.html">nanohttp</a> module.</li>
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +00001305 <li>Added an errno to report errors by another mean than a simple printf
1306 like callback</li>
1307 <li>Finished ID/IDREF support and checking when validation</li>
1308 <li>Serious memory leaks fixed (there is now a <a
Daniel Veillard9cb5ff42001-01-29 08:22:21 +00001309 href="html/libxml-xmlmemory.html">memory wrapper</a> module)</li>
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +00001310 <li>Improvement of <a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xpath">XPath</a>
1311 implementation</li>
1312 <li>Added an HTML parser front-end</li>
1313</ul>
1314
1315<h2><a name="XML">XML</a></h2>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00001316
Daniel Veillard402e8c82000-02-29 22:57:47 +00001317<p><a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml">XML is a standard</a> for
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +00001318markup-based structured documents. Here is <a name="example">an example XML
1319document</a>:</p>
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00001320<pre>&lt;?xml version="1.0"?&gt;
1321&lt;EXAMPLE prop1="gnome is great" prop2="&amp;amp; linux too"&gt;
1322 &lt;head&gt;
1323 &lt;title&gt;Welcome to Gnome&lt;/title&gt;
1324 &lt;/head&gt;
1325 &lt;chapter&gt;
1326 &lt;title&gt;The Linux adventure&lt;/title&gt;
1327 &lt;p&gt;bla bla bla ...&lt;/p&gt;
1328 &lt;image href="linus.gif"/&gt;
1329 &lt;p&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;
1330 &lt;/chapter&gt;
1331&lt;/EXAMPLE&gt;</pre>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00001332
Daniel Veillard402e8c82000-02-29 22:57:47 +00001333<p>The first line specifies that it's an XML document and gives useful
1334information about its encoding. Then the document is a text format whose
1335structure is specified by tags between brackets. <strong>Each tag opened has
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +00001336to be closed</strong>. XML is pedantic about this. However, if a tag is empty
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +00001337(no content), a single tag can serve as both the opening and closing tag if
1338it ends with <code>/&gt;</code> rather than with <code>&gt;</code>. Note
1339that, for example, the image tag has no content (just an attribute) and is
1340closed by ending the tag with <code>/&gt;</code>.</p>
Daniel Veillardccb09631998-10-27 06:21:04 +00001341
Daniel Veillard402e8c82000-02-29 22:57:47 +00001342<p>XML can be applied sucessfully to a wide range of uses, from long term
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +00001343structured document maintenance (where it follows the steps of SGML) to
1344simple data encoding mechanisms like configuration file formatting (glade),
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +00001345spreadsheets (gnumeric), or even shorter lived documents such as WebDAV where
1346it is used to encode remote calls between a client and a server.</p>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00001347
Daniel Veillard82687162001-01-22 15:32:01 +00001348<h2><a name="XSLT">XSLT</a></h2>
1349
Daniel Veillard6e6a6cc2001-02-15 15:55:44 +00001350<p>Check <a href="http://xmlsoft.org/XSLT">the separate libxslt page</a></p>
1351
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +00001352<p><a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xslt">XSL Transformations</a>, is a
1353language for transforming XML documents into other XML documents (or
1354HTML/textual output).</p>
Daniel Veillard82687162001-01-22 15:32:01 +00001355
1356<p>A separate library called libxslt is being built on top of libxml2. This
1357module "libxslt" can be found in the Gnome CVS base too.</p>
1358
Daniel Veillard383b1472001-01-23 11:39:52 +00001359<p>You can check the <a
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +00001360href="http://cvs.gnome.org/lxr/source/libxslt/FEATURES">features</a>
1361supported and the progresses on the <a
Daniel Veillard6dbcaf82002-02-20 14:37:47 +00001362href="http://cvs.gnome.org/lxr/source/libxslt/ChangeLog"
1363name="Changelog">Changelog</a></p>
1364
1365<h2><a name="Python">Python and bindings</a></h2>
1366
1367<p>There is a number of language bindings and wrappers available for libxml2,
1368the list below is not exhaustive. Please contact the <a
1369href="http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/xml-bindings">xml-bindings@gnome.org</a>
1370(<a href="http://mail.gnome.org/archives/xml-bindings/">archives</a>) in
1371order to get updates to this list or to discuss the specific topic of libxml2
1372or libxslt wrappers or bindings:</p>
1373<ul>
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +00001374 <li><a href="mailto:ari@lusis.org">Ari Johnson</a> provides a C++ wrapper
1375 for libxml:<br>
Daniel Veillard6dbcaf82002-02-20 14:37:47 +00001376 Website: <a
1377 href="http://lusis.org/~ari/xml++/">http://lusis.org/~ari/xml++/</a><br>
1378 Download: <a
1379 href="http://lusis.org/~ari/xml++/libxml++.tar.gz">http://lusis.org/~ari/xml++/libxml++.tar.gz</a></li>
1380 <li>There is another <a href="http://libgdome-cpp.berlios.de/">C++ wrapper
1381 based on the gdome2 </a>bindings maintained by Tobias Peters.</li>
1382 <li><a
1383 href="http://mail.gnome.org/archives/xml/2001-March/msg00014.html">Matt
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +00001384 Sergeant</a> developped <a
1385 href="http://axkit.org/download/">XML::LibXSLT</a>, a perl wrapper for
1386 libxml2/libxslt as part of the <a href="http://axkit.com/">AxKit XML
1387 application server</a></li>
1388 <li><a href="mailto:dkuhlman@cutter.rexx.com">Dave Kuhlman</a> provides and
1389 earlier version of the libxml/libxslt <a
Daniel Veillard6dbcaf82002-02-20 14:37:47 +00001390 href="http://www.rexx.com/~dkuhlman">wrappers for Python</a></li>
1391 <li>Petr Kozelka provides <a
1392 href="http://sourceforge.net/projects/libxml2-pas">Pascal units to glue
1393 libxml2</a> with Kylix, Delphi and other Pascal compilers</li>
Daniel Veillardb2fb8ed2002-04-01 09:33:12 +00001394 <li>Uwe Fechner also provides <a
1395 href="http://sourceforge.net/projects/idom2-pas/">idom2</a>, a DOM2
Daniel Veillard75794822002-04-11 16:24:32 +00001396 implementation for Kylix2/D5/D6 from Borland</li>
Daniel Veillard6dbcaf82002-02-20 14:37:47 +00001397 <li>Wai-Sun "Squidster" Chia provides <a
1398 href="http://www.rubycolor.org/arc/redist/">bindings for Ruby</a> and
1399 libxml2 bindings are also available in Ruby through the <a
1400 href="http://libgdome-ruby.berlios.de/">libgdome-ruby</a> module
1401 maintained by Tobias Peters.</li>
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +00001402 <li>Steve Ball and contributors maintains <a
1403 href="http://tclxml.sourceforge.net/">libxml2 and libxslt bindings for
1404 Tcl</a></li>
1405 <li>There is support for libxml2 in the DOM module of PHP.</li>
Daniel Veillard6dbcaf82002-02-20 14:37:47 +00001406</ul>
1407
1408<p>The distribution includes a set of Python bindings, which are garanteed to
1409be maintained as part of the library in the future, though the Python
Daniel Veillard0b79dfe2002-02-23 13:02:31 +00001410interface have not yet reached the maturity of the C API.</p>
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +00001411
1412<p>To install the Python bindings there are 2 options:</p>
Daniel Veillard0b79dfe2002-02-23 13:02:31 +00001413<ul>
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +00001414 <li>If you use an RPM based distribution, simply install the <a
1415 href="http://rpmfind.net/linux/rpm2html/search.php?query=libxml2-python">libxml2-python
1416 RPM</a> (and if needed the <a
1417 href="http://rpmfind.net/linux/rpm2html/search.php?query=libxslt-python">libxslt-python
1418 RPM</a>).</li>
1419 <li>Otherwise use the <a href="ftp://xmlsoft.org/python/">libxml2-python
1420 module distribution</a> corresponding to your installed version of
1421 libxml2 and libxslt. Note that to install it you will need both libxml2
1422 and libxslt installed and run "python setup.py build install" in the
1423 module tree.</li>
Daniel Veillard0b79dfe2002-02-23 13:02:31 +00001424</ul>
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +00001425
1426<p>The distribution includes a set of examples and regression tests for the
1427python bindings in the <code>python/tests</code> directory. Here are some
1428excepts from those tests:</p>
Daniel Veillard6dbcaf82002-02-20 14:37:47 +00001429
1430<h3>tst.py:</h3>
1431
1432<p>This is a basic test of the file interface and DOM navigation:</p>
1433<pre>import libxml2
1434
1435doc = libxml2.parseFile("tst.xml")
1436if doc.name != "tst.xml":
1437 print "doc.name failed"
1438 sys.exit(1)
1439root = doc.children
1440if root.name != "doc":
1441 print "root.name failed"
1442 sys.exit(1)
1443child = root.children
1444if child.name != "foo":
1445 print "child.name failed"
1446 sys.exit(1)
1447doc.freeDoc()</pre>
1448
1449<p>The Python module is called libxml2, parseFile is the equivalent of
1450xmlParseFile (most of the bindings are automatically generated, and the xml
1451prefix is removed and the casing convention are kept). All node seen at the
1452binding level share the same subset of accesors:</p>
1453<ul>
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +00001454 <li><code>name</code> : returns the node name</li>
1455 <li><code>type</code> : returns a string indicating the node
1456 typ<code>e</code></li>
1457 <li><code>content</code> : returns the content of the node, it is based on
1458 xmlNodeGetContent() and hence is recursive.</li>
1459 <li><code>parent</code> , <code>children</code>, <code>last</code>,
1460 <code>next</code>, <code>prev</code>, <code>doc</code>,
1461 <code>properties</code>: pointing to the associated element in the tree,
1462 those may return None in case no such link exists.</li>
Daniel Veillard6dbcaf82002-02-20 14:37:47 +00001463</ul>
1464
1465<p>Also note the need to explicitely deallocate documents with freeDoc() .
1466Reference counting for libxml2 trees would need quite a lot of work to
1467function properly, and rather than risk memory leaks if not implemented
1468correctly it sounds safer to have an explicit function to free a tree. The
1469wrapper python objects like doc, root or child are them automatically garbage
1470collected.</p>
1471
1472<h3>validate.py:</h3>
1473
1474<p>This test check the validation interfaces and redirection of error
1475messages:</p>
1476<pre>import libxml2
1477
1478#desactivate error messages from the validation
1479def noerr(ctx, str):
1480 pass
1481
1482libxml2.registerErrorHandler(noerr, None)
1483
1484ctxt = libxml2.createFileParserCtxt("invalid.xml")
1485ctxt.validate(1)
1486ctxt.parseDocument()
1487doc = ctxt.doc()
1488valid = ctxt.isValid()
1489doc.freeDoc()
1490if valid != 0:
1491 print "validity chec failed"</pre>
1492
1493<p>The first thing to notice is the call to registerErrorHandler(), it
1494defines a new error handler global to the library. It is used to avoid seeing
1495the error messages when trying to validate the invalid document.</p>
1496
1497<p>The main interest of that test is the creation of a parser context with
1498createFileParserCtxt() and how the behaviour can be changed before calling
1499parseDocument() . Similary the informations resulting from the parsing phase
1500are also available using context methods.</p>
1501
1502<p>Contexts like nodes are defined as class and the libxml2 wrappers maps the
1503C function interfaces in terms of objects method as much as possible. The
1504best to get a complete view of what methods are supported is to look at the
1505libxml2.py module containing all the wrappers.</p>
1506
1507<h3>push.py:</h3>
1508
1509<p>This test show how to activate the push parser interface:</p>
1510<pre>import libxml2
1511
1512ctxt = libxml2.createPushParser(None, "&lt;foo", 4, "test.xml")
1513ctxt.parseChunk("/&gt;", 2, 1)
1514doc = ctxt.doc()
1515
1516doc.freeDoc()</pre>
1517
1518<p>The context is created with a speciall call based on the
1519xmlCreatePushParser() from the C library. The first argument is an optional
1520SAX callback object, then the initial set of data, the lenght and the name of
1521the resource in case URI-References need to be computed by the parser.</p>
1522
1523<p>Then the data are pushed using the parseChunk() method, the last call
1524setting the thrird argument terminate to 1.</p>
1525
1526<h3>pushSAX.py:</h3>
1527
1528<p>this test show the use of the event based parsing interfaces. In this case
1529the parser does not build a document, but provides callback information as
1530the parser makes progresses analyzing the data being provided:</p>
1531<pre>import libxml2
1532log = ""
1533
1534class callback:
1535 def startDocument(self):
1536 global log
1537 log = log + "startDocument:"
1538
1539 def endDocument(self):
1540 global log
1541 log = log + "endDocument:"
1542
1543 def startElement(self, tag, attrs):
1544 global log
1545 log = log + "startElement %s %s:" % (tag, attrs)
1546
1547 def endElement(self, tag):
1548 global log
1549 log = log + "endElement %s:" % (tag)
1550
1551 def characters(self, data):
1552 global log
1553 log = log + "characters: %s:" % (data)
1554
1555 def warning(self, msg):
1556 global log
1557 log = log + "warning: %s:" % (msg)
1558
1559 def error(self, msg):
1560 global log
1561 log = log + "error: %s:" % (msg)
1562
1563 def fatalError(self, msg):
1564 global log
1565 log = log + "fatalError: %s:" % (msg)
1566
1567handler = callback()
1568
1569ctxt = libxml2.createPushParser(handler, "&lt;foo", 4, "test.xml")
1570chunk = " url='tst'&gt;b"
1571ctxt.parseChunk(chunk, len(chunk), 0)
1572chunk = "ar&lt;/foo&gt;"
1573ctxt.parseChunk(chunk, len(chunk), 1)
1574
Daniel Veillardfcbfa2d2002-02-21 17:54:27 +00001575reference = "startDocument:startElement foo {'url': 'tst'}:" + \
1576 "characters: bar:endElement foo:endDocument:"
Daniel Veillard6dbcaf82002-02-20 14:37:47 +00001577if log != reference:
1578 print "Error got: %s" % log
1579 print "Exprected: %s" % reference</pre>
1580
1581<p>The key object in that test is the handler, it provides a number of entry
1582points which can be called by the parser as it makes progresses to indicate
1583the information set obtained. The full set of callback is larger than what
1584the callback class in that specific example implements (see the SAX
1585definition for a complete list). The wrapper will only call those supplied by
1586the object when activated. The startElement receives the names of the element
1587and a dictionnary containing the attributes carried by this element.</p>
1588
1589<p>Also note that the reference string generated from the callback shows a
1590single character call even though the string "bar" is passed to the parser
1591from 2 different call to parseChunk()</p>
1592
1593<h3>xpath.py:</h3>
1594
1595<p>This is a basic test of XPath warppers support</p>
1596<pre>import libxml2
1597
1598doc = libxml2.parseFile("tst.xml")
1599ctxt = doc.xpathNewContext()
1600res = ctxt.xpathEval("//*")
1601if len(res) != 2:
1602 print "xpath query: wrong node set size"
1603 sys.exit(1)
1604if res[0].name != "doc" or res[1].name != "foo":
1605 print "xpath query: wrong node set value"
1606 sys.exit(1)
1607doc.freeDoc()
1608ctxt.xpathFreeContext()</pre>
1609
1610<p>This test parses a file, then create an XPath context to evaluate XPath
1611expression on it. The xpathEval() method execute an XPath query and returns
1612the result mapped in a Python way. String and numbers are natively converted,
1613and node sets are returned as a tuple of libxml2 Python nodes wrappers. Like
1614the document, the XPath context need to be freed explicitely, also not that
1615the result of the XPath query may point back to the document tree and hence
1616the document must be freed after the result of the query is used.</p>
1617
1618<h3>xpathext.py:</h3>
1619
1620<p>This test shows how to extend the XPath engine with functions written in
1621python:</p>
1622<pre>import libxml2
1623
1624def foo(ctx, x):
1625 return x + 1
1626
1627doc = libxml2.parseFile("tst.xml")
1628ctxt = doc.xpathNewContext()
1629libxml2.registerXPathFunction(ctxt._o, "foo", None, foo)
1630res = ctxt.xpathEval("foo(1)")
1631if res != 2:
1632 print "xpath extension failure"
1633doc.freeDoc()
1634ctxt.xpathFreeContext()</pre>
1635
1636<p>Note how the extension function is registered with the context (but that
1637part is not yet finalized, ths may change slightly in the future).</p>
1638
1639<h3>tstxpath.py:</h3>
1640
1641<p>This test is similar to the previousone but shows how the extension
1642function can access the XPath evaluation context:</p>
1643<pre>def foo(ctx, x):
1644 global called
1645
1646 #
1647 # test that access to the XPath evaluation contexts
1648 #
1649 pctxt = libxml2.xpathParserContext(_obj=ctx)
1650 ctxt = pctxt.context()
1651 called = ctxt.function()
1652 return x + 1</pre>
1653
1654<p>All the interfaces around the XPath parser(or rather evaluation) context
1655are not finalized, but it should be sufficient to do contextual work at the
1656evaluation point.</p>
1657
1658<h3>Memory debugging:</h3>
1659
1660<p>last but not least, all tests starts with the following prologue:</p>
1661<pre>#memory debug specific
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +00001662libxml2.debugMemory(1)</pre>
Daniel Veillard6dbcaf82002-02-20 14:37:47 +00001663
1664<p>and ends with the following epilogue:</p>
1665<pre>#memory debug specific
1666libxml2.cleanupParser()
1667if libxml2.debugMemory(1) == 0:
1668 print "OK"
1669else:
1670 print "Memory leak %d bytes" % (libxml2.debugMemory(1))
1671 libxml2.dumpMemory()</pre>
1672
1673<p>Those activate the memory debugging interface of libxml2 where all
1674alloacted block in the library are tracked. The prologue then cleans up the
1675library state and checks that all allocated memory has been freed. If not it
1676calls dumpMemory() which saves that list in a <code>.memdump</code> file.</p>
Daniel Veillard82687162001-01-22 15:32:01 +00001677
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00001678<h2><a name="architecture">libxml architecture</a></h2>
Daniel Veillard4540be42000-08-19 16:40:28 +00001679
Daniel Veillardec70e912001-02-26 20:10:45 +00001680<p>Libxml is made of multiple components; some of them are optional, and most
1681of the block interfaces are public. The main components are:</p>
Daniel Veillard4540be42000-08-19 16:40:28 +00001682<ul>
1683 <li>an Input/Output layer</li>
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +00001684 <li>FTP and HTTP client layers (optional)</li>
Daniel Veillard4540be42000-08-19 16:40:28 +00001685 <li>an Internationalization layer managing the encodings support</li>
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +00001686 <li>a URI module</li>
Daniel Veillard4540be42000-08-19 16:40:28 +00001687 <li>the XML parser and its basic SAX interface</li>
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +00001688 <li>an HTML parser using the same SAX interface (optional)</li>
Daniel Veillard4540be42000-08-19 16:40:28 +00001689 <li>a SAX tree module to build an in-memory DOM representation</li>
1690 <li>a tree module to manipulate the DOM representation</li>
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +00001691 <li>a validation module using the DOM representation (optional)</li>
Daniel Veillard4540be42000-08-19 16:40:28 +00001692 <li>an XPath module for global lookup in a DOM representation
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +00001693 (optional)</li>
1694 <li>a debug module (optional)</li>
Daniel Veillard4540be42000-08-19 16:40:28 +00001695</ul>
1696
1697<p>Graphically this gives the following:</p>
1698
1699<p><img src="libxml.gif" alt="a graphical view of the various"></p>
1700
1701<p></p>
1702
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +00001703<h2><a name="tree">The tree output</a></h2>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00001704
1705<p>The parser returns a tree built during the document analysis. The value
Daniel Veillard402e8c82000-02-29 22:57:47 +00001706returned is an <strong>xmlDocPtr</strong> (i.e., a pointer to an
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +00001707<strong>xmlDoc</strong> structure). This structure contains information such
Daniel Veillard306be992000-07-03 12:38:45 +00001708as the file name, the document type, and a <strong>children</strong> pointer
1709which is the root of the document (or more exactly the first child under the
1710root which is the document). The tree is made of <strong>xmlNode</strong>s,
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +00001711chained in double-linked lists of siblings and with a children&lt;-&gt;parent
Daniel Veillard306be992000-07-03 12:38:45 +00001712relationship. An xmlNode can also carry properties (a chain of xmlAttr
1713structures). An attribute may have a value which is a list of TEXT or
1714ENTITY_REF nodes.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00001715
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00001716<p>Here is an example (erroneous with respect to the XML spec since there
1717should be only one ELEMENT under the root):</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00001718
1719<p><img src="structure.gif" alt=" structure.gif "></p>
1720
1721<p>In the source package there is a small program (not installed by default)
Daniel Veillard361d8452000-04-03 19:48:13 +00001722called <strong>xmllint</strong> which parses XML files given as argument and
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +00001723prints them back as parsed. This is useful for detecting errors both in XML
1724code and in the XML parser itself. It has an option <strong>--debug</strong>
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +00001725which prints the actual in-memory structure of the document; here is the
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +00001726result with the <a href="#example">example</a> given before:</p>
Daniel Veillard10c6a8f1998-10-28 01:00:12 +00001727<pre>DOCUMENT
1728version=1.0
1729standalone=true
1730 ELEMENT EXAMPLE
1731 ATTRIBUTE prop1
1732 TEXT
1733 content=gnome is great
1734 ATTRIBUTE prop2
1735 ENTITY_REF
1736 TEXT
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +00001737 content= linux too
Daniel Veillard402e8c82000-02-29 22:57:47 +00001738 ELEMENT head
Daniel Veillard10c6a8f1998-10-28 01:00:12 +00001739 ELEMENT title
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +00001740 TEXT
1741 content=Welcome to Gnome
Daniel Veillard10c6a8f1998-10-28 01:00:12 +00001742 ELEMENT chapter
1743 ELEMENT title
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +00001744 TEXT
1745 content=The Linux adventure
Daniel Veillard10c6a8f1998-10-28 01:00:12 +00001746 ELEMENT p
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +00001747 TEXT
1748 content=bla bla bla ...
Daniel Veillard10c6a8f1998-10-28 01:00:12 +00001749 ELEMENT image
1750 ATTRIBUTE href
1751 TEXT
1752 content=linus.gif
1753 ELEMENT p
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +00001754 TEXT
1755 content=...</pre>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00001756
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00001757<p>This should be useful for learning the internal representation model.</p>
Daniel Veillardccb09631998-10-27 06:21:04 +00001758
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +00001759<h2><a name="interface">The SAX interface</a></h2>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00001760
Daniel Veillard402e8c82000-02-29 22:57:47 +00001761<p>Sometimes the DOM tree output is just too large to fit reasonably into
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00001762memory. In that case (and if you don't expect to save back the XML document
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +00001763loaded using libxml), it's better to use the SAX interface of libxml. SAX is
1764a <strong>callback-based interface</strong> to the parser. Before parsing,
1765the application layer registers a customized set of callbacks which are
1766called by the library as it progresses through the XML input.</p>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00001767
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00001768<p>To get more detailed step-by-step guidance on using the SAX interface of
Daniel Veillard4540be42000-08-19 16:40:28 +00001769libxml, see the <a
1770href="http://www.daa.com.au/~james/gnome/xml-sax/xml-sax.html">nice
1771documentation</a>.written by <a href="mailto:james@daa.com.au">James
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00001772Henstridge</a>.</p>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00001773
1774<p>You can debug the SAX behaviour by using the <strong>testSAX</strong>
1775program located in the gnome-xml module (it's usually not shipped in the
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00001776binary packages of libxml, but you can find it in the tar source
Daniel Veillard402e8c82000-02-29 22:57:47 +00001777distribution). Here is the sequence of callbacks that would be reported by
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00001778testSAX when parsing the example XML document shown earlier:</p>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00001779<pre>SAX.setDocumentLocator()
1780SAX.startDocument()
1781SAX.getEntity(amp)
1782SAX.startElement(EXAMPLE, prop1='gnome is great', prop2='&amp;amp; linux too')
1783SAX.characters( , 3)
1784SAX.startElement(head)
1785SAX.characters( , 4)
1786SAX.startElement(title)
1787SAX.characters(Welcome to Gnome, 16)
1788SAX.endElement(title)
1789SAX.characters( , 3)
1790SAX.endElement(head)
1791SAX.characters( , 3)
1792SAX.startElement(chapter)
1793SAX.characters( , 4)
1794SAX.startElement(title)
1795SAX.characters(The Linux adventure, 19)
1796SAX.endElement(title)
1797SAX.characters( , 4)
1798SAX.startElement(p)
1799SAX.characters(bla bla bla ..., 15)
1800SAX.endElement(p)
1801SAX.characters( , 4)
1802SAX.startElement(image, href='linus.gif')
1803SAX.endElement(image)
1804SAX.characters( , 4)
1805SAX.startElement(p)
1806SAX.characters(..., 3)
1807SAX.endElement(p)
1808SAX.characters( , 3)
1809SAX.endElement(chapter)
1810SAX.characters( , 1)
1811SAX.endElement(EXAMPLE)
1812SAX.endDocument()</pre>
1813
Daniel Veillardec70e912001-02-26 20:10:45 +00001814<p>Most of the other interfaces of libxml are based on the DOM tree-building
1815facility, so nearly everything up to the end of this document presupposes the
1816use of the standard DOM tree build. Note that the DOM tree itself is built by
1817a set of registered default callbacks, without internal specific
1818interface.</p>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00001819
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00001820<h2><a name="Validation">Validation &amp; DTDs</a></h2>
1821
1822<p>Table of Content:</p>
1823<ol>
1824 <li><a href="#General5">General overview</a></li>
1825 <li><a href="#definition">The definition</a></li>
1826 <li><a href="#Simple">Simple rules</a>
1827 <ol>
Daniel Veillard9c466822001-10-25 12:03:39 +00001828 <li><a href="#reference">How to reference a DTD from a document</a></li>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00001829 <li><a href="#Declaring">Declaring elements</a></li>
1830 <li><a href="#Declaring1">Declaring attributes</a></li>
1831 </ol>
1832 </li>
1833 <li><a href="#Some">Some examples</a></li>
1834 <li><a href="#validate">How to validate</a></li>
1835 <li><a href="#Other">Other resources</a></li>
1836</ol>
1837
1838<h3><a name="General5">General overview</a></h3>
1839
1840<p>Well what is validation and what is a DTD ?</p>
1841
1842<p>DTD is the acronym for Document Type Definition. This is a description of
1843the content for a familly of XML files. This is part of the XML 1.0
1844specification, and alows to describe and check that a given document instance
1845conforms to a set of rules detailing its structure and content.</p>
1846
1847<p>Validation is the process of checking a document against a DTD (more
1848generally against a set of construction rules).</p>
1849
1850<p>The validation process and building DTDs are the two most difficult parts
1851of the XML life cycle. Briefly a DTD defines all the possibles element to be
1852found within your document, what is the formal shape of your document tree
1853(by defining the allowed content of an element, either text, a regular
1854expression for the allowed list of children, or mixed content i.e. both text
1855and children). The DTD also defines the allowed attributes for all elements
1856and the types of the attributes.</p>
1857
1858<h3><a name="definition1">The definition</a></h3>
1859
1860<p>The <a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml">W3C XML Recommendation</a> (<a
1861href="http://www.xml.com/axml/axml.html">Tim Bray's annotated version of
1862Rev1</a>):</p>
1863<ul>
1864 <li><a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml#elemdecls">Declaring
1865 elements</a></li>
1866 <li><a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml#attdecls">Declaring
1867 attributes</a></li>
1868</ul>
1869
1870<p>(unfortunately) all this is inherited from the SGML world, the syntax is
1871ancient...</p>
1872
1873<h3><a name="Simple1">Simple rules</a></h3>
1874
1875<p>Writing DTD can be done in multiple ways, the rules to build them if you
1876need something fixed or something which can evolve over time can be radically
1877different. Really complex DTD like Docbook ones are flexible but quite harder
1878to design. I will just focuse on DTDs for a formats with a fixed simple
1879structure. It is just a set of basic rules, and definitely not exhaustive nor
1880useable for complex DTD design.</p>
1881
1882<h4><a name="reference1">How to reference a DTD from a document</a>:</h4>
1883
1884<p>Assuming the top element of the document is <code>spec</code> and the dtd
1885is placed in the file <code>mydtd</code> in the subdirectory
1886<code>dtds</code> of the directory from where the document were loaded:</p>
1887
1888<p><code>&lt;!DOCTYPE spec SYSTEM "dtds/mydtd"&gt;</code></p>
1889
1890<p>Notes:</p>
1891<ul>
1892 <li>the system string is actually an URI-Reference (as defined in <a
1893 href="http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2396.txt">RFC 2396</a>) so you can use a
1894 full URL string indicating the location of your DTD on the Web, this is a
1895 really good thing to do if you want others to validate your document</li>
1896 <li>it is also possible to associate a <code>PUBLIC</code> identifier (a
1897 magic string) so that the DTd is looked up in catalogs on the client side
1898 without having to locate it on the web</li>
1899 <li>a dtd contains a set of elements and attributes declarations, but they
1900 don't define what the root of the document should be. This is explicitely
1901 told to the parser/validator as the first element of the
1902 <code>DOCTYPE</code> declaration.</li>
1903</ul>
1904
1905<h4><a name="Declaring2">Declaring elements</a>:</h4>
1906
1907<p>The following declares an element <code>spec</code>:</p>
1908
1909<p><code>&lt;!ELEMENT spec (front, body, back?)&gt;</code></p>
1910
1911<p>it also expresses that the spec element contains one <code>front</code>,
1912one <code>body</code> and one optionnal <code>back</code> children elements
1913in this order. The declaration of one element of the structure and its
1914content are done in a single declaration. Similary the following declares
1915<code>div1</code> elements:</p>
1916
Daniel Veillard51737272002-01-23 23:10:38 +00001917<p><code>&lt;!ELEMENT div1 (head, (p | list | note)*, div2?)&gt;</code></p>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00001918
1919<p>means div1 contains one <code>head</code> then a series of optional
1920<code>p</code>, <code>list</code>s and <code>note</code>s and then an
1921optional <code>div2</code>. And last but not least an element can contain
1922text:</p>
1923
1924<p><code>&lt;!ELEMENT b (#PCDATA)&gt;</code></p>
1925
1926<p><code>b</code> contains text or being of mixed content (text and elements
1927in no particular order):</p>
1928
1929<p><code>&lt;!ELEMENT p (#PCDATA|a|ul|b|i|em)*&gt;</code></p>
1930
1931<p><code>p </code>can contain text or <code>a</code>, <code>ul</code>,
1932<code>b</code>, <code>i </code>or <code>em</code> elements in no particular
1933order.</p>
1934
1935<h4><a name="Declaring1">Declaring attributes</a>:</h4>
1936
1937<p>again the attributes declaration includes their content definition:</p>
1938
1939<p><code>&lt;!ATTLIST termdef name CDATA #IMPLIED&gt;</code></p>
1940
1941<p>means that the element <code>termdef</code> can have a <code>name</code>
1942attribute containing text (<code>CDATA</code>) and which is optionnal
1943(<code>#IMPLIED</code>). The attribute value can also be defined within a
1944set:</p>
1945
1946<p><code>&lt;!ATTLIST list type (bullets|ordered|glossary)
1947"ordered"&gt;</code></p>
1948
1949<p>means <code>list</code> element have a <code>type</code> attribute with 3
1950allowed values "bullets", "ordered" or "glossary" and which default to
1951"ordered" if the attribute is not explicitely specified.</p>
1952
1953<p>The content type of an attribute can be text (<code>CDATA</code>),
1954anchor/reference/references
1955(<code>ID</code>/<code>IDREF</code>/<code>IDREFS</code>), entity(ies)
1956(<code>ENTITY</code>/<code>ENTITIES</code>) or name(s)
1957(<code>NMTOKEN</code>/<code>NMTOKENS</code>). The following defines that a
1958<code>chapter</code> element can have an optional <code>id</code> attribute
1959of type <code>ID</code>, usable for reference from attribute of type
1960IDREF:</p>
1961
1962<p><code>&lt;!ATTLIST chapter id ID #IMPLIED&gt;</code></p>
1963
1964<p>The last value of an attribute definition can be <code>#REQUIRED
1965</code>meaning that the attribute has to be given, <code>#IMPLIED</code>
1966meaning that it is optional, or the default value (possibly prefixed by
1967<code>#FIXED</code> if it is the only allowed).</p>
1968
1969<p>Notes:</p>
1970<ul>
1971 <li>usually the attributes pertaining to a given element are declared in a
1972 single expression, but it is just a convention adopted by a lot of DTD
1973 writers:
1974 <pre>&lt;!ATTLIST termdef
1975 id ID #REQUIRED
1976 name CDATA #IMPLIED&gt;</pre>
1977 <p>The previous construct defines both <code>id</code> and
1978 <code>name</code> attributes for the element <code>termdef</code></p>
1979 </li>
1980</ul>
1981
1982<h3><a name="Some1">Some examples</a></h3>
1983
1984<p>The directory <code>test/valid/dtds/</code> in the libxml distribution
1985contains some complex DTD examples. The <code>test/valid/dia.xml</code>
1986example shows an XML file where the simple DTD is directly included within
1987the document.</p>
1988
1989<h3><a name="validate1">How to validate</a></h3>
1990
1991<p>The simplest is to use the xmllint program comming with libxml. The
1992<code>--valid</code> option turn on validation of the files given as input,
1993for example the following validates a copy of the first revision of the XML
19941.0 specification:</p>
1995
1996<p><code>xmllint --valid --noout test/valid/REC-xml-19980210.xml</code></p>
1997
1998<p>the -- noout is used to not output the resulting tree.</p>
1999
2000<p>The <code>--dtdvalid dtd</code> allows to validate the document(s) against
2001a given DTD.</p>
2002
2003<p>Libxml exports an API to handle DTDs and validation, check the <a
2004href="http://xmlsoft.org/html/libxml-valid.html">associated
2005description</a>.</p>
2006
2007<h3><a name="Other1">Other resources</a></h3>
2008
2009<p>DTDs are as old as SGML. So there may be a number of examples on-line, I
2010will just list one for now, others pointers welcome:</p>
2011<ul>
2012 <li><a href="http://www.xml101.com:8081/dtd/">XML-101 DTD</a></li>
2013</ul>
2014
2015<p>I suggest looking at the examples found under test/valid/dtd and any of
2016the large number of books available on XML. The dia example in test/valid
2017should be both simple and complete enough to allow you to build your own.</p>
2018
2019<p></p>
2020
2021<h2><a name="Memory">Memory Management</a></h2>
2022
2023<p>Table of Content:</p>
2024<ol>
2025 <li><a href="#General3">General overview</a></li>
Daniel Veillard9c466822001-10-25 12:03:39 +00002026 <li><a href="#setting">Setting libxml set of memory routines</a></li>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002027 <li><a href="#cleanup">Cleaning up after parsing</a></li>
2028 <li><a href="#Debugging">Debugging routines</a></li>
2029 <li><a href="#General4">General memory requirements</a></li>
2030</ol>
2031
2032<h3><a name="General3">General overview</a></h3>
2033
2034<p>The module <code><a
2035href="http://xmlsoft.org/html/libxml-xmlmemory.html">xmlmemory.h</a></code>
2036provides the interfaces to the libxml memory system:</p>
2037<ul>
2038 <li>libxml does not use the libc memory allocator directly but xmlFree(),
2039 xmlMalloc() and xmlRealloc()</li>
2040 <li>those routines can be reallocated to a specific set of routine, by
2041 default the libc ones i.e. free(), malloc() and realloc()</li>
2042 <li>the xmlmemory.c module includes a set of debugging routine</li>
2043</ul>
2044
2045<h3><a name="setting">Setting libxml set of memory routines</a></h3>
2046
2047<p>It is sometimes useful to not use the default memory allocator, either for
2048debugging, analysis or to implement a specific behaviour on memory management
2049(like on embedded systems). Two function calls are available to do so:</p>
2050<ul>
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +00002051 <li><a href="http://xmlsoft.org/html/libxml-xmlmemory.html">xmlMemGet
2052 ()</a> which return the current set of functions in use by the parser</li>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002053 <li><a
2054 href="http://xmlsoft.org/html/libxml-xmlmemory.html">xmlMemSetup()</a>
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +00002055 which allow to set up a new set of memory allocation functions</li>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002056</ul>
2057
2058<p>Of course a call to xmlMemSetup() should probably be done before calling
2059any other libxml routines (unless you are sure your allocations routines are
2060compatibles).</p>
2061
2062<h3><a name="cleanup">Cleaning up after parsing</a></h3>
2063
2064<p>Libxml is not stateless, there is a few set of memory structures needing
2065allocation before the parser is fully functionnal (some encoding structures
2066for example). This also mean that once parsing is finished there is a tiny
2067amount of memory (a few hundred bytes) which can be recollected if you don't
2068reuse the parser immediately:</p>
2069<ul>
2070 <li><a href="http://xmlsoft.org/html/libxml-parser.html">xmlCleanupParser
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +00002071 ()</a> is a centralized routine to free the parsing states. Note that it
2072 won't deallocate any produced tree if any (use the xmlFreeDoc() and
2073 related routines for this).</li>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002074 <li><a href="http://xmlsoft.org/html/libxml-parser.html">xmlInitParser
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +00002075 ()</a> is the dual routine allowing to preallocate the parsing state
2076 which can be useful for example to avoid initialization reentrancy
2077 problems when using libxml in multithreaded applications</li>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002078</ul>
2079
2080<p>Generally xmlCleanupParser() is safe, if needed the state will be rebuild
2081at the next invocation of parser routines, but be careful of the consequences
2082in multithreaded applications.</p>
2083
2084<h3><a name="Debugging">Debugging routines</a></h3>
2085
2086<p>When configured using --with-mem-debug flag (off by default), libxml uses
2087a set of memory allocation debugging routineskeeping track of all allocated
2088blocks and the location in the code where the routine was called. A couple of
2089other debugging routines allow to dump the memory allocated infos to a file
2090or call a specific routine when a given block number is allocated:</p>
2091<ul>
2092 <li><a
2093 href="http://xmlsoft.org/html/libxml-xmlmemory.html">xmlMallocLoc()</a>
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +00002094 <a
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002095 href="http://xmlsoft.org/html/libxml-xmlmemory.html">xmlReallocLoc()</a>
2096 and <a
2097 href="http://xmlsoft.org/html/libxml-xmlmemory.html">xmlMemStrdupLoc()</a>
2098 are the memory debugging replacement allocation routines</li>
2099 <li><a href="http://xmlsoft.org/html/libxml-xmlmemory.html">xmlMemoryDump
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +00002100 ()</a> dumps all the informations about the allocated memory block lefts
2101 in the <code>.memdump</code> file</li>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002102</ul>
2103
2104<p>When developping libxml memory debug is enabled, the tests programs call
2105xmlMemoryDump () and the "make test" regression tests will check for any
2106memory leak during the full regression test sequence, this helps a lot
2107ensuring that libxml does not leak memory and bullet proof memory
2108allocations use (some libc implementations are known to be far too permissive
2109resulting in major portability problems!).</p>
2110
2111<p>If the .memdump reports a leak, it displays the allocation function and
2112also tries to give some informations about the content and structure of the
2113allocated blocks left. This is sufficient in most cases to find the culprit,
2114but not always. Assuming the allocation problem is reproductible, it is
2115possible to find more easilly:</p>
2116<ol>
2117 <li>write down the block number xxxx not allocated</li>
Daniel Veillard75794822002-04-11 16:24:32 +00002118 <li>export the environement variable XML_MEM_BREAKPOINT=xxxx , the easiest
2119 when using GDB is to simply give the command
2120 <p><code>set environment XML_MEM_BREAKPOINT xxxx</code></p>
2121 <p>before running the program.</p>
2122 </li>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002123 <li>run the program under a debugger and set a breakpoint on
2124 xmlMallocBreakpoint() a specific function called when this precise block
2125 is allocated</li>
2126 <li>when the breakpoint is reached you can then do a fine analysis of the
2127 allocation an step to see the condition resulting in the missing
2128 deallocation.</li>
2129</ol>
2130
2131<p>I used to use a commercial tool to debug libxml memory problems but after
2132noticing that it was not detecting memory leaks that simple mechanism was
Daniel Veillard75794822002-04-11 16:24:32 +00002133used and proved extremely efficient until now. Lately I have also used <a
2134href="http://developer.kde.org/~sewardj/">valgrind</a> with quite some
2135success, it is tied to the i386 architecture since it works by emulating the
2136processor and instruction set, it is slow but extremely efficient, i.e. it
2137spot memory usage errors in a very precise way.</p>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002138
2139<h3><a name="General4">General memory requirements</a></h3>
2140
2141<p>How much libxml memory require ? It's hard to tell in average it depends
2142of a number of things:</p>
2143<ul>
2144 <li>the parser itself should work in a fixed amout of memory, except for
2145 information maintained about the stacks of names and entities locations.
2146 The I/O and encoding handlers will probably account for a few KBytes.
2147 This is true for both the XML and HTML parser (though the HTML parser
2148 need more state).</li>
2149 <li>If you are generating the DOM tree then memory requirements will grow
2150 nearly lineary with the size of the data. In general for a balanced
2151 textual document the internal memory requirement is about 4 times the
2152 size of the UTF8 serialization of this document (exmple the XML-1.0
2153 recommendation is a bit more of 150KBytes and takes 650KBytes of main
2154 memory when parsed). Validation will add a amount of memory required for
2155 maintaining the external Dtd state which should be linear with the
2156 complexity of the content model defined by the Dtd</li>
2157 <li>If you don't care about the advanced features of libxml like
2158 validation, DOM, XPath or XPointer, but really need to work fixed memory
2159 requirements, then the SAX interface should be used.</li>
2160</ul>
2161
2162<p></p>
2163
2164<h2><a name="Encodings">Encodings support</a></h2>
2165
2166<p>Table of Content:</p>
2167<ol>
2168 <li><a href="encoding.html#What">What does internationalization support
2169 mean ?</a></li>
2170 <li><a href="encoding.html#internal">The internal encoding, how and
2171 why</a></li>
2172 <li><a href="encoding.html#implemente">How is it implemented ?</a></li>
2173 <li><a href="encoding.html#Default">Default supported encodings</a></li>
2174 <li><a href="encoding.html#extend">How to extend the existing
2175 support</a></li>
2176</ol>
2177
2178<h3><a name="What">What does internationalization support mean ?</a></h3>
2179
2180<p>XML was designed from the start to allow the support of any character set
2181by using Unicode. Any conformant XML parser has to support the UTF-8 and
2182UTF-16 default encodings which can both express the full unicode ranges. UTF8
2183is a variable length encoding whose greatest point are to resuse the same
2184emcoding for ASCII and to save space for Western encodings, but it is a bit
2185more complex to handle in practice. UTF-16 use 2 bytes per characters (and
2186sometimes combines two pairs), it makes implementation easier, but looks a
2187bit overkill for Western languages encoding. Moreover the XML specification
2188allows document to be encoded in other encodings at the condition that they
2189are clearly labelled as such. For example the following is a wellformed XML
2190document encoded in ISO-8859 1 and using accentuated letter that we French
2191likes for both markup and content:</p>
2192<pre>&lt;?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?&gt;
2193&lt;très&gt;là&lt;/très&gt;</pre>
2194
2195<p>Having internationalization support in libxml means the foolowing:</p>
2196<ul>
2197 <li>the document is properly parsed</li>
2198 <li>informations about it's encoding are saved</li>
2199 <li>it can be modified</li>
2200 <li>it can be saved in its original encoding</li>
2201 <li>it can also be saved in another encoding supported by libxml (for
2202 example straight UTF8 or even an ASCII form)</li>
2203</ul>
2204
2205<p>Another very important point is that the whole libxml API, with the
2206exception of a few routines to read with a specific encoding or save to a
2207specific encoding, is completely agnostic about the original encoding of the
2208document.</p>
2209
2210<p>It should be noted too that the HTML parser embedded in libxml now obbey
2211the same rules too, the following document will be (as of 2.2.2) handled in
2212an internationalized fashion by libxml too:</p>
2213<pre>&lt;!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN"
2214 "http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd"&gt;
2215&lt;html lang="fr"&gt;
2216&lt;head&gt;
2217 &lt;META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Type" CONTENT="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1"&gt;
2218&lt;/head&gt;
2219&lt;body&gt;
2220&lt;p&gt;W3C crée des standards pour le Web.&lt;/body&gt;
2221&lt;/html&gt;</pre>
2222
2223<h3><a name="internal">The internal encoding, how and why</a></h3>
2224
2225<p>One of the core decision was to force all documents to be converted to a
2226default internal encoding, and that encoding to be UTF-8, here are the
2227rationale for those choices:</p>
2228<ul>
2229 <li>keeping the native encoding in the internal form would force the libxml
2230 users (or the code associated) to be fully aware of the encoding of the
2231 original document, for examples when adding a text node to a document,
2232 the content would have to be provided in the document encoding, i.e. the
2233 client code would have to check it before hand, make sure it's conformant
2234 to the encoding, etc ... Very hard in practice, though in some specific
2235 cases this may make sense.</li>
2236 <li>the second decision was which encoding. From the XML spec only UTF8 and
2237 UTF16 really makes sense as being the two only encodings for which there
2238 is amndatory support. UCS-4 (32 bits fixed size encoding) could be
2239 considered an intelligent choice too since it's a direct Unicode mapping
2240 support. I selected UTF-8 on the basis of efficiency and compatibility
2241 with surrounding software:
2242 <ul>
2243 <li>UTF-8 while a bit more complex to convert from/to (i.e. slightly
2244 more costly to import and export CPU wise) is also far more compact
2245 than UTF-16 (and UCS-4) for a majority of the documents I see it used
2246 for right now (RPM RDF catalogs, advogato data, various configuration
2247 file formats, etc.) and the key point for today's computer
2248 architecture is efficient uses of caches. If one nearly double the
2249 memory requirement to store the same amount of data, this will trash
2250 caches (main memory/external caches/internal caches) and my take is
2251 that this harms the system far more than the CPU requirements needed
2252 for the conversion to UTF-8</li>
2253 <li>Most of libxml version 1 users were using it with straight ASCII
2254 most of the time, doing the conversion with an internal encoding
2255 requiring all their code to be rewritten was a serious show-stopper
2256 for using UTF-16 or UCS-4.</li>
2257 <li>UTF-8 is being used as the de-facto internal encoding standard for
2258 related code like the <a href="http://www.pango.org/">pango</a>
2259 upcoming Gnome text widget, and a lot of Unix code (yep another place
2260 where Unix programmer base takes a different approach from Microsoft
2261 - they are using UTF-16)</li>
2262 </ul>
2263 </li>
2264</ul>
2265
2266<p>What does this mean in practice for the libxml user:</p>
2267<ul>
2268 <li>xmlChar, the libxml data type is a byte, those bytes must be assembled
2269 as UTF-8 valid strings. The proper way to terminate an xmlChar * string
2270 is simply to append 0 byte, as usual.</li>
2271 <li>One just need to make sure that when using chars outside the ASCII set,
2272 the values has been properly converted to UTF-8</li>
2273</ul>
2274
2275<h3><a name="implemente">How is it implemented ?</a></h3>
2276
2277<p>Let's describe how all this works within libxml, basically the I18N
2278(internationalization) support get triggered only during I/O operation, i.e.
2279when reading a document or saving one. Let's look first at the reading
2280sequence:</p>
2281<ol>
2282 <li>when a document is processed, we usually don't know the encoding, a
2283 simple heuristic allows to detect UTF-18 and UCS-4 from whose where the
2284 ASCII range (0-0x7F) maps with ASCII</li>
2285 <li>the xml declaration if available is parsed, including the encoding
2286 declaration. At that point, if the autodetected encoding is different
2287 from the one declared a call to xmlSwitchEncoding() is issued.</li>
2288 <li>If there is no encoding declaration, then the input has to be in either
2289 UTF-8 or UTF-16, if it is not then at some point when processing the
2290 input, the converter/checker of UTF-8 form will raise an encoding error.
2291 You may end-up with a garbled document, or no document at all ! Example:
2292 <pre>~/XML -&gt; ./xmllint err.xml
2293err.xml:1: error: Input is not proper UTF-8, indicate encoding !
2294&lt;très&gt;là&lt;/très&gt;
2295 ^
2296err.xml:1: error: Bytes: 0xE8 0x73 0x3E 0x6C
2297&lt;très&gt;là&lt;/très&gt;
2298 ^</pre>
2299 </li>
2300 <li>xmlSwitchEncoding() does an encoding name lookup, canonalize it, and
2301 then search the default registered encoding converters for that encoding.
2302 If it's not within the default set and iconv() support has been compiled
2303 it, it will ask iconv for such an encoder. If this fails then the parser
2304 will report an error and stops processing:
2305 <pre>~/XML -&gt; ./xmllint err2.xml
2306err2.xml:1: error: Unsupported encoding UnsupportedEnc
2307&lt;?xml version="1.0" encoding="UnsupportedEnc"?&gt;
2308 ^</pre>
2309 </li>
2310 <li>From that point the encoder process progressingly the input (it is
2311 plugged as a front-end to the I/O module) for that entity. It captures
2312 and convert on-the-fly the document to be parsed to UTF-8. The parser
2313 itself just does UTF-8 checking of this input and process it
2314 transparently. The only difference is that the encoding information has
2315 been added to the parsing context (more precisely to the input
2316 corresponding to this entity).</li>
2317 <li>The result (when using DOM) is an internal form completely in UTF-8
2318 with just an encoding information on the document node.</li>
2319</ol>
2320
2321<p>Ok then what's happen when saving the document (assuming you
2322colllected/built an xmlDoc DOM like structure) ? It depends on the function
2323called, xmlSaveFile() will just try to save in the original encoding, while
2324xmlSaveFileTo() and xmlSaveFileEnc() can optionally save to a given
2325encoding:</p>
2326<ol>
2327 <li>if no encoding is given, libxml will look for an encoding value
2328 associated to the document and if it exists will try to save to that
2329 encoding,
2330 <p>otherwise everything is written in the internal form, i.e. UTF-8</p>
2331 </li>
2332 <li>so if an encoding was specified, either at the API level or on the
2333 document, libxml will again canonalize the encoding name, lookup for a
2334 converter in the registered set or through iconv. If not found the
2335 function will return an error code</li>
2336 <li>the converter is placed before the I/O buffer layer, as another kind of
2337 buffer, then libxml will simply push the UTF-8 serialization to through
2338 that buffer, which will then progressively be converted and pushed onto
2339 the I/O layer.</li>
2340 <li>It is possible that the converter code fails on some input, for example
2341 trying to push an UTF-8 encoded chinese character through the UTF-8 to
2342 ISO-8859-1 converter won't work. Since the encoders are progressive they
2343 will just report the error and the number of bytes converted, at that
2344 point libxml will decode the offending character, remove it from the
2345 buffer and replace it with the associated charRef encoding &amp;#123; and
2346 resume the convertion. This guarante that any document will be saved
2347 without losses (except for markup names where this is not legal, this is
2348 a problem in the current version, in pactice avoid using non-ascci
2349 characters for tags or attributes names @@). A special "ascii" encoding
2350 name is used to save documents to a pure ascii form can be used when
2351 portability is really crucial</li>
2352</ol>
2353
2354<p>Here is a few examples based on the same test document:</p>
2355<pre>~/XML -&gt; ./xmllint isolat1
2356&lt;?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?&gt;
2357&lt;très&gt;là&lt;/très&gt;
2358~/XML -&gt; ./xmllint --encode UTF-8 isolat1
2359&lt;?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?&gt;
2360&lt;très&gt;là  &lt;/très&gt;
2361~/XML -&gt; </pre>
2362
2363<p>The same processing is applied (and reuse most of the code) for HTML I18N
2364processing. Looking up and modifying the content encoding is a bit more
2365difficult since it is located in a &lt;meta&gt; tag under the &lt;head&gt;,
2366so a couple of functions htmlGetMetaEncoding() and htmlSetMetaEncoding() have
2367been provided. The parser also attempts to switch encoding on the fly when
2368detecting such a tag on input. Except for that the processing is the same
2369(and again reuses the same code).</p>
2370
2371<h3><a name="Default">Default supported encodings</a></h3>
2372
2373<p>libxml has a set of default converters for the following encodings
2374(located in encoding.c):</p>
2375<ol>
2376 <li>UTF-8 is supported by default (null handlers)</li>
2377 <li>UTF-16, both little and big endian</li>
2378 <li>ISO-Latin-1 (ISO-8859-1) covering most western languages</li>
2379 <li>ASCII, useful mostly for saving</li>
2380 <li>HTML, a specific handler for the conversion of UTF-8 to ASCII with HTML
2381 predefined entities like &amp;copy; for the Copyright sign.</li>
2382</ol>
2383
2384<p>More over when compiled on an Unix platfor with iconv support the full set
2385of encodings supported by iconv can be instantly be used by libxml. On a
2386linux machine with glibc-2.1 the list of supported encodings and aliases fill
23873 full pages, and include UCS-4, the full set of ISO-Latin encodings, and the
2388various Japanese ones.</p>
2389
2390<h4>Encoding aliases</h4>
2391
2392<p>From 2.2.3, libxml has support to register encoding names aliases. The
2393goal is to be able to parse document whose encoding is supported but where
2394the name differs (for example from the default set of names accepted by
2395iconv). The following functions allow to register and handle new aliases for
2396existing encodings. Once registered libxml will automatically lookup the
2397aliases when handling a document:</p>
2398<ul>
2399 <li>int xmlAddEncodingAlias(const char *name, const char *alias);</li>
2400 <li>int xmlDelEncodingAlias(const char *alias);</li>
2401 <li>const char * xmlGetEncodingAlias(const char *alias);</li>
2402 <li>void xmlCleanupEncodingAliases(void);</li>
2403</ul>
2404
2405<h3><a name="extend">How to extend the existing support</a></h3>
2406
2407<p>Well adding support for new encoding, or overriding one of the encoders
2408(assuming it is buggy) should not be hard, just write an input and output
2409conversion routines to/from UTF-8, and register them using
2410xmlNewCharEncodingHandler(name, xxxToUTF8, UTF8Toxxx), and they will be
2411called automatically if the parser(s) encounter such an encoding name
2412(register it uppercase, this will help). The description of the encoders,
2413their arguments and expected return values are described in the encoding.h
2414header.</p>
2415
2416<p>A quick note on the topic of subverting the parser to use a different
2417internal encoding than UTF-8, in some case people will absolutely want to
2418keep the internal encoding different, I think it's still possible (but the
2419encoding must be compliant with ASCII on the same subrange) though I didn't
2420tried it. The key is to override the default conversion routines (by
2421registering null encoders/decoders for your charsets), and bypass the UTF-8
2422checking of the parser by setting the parser context charset
2423(ctxt-&gt;charset) to something different than XML_CHAR_ENCODING_UTF8, but
2424there is no guarantee taht this will work. You may also have some troubles
2425saving back.</p>
2426
2427<p>Basically proper I18N support is important, this requires at least
2428libxml-2.0.0, but a lot of features and corrections are really available only
2429starting 2.2.</p>
2430
2431<h2><a name="IO">I/O Interfaces</a></h2>
2432
2433<p>Table of Content:</p>
2434<ol>
2435 <li><a href="#General1">General overview</a></li>
2436 <li><a href="#basic">The basic buffer type</a></li>
2437 <li><a href="#Input">Input I/O handlers</a></li>
2438 <li><a href="#Output">Output I/O handlers</a></li>
2439 <li><a href="#entities">The entities loader</a></li>
2440 <li><a href="#Example2">Example of customized I/O</a></li>
2441</ol>
2442
2443<h3><a name="General1">General overview</a></h3>
2444
2445<p>The module <code><a
2446href="http://xmlsoft.org/html/libxml-xmlio.html">xmlIO.h</a></code> provides
2447the interfaces to the libxml I/O system. This consists of 4 main parts:</p>
2448<ul>
2449 <li>Entities loader, this is a routine which tries to fetch the entities
2450 (files) based on their PUBLIC and SYSTEM identifiers. The default loader
2451 don't look at the public identifier since libxml do not maintain a
2452 catalog. You can redefine you own entity loader by using
2453 <code>xmlGetExternalEntityLoader()</code> and
Daniel Veillard9c466822001-10-25 12:03:39 +00002454 <code>xmlSetExternalEntityLoader()</code>. <a href="#entities">Check the
2455 example</a>.</li>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002456 <li>Input I/O buffers which are a commodity structure used by the parser(s)
2457 input layer to handle fetching the informations to feed the parser. This
2458 provides buffering and is also a placeholder where the encoding
2459 convertors to UTF8 are piggy-backed.</li>
2460 <li>Output I/O buffers are similar to the Input ones and fulfill similar
2461 task but when generating a serialization from a tree.</li>
2462 <li>A mechanism to register sets of I/O callbacks and associate them with
2463 specific naming schemes like the protocol part of the URIs.
2464 <p>This affect the default I/O operations and allows to use specific I/O
2465 handlers for certain names.</p>
2466 </li>
2467</ul>
2468
2469<p>The general mechanism used when loading http://rpmfind.net/xml.html for
2470example in the HTML parser is the following:</p>
2471<ol>
2472 <li>The default entity loader calls <code>xmlNewInputFromFile()</code> with
2473 the parsing context and the URI string.</li>
2474 <li>the URI string is checked against the existing registered handlers
2475 using their match() callback function, if the HTTP module was compiled
2476 in, it is registered and its match() function will succeeds</li>
2477 <li>the open() function of the handler is called and if successful will
2478 return an I/O Input buffer</li>
2479 <li>the parser will the start reading from this buffer and progressively
2480 fetch information from the resource, calling the read() function of the
2481 handler until the resource is exhausted</li>
2482 <li>if an encoding change is detected it will be installed on the input
2483 buffer, providing buffering and efficient use of the conversion
2484 routines</li>
2485 <li>once the parser has finished, the close() function of the handler is
2486 called once and the Input buffer and associed resources are
2487 deallocated.</li>
2488</ol>
2489
2490<p>The user defined callbacks are checked first to allow overriding of the
2491default libxml I/O routines.</p>
2492
2493<h3><a name="basic">The basic buffer type</a></h3>
2494
2495<p>All the buffer manipulation handling is done using the
2496<code>xmlBuffer</code> type define in <code><a
2497href="http://xmlsoft.org/html/libxml-tree.html">tree.h</a> </code>which is a
2498resizable memory buffer. The buffer allocation strategy can be selected to be
2499either best-fit or use an exponential doubling one (CPU vs. memory use
2500tradeoff). The values are <code>XML_BUFFER_ALLOC_EXACT</code> and
2501<code>XML_BUFFER_ALLOC_DOUBLEIT</code>, and can be set individually or on a
2502system wide basis using <code>xmlBufferSetAllocationScheme()</code>. A number
2503of functions allows to manipulate buffers with names starting with the
2504<code>xmlBuffer...</code> prefix.</p>
2505
2506<h3><a name="Input">Input I/O handlers</a></h3>
2507
2508<p>An Input I/O handler is a simple structure
2509<code>xmlParserInputBuffer</code> containing a context associated to the
2510resource (file descriptor, or pointer to a protocol handler), the read() and
2511close() callbacks to use and an xmlBuffer. And extra xmlBuffer and a charset
2512encoding handler are also present to support charset conversion when
2513needed.</p>
2514
2515<h3><a name="Output">Output I/O handlers</a></h3>
2516
2517<p>An Output handler <code>xmlOutputBuffer</code> is completely similar to an
2518Input one except the callbacks are write() and close().</p>
2519
2520<h3><a name="entities">The entities loader</a></h3>
2521
2522<p>The entity loader resolves requests for new entities and create inputs for
2523the parser. Creating an input from a filename or an URI string is done
2524through the xmlNewInputFromFile() routine. The default entity loader do not
2525handle the PUBLIC identifier associated with an entity (if any). So it just
2526calls xmlNewInputFromFile() with the SYSTEM identifier (which is mandatory in
2527XML).</p>
2528
2529<p>If you want to hook up a catalog mechanism then you simply need to
2530override the default entity loader, here is an example:</p>
2531<pre>#include &lt;libxml/xmlIO.h&gt;
2532
2533xmlExternalEntityLoader defaultLoader = NULL;
2534
2535xmlParserInputPtr
2536xmlMyExternalEntityLoader(const char *URL, const char *ID,
2537 xmlParserCtxtPtr ctxt) {
2538 xmlParserInputPtr ret;
2539 const char *fileID = NULL;
2540 /* lookup for the fileID depending on ID */
2541
2542 ret = xmlNewInputFromFile(ctxt, fileID);
2543 if (ret != NULL)
2544 return(ret);
2545 if (defaultLoader != NULL)
2546 ret = defaultLoader(URL, ID, ctxt);
2547 return(ret);
2548}
2549
2550int main(..) {
2551 ...
2552
2553 /*
2554 * Install our own entity loader
2555 */
2556 defaultLoader = xmlGetExternalEntityLoader();
2557 xmlSetExternalEntityLoader(xmlMyExternalEntityLoader);
2558
2559 ...
2560}</pre>
2561
2562<h3><a name="Example2">Example of customized I/O</a></h3>
2563
2564<p>This example come from <a href="http://xmlsoft.org/messages/0708.html">a
2565real use case</a>, xmlDocDump() closes the FILE * passed by the application
2566and this was a problem. The <a
2567href="http://xmlsoft.org/messages/0711.html">solution</a> was to redefine a
2568new output handler with the closing call deactivated:</p>
2569<ol>
2570 <li>First define a new I/O ouput allocator where the output don't close the
2571 file:
2572 <pre>xmlOutputBufferPtr
2573xmlOutputBufferCreateOwn(FILE *file, xmlCharEncodingHandlerPtr encoder) {
2574    xmlOutputBufferPtr ret;
2575    
2576    if (xmlOutputCallbackInitialized == 0)
2577        xmlRegisterDefaultOutputCallbacks();
2578
2579    if (file == NULL) return(NULL);
2580    ret = xmlAllocOutputBuffer(encoder);
2581    if (ret != NULL) {
2582        ret-&gt;context = file;
2583        ret-&gt;writecallback = xmlFileWrite;
2584        ret-&gt;closecallback = NULL; /* No close callback */
2585    }
2586    return(ret); <br>
Daniel Veillard1eb24242002-03-18 11:33:03 +00002587
Daniel Veillard34ce8be2002-03-18 19:37:11 +00002588
2589
Daniel Veillard19274092002-03-25 16:48:03 +00002590
Daniel Veillardb2fb8ed2002-04-01 09:33:12 +00002591
Daniel Veillard75794822002-04-11 16:24:32 +00002592
Daniel Veillarda7084cd2002-04-15 17:12:47 +00002593
Daniel Veillard0bfbb422002-04-26 09:21:45 +00002594
Daniel Veillard93d3a472002-04-26 14:04:55 +00002595
Daniel Veillardcf27f7c2002-04-30 07:12:39 +00002596
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002597} </pre>
2598 </li>
2599 <li>And then use it to save the document:
2600 <pre>FILE *f;
2601xmlOutputBufferPtr output;
2602xmlDocPtr doc;
2603int res;
2604
2605f = ...
2606doc = ....
2607
2608output = xmlOutputBufferCreateOwn(f, NULL);
2609res = xmlSaveFileTo(output, doc, NULL);
2610 </pre>
2611 </li>
2612</ol>
2613
2614<h2><a name="Catalog">Catalog support</a></h2>
2615
2616<p>Table of Content:</p>
2617<ol>
2618 <li><a href="General2">General overview</a></li>
2619 <li><a href="#definition">The definition</a></li>
2620 <li><a href="#Simple">Using catalogs</a></li>
2621 <li><a href="#Some">Some examples</a></li>
2622 <li><a href="#reference">How to tune catalog usage</a></li>
2623 <li><a href="#validate">How to debug catalog processing</a></li>
2624 <li><a href="#Declaring">How to create and maintain catalogs</a></li>
2625 <li><a href="#implemento">The implementor corner quick review of the
2626 API</a></li>
2627 <li><a href="#Other">Other resources</a></li>
2628</ol>
2629
2630<h3><a name="General2">General overview</a></h3>
2631
2632<p>What is a catalog? Basically it's a lookup mechanism used when an entity
2633(a file or a remote resource) references another entity. The catalog lookup
2634is inserted between the moment the reference is recognized by the software
2635(XML parser, stylesheet processing, or even images referenced for inclusion
2636in a rendering) and the time where loading that resource is actually
2637started.</p>
2638
2639<p>It is basically used for 3 things:</p>
2640<ul>
2641 <li>mapping from "logical" names, the public identifiers and a more
2642 concrete name usable for download (and URI). For example it can associate
2643 the logical name
2644 <p>"-//OASIS//DTD DocBook XML V4.1.2//EN"</p>
2645 <p>of the DocBook 4.1.2 XML DTD with the actual URL where it can be
2646 downloaded</p>
2647 <p>http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/xml/4.1.2/docbookx.dtd</p>
2648 </li>
2649 <li>remapping from a given URL to another one, like an HTTP indirection
2650 saying that
2651 <p>"http://www.oasis-open.org/committes/tr.xsl"</p>
2652 <p>should really be looked at</p>
2653 <p>"http://www.oasis-open.org/committes/entity/stylesheets/base/tr.xsl"</p>
2654 </li>
2655 <li>providing a local cache mechanism allowing to load the entities
2656 associated to public identifiers or remote resources, this is a really
2657 important feature for any significant deployment of XML or SGML since it
2658 allows to avoid the aleas and delays associated to fetching remote
2659 resources.</li>
2660</ul>
2661
2662<h3><a name="definition">The definitions</a></h3>
2663
2664<p>Libxml, as of 2.4.3 implements 2 kind of catalogs:</p>
2665<ul>
2666 <li>the older SGML catalogs, the official spec is SGML Open Technical
2667 Resolution TR9401:1997, but is better understood by reading <a
2668 href="http://www.jclark.com/sp/catalog.htm">the SP Catalog page</a> from
2669 James Clark. This is relatively old and not the preferred mode of
2670 operation of libxml.</li>
2671 <li><a href="http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/entity/spec.html">XML
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +00002672 Catalogs</a> is far more flexible, more recent, uses an XML syntax and
2673 should scale quite better. This is the default option of libxml.</li>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002674</ul>
2675
2676<p></p>
2677
2678<h3><a name="Simple">Using catalog</a></h3>
2679
2680<p>In a normal environment libxml will by default check the presence of a
2681catalog in /etc/xml/catalog, and assuming it has been correctly populated,
2682the processing is completely transparent to the document user. To take a
2683concrete example, suppose you are authoring a DocBook document, this one
2684starts with the following DOCTYPE definition:</p>
2685<pre>&lt;?xml version='1.0'?&gt;
2686&lt;!DOCTYPE book PUBLIC "-//Norman Walsh//DTD DocBk XML V3.1.4//EN"
2687 "http://nwalsh.com/docbook/xml/3.1.4/db3xml.dtd"&gt;</pre>
2688
2689<p>When validating the document with libxml, the catalog will be
2690automatically consulted to lookup the public identifier "-//Norman Walsh//DTD
2691DocBk XML V3.1.4//EN" and the system identifier
2692"http://nwalsh.com/docbook/xml/3.1.4/db3xml.dtd", and if these entities have
2693been installed on your system and the catalogs actually point to them, libxml
2694will fetch them from the local disk.</p>
2695
2696<p style="font-size: 10pt"><strong>Note</strong>: Really don't use this
2697DOCTYPE example it's a really old version, but is fine as an example.</p>
2698
2699<p>Libxml will check the catalog each time that it is requested to load an
2700entity, this includes DTD, external parsed entities, stylesheets, etc ... If
2701your system is correctly configured all the authoring phase and processing
2702should use only local files, even if your document stays portable because it
2703uses the canonical public and system ID, referencing the remote document.</p>
2704
2705<h3><a name="Some">Some examples:</a></h3>
2706
2707<p>Here is a couple of fragments from XML Catalogs used in libxml early
2708regression tests in <code>test/catalogs</code> :</p>
2709<pre>&lt;?xml version="1.0"?&gt;
2710&lt;!DOCTYPE catalog PUBLIC
2711 "-//OASIS//DTD Entity Resolution XML Catalog V1.0//EN"
2712 "http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/entity/release/1.0/catalog.dtd"&gt;
2713&lt;catalog xmlns="urn:oasis:names:tc:entity:xmlns:xml:catalog"&gt;
2714 &lt;public publicId="-//OASIS//DTD DocBook XML V4.1.2//EN"
2715 uri="http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/xml/4.1.2/docbookx.dtd"/&gt;
2716...</pre>
2717
2718<p>This is the beginning of a catalog for DocBook 4.1.2, XML Catalogs are
2719written in XML, there is a specific namespace for catalog elements
2720"urn:oasis:names:tc:entity:xmlns:xml:catalog". The first entry in this
2721catalog is a <code>public</code> mapping it allows to associate a Public
2722Identifier with an URI.</p>
2723<pre>...
2724 &lt;rewriteSystem systemIdStartString="http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/"
2725 rewritePrefix="file:///usr/share/xml/docbook/"/&gt;
2726...</pre>
2727
2728<p>A <code>rewriteSystem</code> is a very powerful instruction, it says that
2729any URI starting with a given prefix should be looked at another URI
2730constructed by replacing the prefix with an new one. In effect this acts like
2731a cache system for a full area of the Web. In practice it is extremely useful
2732with a file prefix if you have installed a copy of those resources on your
2733local system.</p>
2734<pre>...
2735&lt;delegatePublic publicIdStartString="-//OASIS//DTD XML Catalog //"
2736 catalog="file:///usr/share/xml/docbook.xml"/&gt;
2737&lt;delegatePublic publicIdStartString="-//OASIS//ENTITIES DocBook XML"
2738 catalog="file:///usr/share/xml/docbook.xml"/&gt;
2739&lt;delegatePublic publicIdStartString="-//OASIS//DTD DocBook XML"
2740 catalog="file:///usr/share/xml/docbook.xml"/&gt;
2741&lt;delegateSystem systemIdStartString="http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/"
2742 catalog="file:///usr/share/xml/docbook.xml"/&gt;
2743&lt;delegateURI uriStartString="http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/"
2744 catalog="file:///usr/share/xml/docbook.xml"/&gt;
2745...</pre>
2746
2747<p>Delegation is the core features which allows to build a tree of catalogs,
2748easier to maintain than a single catalog, based on Public Identifier, System
2749Identifier or URI prefixes it instructs the catalog software to look up
2750entries in another resource. This feature allow to build hierarchies of
2751catalogs, the set of entries presented should be sufficient to redirect the
2752resolution of all DocBook references to the specific catalog in
2753<code>/usr/share/xml/docbook.xml</code> this one in turn could delegate all
2754references for DocBook 4.2.1 to a specific catalog installed at the same time
2755as the DocBook resources on the local machine.</p>
2756
2757<h3><a name="reference">How to tune catalog usage:</a></h3>
2758
2759<p>The user can change the default catalog behaviour by redirecting queries
2760to its own set of catalogs, this can be done by setting the
2761<code>XML_CATALOG_FILES</code> environment variable to a list of catalogs, an
2762empty one should deactivate loading the default <code>/etc/xml/catalog</code>
2763default catalog</p>
2764
2765<h3><a name="validate">How to debug catalog processing:</a></h3>
2766
2767<p>Setting up the <code>XML_DEBUG_CATALOG</code> environment variable will
2768make libxml output debugging informations for each catalog operations, for
2769example:</p>
2770<pre>orchis:~/XML -&gt; xmllint --memory --noout test/ent2
2771warning: failed to load external entity "title.xml"
2772orchis:~/XML -&gt; export XML_DEBUG_CATALOG=
2773orchis:~/XML -&gt; xmllint --memory --noout test/ent2
2774Failed to parse catalog /etc/xml/catalog
2775Failed to parse catalog /etc/xml/catalog
2776warning: failed to load external entity "title.xml"
2777Catalogs cleanup
2778orchis:~/XML -&gt; </pre>
2779
2780<p>The test/ent2 references an entity, running the parser from memory makes
2781the base URI unavailable and the the "title.xml" entity cannot be loaded.
2782Setting up the debug environment variable allows to detect that an attempt is
2783made to load the <code>/etc/xml/catalog</code> but since it's not present the
2784resolution fails.</p>
2785
2786<p>But the most advanced way to debug XML catalog processing is to use the
2787<strong>xmlcatalog</strong> command shipped with libxml2, it allows to load
2788catalogs and make resolution queries to see what is going on. This is also
2789used for the regression tests:</p>
2790<pre>orchis:~/XML -&gt; ./xmlcatalog test/catalogs/docbook.xml \
2791 "-//OASIS//DTD DocBook XML V4.1.2//EN"
2792http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/xml/4.1.2/docbookx.dtd
2793orchis:~/XML -&gt; </pre>
2794
2795<p>For debugging what is going on, adding one -v flags increase the verbosity
2796level to indicate the processing done (adding a second flag also indicate
2797what elements are recognized at parsing):</p>
2798<pre>orchis:~/XML -&gt; ./xmlcatalog -v test/catalogs/docbook.xml \
2799 "-//OASIS//DTD DocBook XML V4.1.2//EN"
2800Parsing catalog test/catalogs/docbook.xml's content
2801Found public match -//OASIS//DTD DocBook XML V4.1.2//EN
2802http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/xml/4.1.2/docbookx.dtd
2803Catalogs cleanup
2804orchis:~/XML -&gt; </pre>
2805
2806<p>A shell interface is also available to debug and process multiple queries
2807(and for regression tests):</p>
2808<pre>orchis:~/XML -&gt; ./xmlcatalog -shell test/catalogs/docbook.xml \
2809 "-//OASIS//DTD DocBook XML V4.1.2//EN"
2810&gt; help
2811Commands available:
2812public PublicID: make a PUBLIC identifier lookup
2813system SystemID: make a SYSTEM identifier lookup
2814resolve PublicID SystemID: do a full resolver lookup
2815add 'type' 'orig' 'replace' : add an entry
2816del 'values' : remove values
2817dump: print the current catalog state
2818debug: increase the verbosity level
2819quiet: decrease the verbosity level
2820exit: quit the shell
2821&gt; public "-//OASIS//DTD DocBook XML V4.1.2//EN"
2822http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/xml/4.1.2/docbookx.dtd
2823&gt; quit
2824orchis:~/XML -&gt; </pre>
2825
2826<p>This should be sufficient for most debugging purpose, this was actually
2827used heavily to debug the XML Catalog implementation itself.</p>
2828
2829<h3><a name="Declaring">How to create and maintain</a> catalogs:</h3>
2830
2831<p>Basically XML Catalogs are XML files, you can either use XML tools to
2832manage them or use <strong>xmlcatalog</strong> for this. The basic step is
2833to create a catalog the -create option provide this facility:</p>
2834<pre>orchis:~/XML -&gt; ./xmlcatalog --create tst.xml
2835&lt;?xml version="1.0"?&gt;
2836&lt;!DOCTYPE catalog PUBLIC "-//OASIS//DTD Entity Resolution XML Catalog V1.0//EN"
2837 "http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/entity/release/1.0/catalog.dtd"&gt;
2838&lt;catalog xmlns="urn:oasis:names:tc:entity:xmlns:xml:catalog"/&gt;
2839orchis:~/XML -&gt; </pre>
2840
2841<p>By default xmlcatalog does not overwrite the original catalog and save the
2842result on the standard output, this can be overridden using the -noout
2843option. The <code>-add</code> command allows to add entries in the
2844catalog:</p>
2845<pre>orchis:~/XML -&gt; ./xmlcatalog --noout --create --add "public" \
2846 "-//OASIS//DTD DocBook XML V4.1.2//EN" \
2847 http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/xml/4.1.2/docbookx.dtd tst.xml
2848orchis:~/XML -&gt; cat tst.xml
2849&lt;?xml version="1.0"?&gt;
2850&lt;!DOCTYPE catalog PUBLIC "-//OASIS//DTD Entity Resolution XML Catalog V1.0//EN" \
2851 "http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/entity/release/1.0/catalog.dtd"&gt;
2852&lt;catalog xmlns="urn:oasis:names:tc:entity:xmlns:xml:catalog"&gt;
2853&lt;public publicId="-//OASIS//DTD DocBook XML V4.1.2//EN"
2854 uri="http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/xml/4.1.2/docbookx.dtd"/&gt;
2855&lt;/catalog&gt;
2856orchis:~/XML -&gt; </pre>
2857
2858<p>The <code>-add</code> option will always take 3 parameters even if some of
2859the XML Catalog constructs (like nextCatalog) will have only a single
2860argument, just pass a third empty string, it will be ignored.</p>
2861
2862<p>Similarly the <code>-del</code> option remove matching entries from the
2863catalog:</p>
2864<pre>orchis:~/XML -&gt; ./xmlcatalog --del \
2865 "http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/xml/4.1.2/docbookx.dtd" tst.xml
2866&lt;?xml version="1.0"?&gt;
2867&lt;!DOCTYPE catalog PUBLIC "-//OASIS//DTD Entity Resolution XML Catalog V1.0//EN"
2868 "http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/entity/release/1.0/catalog.dtd"&gt;
2869&lt;catalog xmlns="urn:oasis:names:tc:entity:xmlns:xml:catalog"/&gt;
2870orchis:~/XML -&gt; </pre>
2871
2872<p>The catalog is now empty. Note that the matching of <code>-del</code> is
2873exact and would have worked in a similar fashion with the Public ID
2874string.</p>
2875
2876<p>This is rudimentary but should be sufficient to manage a not too complex
2877catalog tree of resources.</p>
2878
2879<h3><a name="implemento">The implementor corner quick review of the
2880API:</a></h3>
2881
2882<p>First, and like for every other module of libxml, there is an
2883automatically generated <a href="html/libxml-catalog.html">API page for
2884catalog support</a>.</p>
2885
2886<p>The header for the catalog interfaces should be included as:</p>
2887<pre>#include &lt;libxml/catalog.h&gt;</pre>
2888
2889<p>The API is voluntarily kept very simple. First it is not obvious that
2890applications really need access to it since it is the default behaviour of
2891libxml (Note: it is possible to completely override libxml default catalog by
2892using <a href="html/libxml-parser.html">xmlSetExternalEntityLoader</a> to
2893plug an application specific resolver).</p>
2894
2895<p>Basically libxml support 2 catalog lists:</p>
2896<ul>
2897 <li>the default one, global shared by all the application</li>
2898 <li>a per-document catalog, this one is built if the document uses the
2899 <code>oasis-xml-catalog</code> PIs to specify its own catalog list, it is
2900 associated to the parser context and destroyed when the parsing context
2901 is destroyed.</li>
2902</ul>
2903
2904<p>the document one will be used first if it exists.</p>
2905
2906<h4>Initialization routines:</h4>
2907
2908<p>xmlInitializeCatalog(), xmlLoadCatalog() and xmlLoadCatalogs() should be
2909used at startup to initialize the catalog, if the catalog should be
2910initialized with specific values xmlLoadCatalog() or xmlLoadCatalogs()
2911should be called before xmlInitializeCatalog() which would otherwise do a
2912default initialization first.</p>
2913
2914<p>The xmlCatalogAddLocal() call is used by the parser to grow the document
2915own catalog list if needed.</p>
2916
2917<h4>Preferences setup:</h4>
2918
2919<p>The XML Catalog spec requires the possibility to select default
2920preferences between public and system delegation,
2921xmlCatalogSetDefaultPrefer() allows this, xmlCatalogSetDefaults() and
2922xmlCatalogGetDefaults() allow to control if XML Catalogs resolution should
2923be forbidden, allowed for global catalog, for document catalog or both, the
2924default is to allow both.</p>
2925
2926<p>And of course xmlCatalogSetDebug() allows to generate debug messages
2927(through the xmlGenericError() mechanism).</p>
2928
2929<h4>Querying routines:</h4>
2930
2931<p>xmlCatalogResolve(), xmlCatalogResolveSystem(), xmlCatalogResolvePublic()
2932and xmlCatalogResolveURI() are relatively explicit if you read the XML
2933Catalog specification they correspond to section 7 algorithms, they should
2934also work if you have loaded an SGML catalog with a simplified semantic.</p>
2935
2936<p>xmlCatalogLocalResolve() and xmlCatalogLocalResolveURI() are the same but
2937operate on the document catalog list</p>
2938
2939<h4>Cleanup and Miscellaneous:</h4>
2940
2941<p>xmlCatalogCleanup() free-up the global catalog, xmlCatalogFreeLocal() is
2942the per-document equivalent.</p>
2943
2944<p>xmlCatalogAdd() and xmlCatalogRemove() are used to dynamically modify the
2945first catalog in the global list, and xmlCatalogDump() allows to dump a
2946catalog state, those routines are primarily designed for xmlcatalog, I'm not
2947sure that exposing more complex interfaces (like navigation ones) would be
2948really useful.</p>
2949
2950<p>The xmlParseCatalogFile() is a function used to load XML Catalog files,
2951it's similar as xmlParseFile() except it bypass all catalog lookups, it's
2952provided because this functionality may be useful for client tools.</p>
2953
2954<h4>threaded environments:</h4>
2955
2956<p>Since the catalog tree is built progressively, some care has been taken to
2957try to avoid troubles in multithreaded environments. The code is now thread
2958safe assuming that the libxml library has been compiled with threads
2959support.</p>
2960
2961<p></p>
2962
2963<h3><a name="Other">Other resources</a></h3>
2964
2965<p>The XML Catalog specification is relatively recent so there isn't much
2966literature to point at:</p>
2967<ul>
2968 <li>You can find an good rant from Norm Walsh about <a
2969 href="http://www.arbortext.com/Think_Tank/XML_Resources/Issue_Three/issue_three.html">the
2970 need for catalogs</a>, it provides a lot of context informations even if
Daniel Veillard93d3a472002-04-26 14:04:55 +00002971 I don't agree with everything presented. Norm also wrote a more recent
2972 article <a
2973 href="http://wwws.sun.com/software/xml/developers/resolver/article/">XML
2974 entities and URI resolvers</a> describing them.</li>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002975 <li>An <a href="http://home.ccil.org/~cowan/XML/XCatalog.html">old XML
2976 catalog proposal</a> from John Cowan</li>
2977 <li>The <a href="http://www.rddl.org/">Resource Directory Description
2978 Language</a> (RDDL) another catalog system but more oriented toward
2979 providing metadata for XML namespaces.</li>
2980 <li>the page from the OASIS Technical <a
2981 href="http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/entity/">Committee on Entity
2982 Resolution</a> who maintains XML Catalog, you will find pointers to the
2983 specification update, some background and pointers to others tools
2984 providing XML Catalog support</li>
Daniel Veillard35e937a2002-01-19 22:21:54 +00002985 <li>Here is a <a href="buildDocBookCatalog">shell script</a> to generate
2986 XML Catalogs for DocBook 4.1.2 . If it can write to the /etc/xml/
2987 directory, it will set-up /etc/xml/catalog and /etc/xml/docbook based on
2988 the resources found on the system. Otherwise it will just create
2989 ~/xmlcatalog and ~/dbkxmlcatalog and doing:
Daniel Veillardc575b992002-02-08 13:28:40 +00002990 <p><code>export XMLCATALOG=$HOME/xmlcatalog</code></p>
Daniel Veillard35e937a2002-01-19 22:21:54 +00002991 <p>should allow to process DocBook documentations without requiring
2992 network accesses for the DTd or stylesheets</p>
2993 </li>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002994 <li>I have uploaded <a href="ftp://xmlsoft.org/test/dbk412catalog.tar.gz">a
Daniel Veillard35e937a2002-01-19 22:21:54 +00002995 small tarball</a> containing XML Catalogs for DocBook 4.1.2 which seems
2996 to work fine for me too</li>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002997 <li>The <a href="http://www.xmlsoft.org/xmlcatalog_man.html">xmlcatalog
2998 manual page</a></li>
2999</ul>
3000
3001<p>If you have suggestions for corrections or additions, simply contact
3002me:</p>
3003
3004<h2><a name="library">The parser interfaces</a></h2>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003005
3006<p>This section is directly intended to help programmers getting bootstrapped
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +00003007using the XML library from the C language. It is not intended to be
3008extensive. I hope the automatically generated documents will provide the
3009completeness required, but as a separate set of documents. The interfaces of
3010the XML library are by principle low level, there is nearly zero abstraction.
3011Those interested in a higher level API should <a href="#DOM">look at
3012DOM</a>.</p>
Daniel Veillardccb09631998-10-27 06:21:04 +00003013
Daniel Veillard9cb5ff42001-01-29 08:22:21 +00003014<p>The <a href="html/libxml-parser.html">parser interfaces for XML</a> are
3015separated from the <a href="html/libxml-htmlparser.html">HTML parser
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00003016interfaces</a>. Let's have a look at how the XML parser can be called:</p>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +00003017
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00003018<h3><a name="Invoking">Invoking the parser : the pull method</a></h3>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003019
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00003020<p>Usually, the first thing to do is to read an XML input. The parser accepts
3021documents either from in-memory strings or from files. The functions are
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003022defined in "parser.h":</p>
Daniel Veillard10c6a8f1998-10-28 01:00:12 +00003023<dl>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003024 <dt><code>xmlDocPtr xmlParseMemory(char *buffer, int size);</code></dt>
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00003025 <dd><p>Parse a null-terminated string containing the document.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003026 </dd>
Daniel Veillard10c6a8f1998-10-28 01:00:12 +00003027</dl>
3028<dl>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003029 <dt><code>xmlDocPtr xmlParseFile(const char *filename);</code></dt>
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +00003030 <dd><p>Parse an XML document contained in a (possibly compressed)
3031 file.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003032 </dd>
Daniel Veillard10c6a8f1998-10-28 01:00:12 +00003033</dl>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003034
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00003035<p>The parser returns a pointer to the document structure (or NULL in case of
Daniel Veillard10c6a8f1998-10-28 01:00:12 +00003036failure).</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003037
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00003038<h3 id="Invoking1">Invoking the parser: the push method</h3>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +00003039
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +00003040<p>In order for the application to keep the control when the document is
3041being fetched (which is common for GUI based programs) libxml provides a push
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00003042interface, too, as of version 1.8.3. Here are the interface functions:</p>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +00003043<pre>xmlParserCtxtPtr xmlCreatePushParserCtxt(xmlSAXHandlerPtr sax,
3044 void *user_data,
3045 const char *chunk,
3046 int size,
3047 const char *filename);
3048int xmlParseChunk (xmlParserCtxtPtr ctxt,
3049 const char *chunk,
3050 int size,
3051 int terminate);</pre>
3052
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00003053<p>and here is a simple example showing how to use the interface:</p>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +00003054<pre> FILE *f;
3055
3056 f = fopen(filename, "r");
3057 if (f != NULL) {
3058 int res, size = 1024;
3059 char chars[1024];
3060 xmlParserCtxtPtr ctxt;
3061
3062 res = fread(chars, 1, 4, f);
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00003063 if (res &gt; 0) {
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +00003064 ctxt = xmlCreatePushParserCtxt(NULL, NULL,
3065 chars, res, filename);
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00003066 while ((res = fread(chars, 1, size, f)) &gt; 0) {
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +00003067 xmlParseChunk(ctxt, chars, res, 0);
3068 }
3069 xmlParseChunk(ctxt, chars, 0, 1);
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00003070 doc = ctxt-&gt;myDoc;
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +00003071 xmlFreeParserCtxt(ctxt);
3072 }
3073 }</pre>
3074
Daniel Veillardec70e912001-02-26 20:10:45 +00003075<p>The HTML parser embedded into libxml also has a push interface; the
3076functions are just prefixed by "html" rather than "xml".</p>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +00003077
3078<h3 id="Invoking2">Invoking the parser: the SAX interface</h3>
3079
Daniel Veillardec70e912001-02-26 20:10:45 +00003080<p>The tree-building interface makes the parser memory-hungry, first loading
3081the document in memory and then building the tree itself. Reading a document
3082without building the tree is possible using the SAX interfaces (see SAX.h and
3083<a href="http://www.daa.com.au/~james/gnome/xml-sax/xml-sax.html">James
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00003084Henstridge's documentation</a>). Note also that the push interface can be
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +00003085limited to SAX: just use the two first arguments of
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +00003086<code>xmlCreatePushParserCtxt()</code>.</p>
Daniel Veillardccb09631998-10-27 06:21:04 +00003087
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +00003088<h3><a name="Building">Building a tree from scratch</a></h3>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003089
3090<p>The other way to get an XML tree in memory is by building it. Basically
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +00003091there is a set of functions dedicated to building new elements. (These are
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +00003092also described in &lt;libxml/tree.h&gt;.) For example, here is a piece of
3093code that produces the XML document used in the previous examples:</p>
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00003094<pre> #include &lt;libxml/tree.h&gt;
Daniel Veillard361d8452000-04-03 19:48:13 +00003095 xmlDocPtr doc;
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +00003096 xmlNodePtr tree, subtree;
3097
3098 doc = xmlNewDoc("1.0");
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00003099 doc-&gt;children = xmlNewDocNode(doc, NULL, "EXAMPLE", NULL);
3100 xmlSetProp(doc-&gt;children, "prop1", "gnome is great");
3101 xmlSetProp(doc-&gt;children, "prop2", "&amp; linux too");
3102 tree = xmlNewChild(doc-&gt;children, NULL, "head", NULL);
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +00003103 subtree = xmlNewChild(tree, NULL, "title", "Welcome to Gnome");
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00003104 tree = xmlNewChild(doc-&gt;children, NULL, "chapter", NULL);
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +00003105 subtree = xmlNewChild(tree, NULL, "title", "The Linux adventure");
3106 subtree = xmlNewChild(tree, NULL, "p", "bla bla bla ...");
3107 subtree = xmlNewChild(tree, NULL, "image", NULL);
3108 xmlSetProp(subtree, "href", "linus.gif");</pre>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003109
3110<p>Not really rocket science ...</p>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +00003111
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +00003112<h3><a name="Traversing">Traversing the tree</a></h3>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003113
Daniel Veillard9cb5ff42001-01-29 08:22:21 +00003114<p>Basically by <a href="html/libxml-tree.html">including "tree.h"</a> your
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +00003115code has access to the internal structure of all the elements of the tree.
3116The names should be somewhat simple like <strong>parent</strong>,
Daniel Veillard306be992000-07-03 12:38:45 +00003117<strong>children</strong>, <strong>next</strong>, <strong>prev</strong>,
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00003118<strong>properties</strong>, etc... For example, still with the previous
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +00003119example:</p>
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00003120<pre><code>doc-&gt;children-&gt;children-&gt;children</code></pre>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003121
3122<p>points to the title element,</p>
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +00003123<pre>doc-&gt;children-&gt;children-&gt;next-&gt;children-&gt;children</pre>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003124
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +00003125<p>points to the text node containing the chapter title "The Linux
3126adventure".</p>
Daniel Veillard10c6a8f1998-10-28 01:00:12 +00003127
Daniel Veillardb24054a1999-12-18 15:32:46 +00003128<p><strong>NOTE</strong>: XML allows <em>PI</em>s and <em>comments</em> to be
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00003129present before the document root, so <code>doc-&gt;children</code> may point
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +00003130to an element which is not the document Root Element; a function
Daniel Veillard5cb5ab81999-12-21 15:35:29 +00003131<code>xmlDocGetRootElement()</code> was added for this purpose.</p>
Daniel Veillardb24054a1999-12-18 15:32:46 +00003132
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +00003133<h3><a name="Modifying">Modifying the tree</a></h3>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003134
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00003135<p>Functions are provided for reading and writing the document content. Here
Daniel Veillard9cb5ff42001-01-29 08:22:21 +00003136is an excerpt from the <a href="html/libxml-tree.html">tree API</a>:</p>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +00003137<dl>
Daniel Veillarddd6b3671999-09-23 22:19:22 +00003138 <dt><code>xmlAttrPtr xmlSetProp(xmlNodePtr node, const xmlChar *name, const
3139 xmlChar *value);</code></dt>
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +00003140 <dd><p>This sets (or changes) an attribute carried by an ELEMENT node.
3141 The value can be NULL.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003142 </dd>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +00003143</dl>
3144<dl>
Daniel Veillarddd6b3671999-09-23 22:19:22 +00003145 <dt><code>const xmlChar *xmlGetProp(xmlNodePtr node, const xmlChar
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003146 *name);</code></dt>
Daniel Veillardc92c3042000-09-29 02:42:04 +00003147 <dd><p>This function returns a pointer to new copy of the property
3148 content. Note that the user must deallocate the result.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003149 </dd>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +00003150</dl>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003151
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +00003152<p>Two functions are provided for reading and writing the text associated
3153with elements:</p>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +00003154<dl>
Daniel Veillarddd6b3671999-09-23 22:19:22 +00003155 <dt><code>xmlNodePtr xmlStringGetNodeList(xmlDocPtr doc, const xmlChar
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003156 *value);</code></dt>
Daniel Veillardec70e912001-02-26 20:10:45 +00003157 <dd><p>This function takes an "external" string and converts it to one
3158 text node or possibly to a list of entity and text nodes. All
3159 non-predefined entity references like &amp;Gnome; will be stored
3160 internally as entity nodes, hence the result of the function may not be
3161 a single node.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003162 </dd>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +00003163</dl>
3164<dl>
Daniel Veillarddd6b3671999-09-23 22:19:22 +00003165 <dt><code>xmlChar *xmlNodeListGetString(xmlDocPtr doc, xmlNodePtr list, int
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003166 inLine);</code></dt>
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +00003167 <dd><p>This function is the inverse of
3168 <code>xmlStringGetNodeList()</code>. It generates a new string
3169 containing the content of the text and entity nodes. Note the extra
3170 argument inLine. If this argument is set to 1, the function will expand
3171 entity references. For example, instead of returning the &amp;Gnome;
3172 XML encoding in the string, it will substitute it with its value (say,
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +00003173 "GNU Network Object Model Environment").</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003174 </dd>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +00003175</dl>
Daniel Veillard10c6a8f1998-10-28 01:00:12 +00003176
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +00003177<h3><a name="Saving">Saving a tree</a></h3>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003178
3179<p>Basically 3 options are possible:</p>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +00003180<dl>
Daniel Veillarddd6b3671999-09-23 22:19:22 +00003181 <dt><code>void xmlDocDumpMemory(xmlDocPtr cur, xmlChar**mem, int
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003182 *size);</code></dt>
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00003183 <dd><p>Returns a buffer into which the document has been saved.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003184 </dd>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +00003185</dl>
3186<dl>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003187 <dt><code>extern void xmlDocDump(FILE *f, xmlDocPtr doc);</code></dt>
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00003188 <dd><p>Dumps a document to an open file descriptor.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003189 </dd>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +00003190</dl>
3191<dl>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003192 <dt><code>int xmlSaveFile(const char *filename, xmlDocPtr cur);</code></dt>
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +00003193 <dd><p>Saves the document to a file. In this case, the compression
3194 interface is triggered if it has been turned on.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003195 </dd>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +00003196</dl>
Daniel Veillard10c6a8f1998-10-28 01:00:12 +00003197
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +00003198<h3><a name="Compressio">Compression</a></h3>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003199
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00003200<p>The library transparently handles compression when doing file-based
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +00003201accesses. The level of compression on saves can be turned on either globally
3202or individually for one file:</p>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +00003203<dl>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003204 <dt><code>int xmlGetDocCompressMode (xmlDocPtr doc);</code></dt>
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00003205 <dd><p>Gets the document compression ratio (0-9).</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003206 </dd>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +00003207</dl>
3208<dl>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003209 <dt><code>void xmlSetDocCompressMode (xmlDocPtr doc, int mode);</code></dt>
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00003210 <dd><p>Sets the document compression ratio.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003211 </dd>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +00003212</dl>
3213<dl>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003214 <dt><code>int xmlGetCompressMode(void);</code></dt>
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00003215 <dd><p>Gets the default compression ratio.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003216 </dd>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +00003217</dl>
3218<dl>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003219 <dt><code>void xmlSetCompressMode(int mode);</code></dt>
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00003220 <dd><p>Sets the default compression ratio.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003221 </dd>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +00003222</dl>
3223
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +00003224<h2><a name="Entities">Entities or no entities</a></h2>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00003225
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00003226<p>Entities in principle are similar to simple C macros. An entity defines an
3227abbreviation for a given string that you can reuse many times throughout the
3228content of your document. Entities are especially useful when a given string
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +00003229may occur frequently within a document, or to confine the change needed to a
3230document to a restricted area in the internal subset of the document (at the
3231beginning). Example:</p>
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00003232<pre>1 &lt;?xml version="1.0"?&gt;
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +000032332 &lt;!DOCTYPE EXAMPLE SYSTEM "example.dtd" [
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +000032343 &lt;!ENTITY xml "Extensible Markup Language"&gt;
32354 ]&gt;
32365 &lt;EXAMPLE&gt;
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +000032376 &amp;xml;
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +000032387 &lt;/EXAMPLE&gt;</pre>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00003239
3240<p>Line 3 declares the xml entity. Line 6 uses the xml entity, by prefixing
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +00003241its name with '&amp;' and following it by ';' without any spaces added. There
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00003242are 5 predefined entities in libxml allowing you to escape charaters with
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00003243predefined meaning in some parts of the xml document content:
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00003244<strong>&amp;lt;</strong> for the character '&lt;', <strong>&amp;gt;</strong>
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00003245for the character '&gt;', <strong>&amp;apos;</strong> for the character ''',
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00003246<strong>&amp;quot;</strong> for the character '"', and
3247<strong>&amp;amp;</strong> for the character '&amp;'.</p>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00003248
3249<p>One of the problems related to entities is that you may want the parser to
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +00003250substitute an entity's content so that you can see the replacement text in
3251your application. Or you may prefer to keep entity references as such in the
3252content to be able to save the document back without losing this usually
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +00003253precious information (if the user went through the pain of explicitly
3254defining entities, he may have a a rather negative attitude if you blindly
3255susbtitute them as saving time). The <a
Daniel Veillard9cb5ff42001-01-29 08:22:21 +00003256href="html/libxml-parser.html#XMLSUBSTITUTEENTITIESDEFAULT">xmlSubstituteEntitiesDefault()</a>
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00003257function allows you to check and change the behaviour, which is to not
3258substitute entities by default.</p>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00003259
3260<p>Here is the DOM tree built by libxml for the previous document in the
3261default case:</p>
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00003262<pre>/gnome/src/gnome-xml -&gt; ./xmllint --debug test/ent1
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00003263DOCUMENT
3264version=1.0
3265 ELEMENT EXAMPLE
3266 TEXT
3267 content=
3268 ENTITY_REF
3269 INTERNAL_GENERAL_ENTITY xml
3270 content=Extensible Markup Language
3271 TEXT
3272 content=</pre>
3273
3274<p>And here is the result when substituting entities:</p>
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00003275<pre>/gnome/src/gnome-xml -&gt; ./tester --debug --noent test/ent1
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00003276DOCUMENT
3277version=1.0
3278 ELEMENT EXAMPLE
3279 TEXT
3280 content= Extensible Markup Language</pre>
3281
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00003282<p>So, entities or no entities? Basically, it depends on your use case. I
3283suggest that you keep the non-substituting default behaviour and avoid using
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00003284entities in your XML document or data if you are not willing to handle the
3285entity references elements in the DOM tree.</p>
3286
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +00003287<p>Note that at save time libxml enforces the conversion of the predefined
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00003288entities where necessary to prevent well-formedness problems, and will also
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +00003289transparently replace those with chars (i.e. it will not generate entity
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00003290reference elements in the DOM tree or call the reference() SAX callback when
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00003291finding them in the input).</p>
3292
Daniel Veillard7b9c4b72000-08-25 16:26:50 +00003293<p><span style="background-color: #FF0000">WARNING</span>: handling entities
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +00003294on top of the libxml SAX interface is difficult!!! If you plan to use
Daniel Veillard7b9c4b72000-08-25 16:26:50 +00003295non-predefined entities in your documents, then the learning cuvre to handle
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +00003296then using the SAX API may be long. If you plan to use complex documents, I
Daniel Veillard7b9c4b72000-08-25 16:26:50 +00003297strongly suggest you consider using the DOM interface instead and let libxml
Daniel Veillard8c6d6af2000-08-25 17:14:13 +00003298deal with the complexity rather than trying to do it yourself.</p>
Daniel Veillard7b9c4b72000-08-25 16:26:50 +00003299
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +00003300<h2><a name="Namespaces">Namespaces</a></h2>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00003301
Daniel Veillardec303412000-03-24 13:41:54 +00003302<p>The libxml library implements <a
3303href="http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml-names/">XML namespaces</a> support by
3304recognizing namespace contructs in the input, and does namespace lookup
3305automatically when building the DOM tree. A namespace declaration is
3306associated with an in-memory structure and all elements or attributes within
3307that namespace point to it. Hence testing the namespace is a simple and fast
3308equality operation at the user level.</p>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00003309
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +00003310<p>I suggest that people using libxml use a namespace, and declare it in the
3311root element of their document as the default namespace. Then they don't need
3312to use the prefix in the content but we will have a basis for future semantic
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +00003313refinement and merging of data from different sources. This doesn't increase
Daniel Veillardec70e912001-02-26 20:10:45 +00003314the size of the XML output significantly, but significantly increases its
3315value in the long-term. Example:</p>
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00003316<pre>&lt;mydoc xmlns="http://mydoc.example.org/schemas/"&gt;
3317 &lt;elem1&gt;...&lt;/elem1&gt;
3318 &lt;elem2&gt;...&lt;/elem2&gt;
3319&lt;/mydoc&gt;</pre>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00003320
Daniel Veillardec70e912001-02-26 20:10:45 +00003321<p>The namespace value has to be an absolute URL, but the URL doesn't have to
3322point to any existing resource on the Web. It will bind all the element and
3323atributes with that URL. I suggest to use an URL within a domain you control,
3324and that the URL should contain some kind of version information if possible.
3325For example, <code>"http://www.gnome.org/gnumeric/1.0/"</code> is a good
3326namespace scheme.</p>
Daniel Veillardec303412000-03-24 13:41:54 +00003327
3328<p>Then when you load a file, make sure that a namespace carrying the
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00003329version-independent prefix is installed on the root element of your document,
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00003330and if the version information don't match something you know, warn the user
3331and be liberal in what you accept as the input. Also do *not* try to base
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00003332namespace checking on the prefix value. &lt;foo:text&gt; may be exactly the
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +00003333same as &lt;bar:text&gt; in another document. What really matters is the URI
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00003334associated with the element or the attribute, not the prefix string (which is
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +00003335just a shortcut for the full URI). In libxml, element and attributes have an
Daniel Veillardec303412000-03-24 13:41:54 +00003336<code>ns</code> field pointing to an xmlNs structure detailing the namespace
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +00003337prefix and its URI.</p>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00003338
3339<p>@@Interfaces@@</p>
3340
3341<p>@@Examples@@</p>
3342
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +00003343<p>Usually people object to using namespaces together with validity checking.
3344I will try to make sure that using namespaces won't break validity checking,
3345so even if you plan to use or currently are using validation I strongly
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +00003346suggest adding namespaces to your document. A default namespace scheme
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00003347<code>xmlns="http://...."</code> should not break validity even on less
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +00003348flexible parsers. Using namespaces to mix and differentiate content coming
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +00003349from multiple DTDs will certainly break current validation schemes. I will
3350try to provide ways to do this, but this may not be portable or
3351standardized.</p>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00003352
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00003353<h2><a name="Upgrading">Upgrading 1.x code</a></h2>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00003354
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00003355<p>Incompatible changes:</p>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00003356
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00003357<p>Version 2 of libxml is the first version introducing serious backward
3358incompatible changes. The main goals were:</p>
3359<ul>
3360 <li>a general cleanup. A number of mistakes inherited from the very early
3361 versions couldn't be changed due to compatibility constraints. Example
3362 the "childs" element in the nodes.</li>
3363 <li>Uniformization of the various nodes, at least for their header and link
3364 parts (doc, parent, children, prev, next), the goal is a simpler
3365 programming model and simplifying the task of the DOM implementors.</li>
3366 <li>better conformances to the XML specification, for example version 1.x
3367 had an heuristic to try to detect ignorable white spaces. As a result the
3368 SAX event generated were ignorableWhitespace() while the spec requires
3369 character() in that case. This also mean that a number of DOM node
3370 containing blank text may populate the DOM tree which were not present
3371 before.</li>
3372</ul>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00003373
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00003374<h3>How to fix libxml-1.x code:</h3>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00003375
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00003376<p>So client code of libxml designed to run with version 1.x may have to be
3377changed to compile against version 2.x of libxml. Here is a list of changes
3378that I have collected, they may not be sufficient, so in case you find other
3379change which are required, <a href="mailto:Daniel.Ïeillardw3.org">drop me a
3380mail</a>:</p>
3381<ol>
3382 <li>The package name have changed from libxml to libxml2, the library name
3383 is now -lxml2 . There is a new xml2-config script which should be used to
3384 select the right parameters libxml2</li>
3385 <li>Node <strong>childs</strong> field has been renamed
3386 <strong>children</strong> so s/childs/children/g should be applied
3387 (probablility of having "childs" anywere else is close to 0+</li>
3388 <li>The document don't have anymore a <strong>root</strong> element it has
3389 been replaced by <strong>children</strong> and usually you will get a
3390 list of element here. For example a Dtd element for the internal subset
3391 and it's declaration may be found in that list, as well as processing
3392 instructions or comments found before or after the document root element.
3393 Use <strong>xmlDocGetRootElement(doc)</strong> to get the root element of
3394 a document. Alternatively if you are sure to not reference Dtds nor have
3395 PIs or comments before or after the root element
3396 s/-&gt;root/-&gt;children/g will probably do it.</li>
3397 <li>The white space issue, this one is more complex, unless special case of
3398 validating parsing, the line breaks and spaces usually used for indenting
3399 and formatting the document content becomes significant. So they are
3400 reported by SAX and if your using the DOM tree, corresponding nodes are
3401 generated. Too approach can be taken:
3402 <ol>
3403 <li>lazy one, use the compatibility call
3404 <strong>xmlKeepBlanksDefault(0)</strong> but be aware that you are
3405 relying on a special (and possibly broken) set of heuristics of
3406 libxml to detect ignorable blanks. Don't complain if it breaks or
3407 make your application not 100% clean w.r.t. to it's input.</li>
3408 <li>the Right Way: change you code to accept possibly unsignificant
3409 blanks characters, or have your tree populated with weird blank text
3410 nodes. You can spot them using the comodity function
3411 <strong>xmlIsBlankNode(node)</strong> returning 1 for such blank
3412 nodes.</li>
3413 </ol>
3414 <p>Note also that with the new default the output functions don't add any
3415 extra indentation when saving a tree in order to be able to round trip
3416 (read and save) without inflating the document with extra formatting
3417 chars.</p>
3418 </li>
3419 <li>The include path has changed to $prefix/libxml/ and the includes
3420 themselves uses this new prefix in includes instructions... If you are
3421 using (as expected) the
3422 <pre>xml2-config --cflags</pre>
3423 <p>output to generate you compile commands this will probably work out of
3424 the box</p>
3425 </li>
3426 <li>xmlDetectCharEncoding takes an extra argument indicating the lenght in
3427 byte of the head of the document available for character detection.</li>
3428</ol>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00003429
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00003430<h3>Ensuring both libxml-1.x and libxml-2.x compatibility</h3>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00003431
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00003432<p>Two new version of libxml (1.8.11) and libxml2 (2.3.4) have been released
3433to allow smoth upgrade of existing libxml v1code while retaining
3434compatibility. They offers the following:</p>
3435<ol>
3436 <li>similar include naming, one should use
3437 <strong>#include&lt;libxml/...&gt;</strong> in both cases.</li>
3438 <li>similar identifiers defined via macros for the child and root fields:
3439 respectively <strong>xmlChildrenNode</strong> and
3440 <strong>xmlRootNode</strong></li>
3441 <li>a new macro <strong>LIBXML_TEST_VERSION</strong> which should be
3442 inserted once in the client code</li>
3443</ol>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00003444
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00003445<p>So the roadmap to upgrade your existing libxml applications is the
3446following:</p>
3447<ol>
3448 <li>install the libxml-1.8.8 (and libxml-devel-1.8.8) packages</li>
3449 <li>find all occurences where the xmlDoc <strong>root</strong> field is
3450 used and change it to <strong>xmlRootNode</strong></li>
3451 <li>similary find all occurences where the xmlNode <strong>childs</strong>
3452 field is used and change it to <strong>xmlChildrenNode</strong></li>
3453 <li>add a <strong>LIBXML_TEST_VERSION</strong> macro somewhere in your
3454 <strong>main()</strong> or in the library init entry point</li>
3455 <li>Recompile, check compatibility, it should still work</li>
3456 <li>Change your configure script to look first for xml2-config and fallback
3457 using xml-config . Use the --cflags and --libs ouptut of the command as
3458 the Include and Linking parameters needed to use libxml.</li>
3459 <li>install libxml2-2.3.x and libxml2-devel-2.3.x (libxml-1.8.y and
3460 libxml-devel-1.8.y can be kept simultaneously)</li>
3461 <li>remove your config.cache, relaunch your configuration mechanism, and
3462 recompile, if steps 2 and 3 were done right it should compile as-is</li>
3463 <li>Test that your application is still running correctly, if not this may
3464 be due to extra empty nodes due to formating spaces being kept in libxml2
3465 contrary to libxml1, in that case insert xmlKeepBlanksDefault(1) in your
3466 code before calling the parser (next to
3467 <strong>LIBXML_TEST_VERSION</strong> is a fine place).</li>
3468</ol>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00003469
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00003470<p>Following those steps should work. It worked for some of my own code.</p>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00003471
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00003472<p>Let me put some emphasis on the fact that there is far more changes from
3473libxml 1.x to 2.x than the ones you may have to patch for. The overall code
3474has been considerably cleaned up and the conformance to the XML specification
3475has been drastically improved too. Don't take those changes as an excuse to
3476not upgrade, it may cost a lot on the long term ...</p>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00003477
Daniel Veillard52dcab32001-10-30 12:51:17 +00003478<h2><a name="Thread">Thread safety</a></h2>
3479
3480<p>Starting with 2.4.7, libxml makes provisions to ensure that concurent
3481threads can safely work in parallel parsing different documents. There is
3482however a couple of things to do to ensure it:</p>
3483<ul>
3484 <li>configure the library accordingly using the --with-threads options</li>
3485 <li>call xmlInitParser() in the "main" thread before using any of the
3486 libxml API (except possibly selecting a different memory allocator)</li>
3487</ul>
3488
3489<p>Note that the thread safety cannot be ensured for multiple threads sharing
3490the same document, the locking must be done at the application level, libxml
3491exports a basic mutex and reentrant mutexes API in &lt;libxml/threads.h&gt;.
3492The parts of the library checked for thread safety are:</p>
3493<ul>
3494 <li>concurrent loading</li>
3495 <li>file access resolution</li>
3496 <li>catalog access</li>
3497 <li>catalog building</li>
3498 <li>entities lookup/accesses</li>
3499 <li>validation</li>
3500 <li>global variables per-thread override</li>
3501 <li>memory handling</li>
3502</ul>
3503
3504<p>XPath is supposed to be thread safe now, but this wasn't tested
3505seriously.</p>
3506
Daniel Veillard35008381999-10-25 13:15:52 +00003507<h2><a name="DOM"></a><a name="Principles">DOM Principles</a></h2>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003508
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +00003509<p><a href="http://www.w3.org/DOM/">DOM</a> stands for the <em>Document
3510Object Model</em>; this is an API for accessing XML or HTML structured
3511documents. Native support for DOM in Gnome is on the way (module gnome-dom),
3512and will be based on gnome-xml. This will be a far cleaner interface to
3513manipulate XML files within Gnome since it won't expose the internal
3514structure.</p>
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +00003515
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00003516<p>The current DOM implementation on top of libxml is the <a
Daniel Veillarda47fb3d2001-03-25 17:23:49 +00003517href="http://cvs.gnome.org/lxr/source/gdome2/">gdome2 Gnome module</a>, this
3518is a full DOM interface, thanks to Paolo Casarini, check the <a
3519href="http://www.cs.unibo.it/~casarini/gdome2/">Gdome2 homepage</a> for more
3520informations.</p>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00003521
Daniel Veillard35008381999-10-25 13:15:52 +00003522<h2><a name="Example"></a><a name="real">A real example</a></h2>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003523
3524<p>Here is a real size example, where the actual content of the application
3525data is not kept in the DOM tree but uses internal structures. It is based on
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +00003526a proposal to keep a database of jobs related to Gnome, with an XML based
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003527storage structure. Here is an <a href="gjobs.xml">XML encoded jobs
3528base</a>:</p>
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00003529<pre>&lt;?xml version="1.0"?&gt;
3530&lt;gjob:Helping xmlns:gjob="http://www.gnome.org/some-location"&gt;
3531 &lt;gjob:Jobs&gt;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +00003532
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00003533 &lt;gjob:Job&gt;
3534 &lt;gjob:Project ID="3"/&gt;
3535 &lt;gjob:Application&gt;GBackup&lt;/gjob:Application&gt;
3536 &lt;gjob:Category&gt;Development&lt;/gjob:Category&gt;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +00003537
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00003538 &lt;gjob:Update&gt;
3539 &lt;gjob:Status&gt;Open&lt;/gjob:Status&gt;
3540 &lt;gjob:Modified&gt;Mon, 07 Jun 1999 20:27:45 -0400 MET DST&lt;/gjob:Modified&gt;
3541 &lt;gjob:Salary&gt;USD 0.00&lt;/gjob:Salary&gt;
3542 &lt;/gjob:Update&gt;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +00003543
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00003544 &lt;gjob:Developers&gt;
3545 &lt;gjob:Developer&gt;
3546 &lt;/gjob:Developer&gt;
3547 &lt;/gjob:Developers&gt;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +00003548
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00003549 &lt;gjob:Contact&gt;
3550 &lt;gjob:Person&gt;Nathan Clemons&lt;/gjob:Person&gt;
3551 &lt;gjob:Email&gt;nathan@windsofstorm.net&lt;/gjob:Email&gt;
3552 &lt;gjob:Company&gt;
3553 &lt;/gjob:Company&gt;
3554 &lt;gjob:Organisation&gt;
3555 &lt;/gjob:Organisation&gt;
3556 &lt;gjob:Webpage&gt;
3557 &lt;/gjob:Webpage&gt;
3558 &lt;gjob:Snailmail&gt;
3559 &lt;/gjob:Snailmail&gt;
3560 &lt;gjob:Phone&gt;
3561 &lt;/gjob:Phone&gt;
3562 &lt;/gjob:Contact&gt;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +00003563
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00003564 &lt;gjob:Requirements&gt;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +00003565 The program should be released as free software, under the GPL.
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00003566 &lt;/gjob:Requirements&gt;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +00003567
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00003568 &lt;gjob:Skills&gt;
3569 &lt;/gjob:Skills&gt;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +00003570
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00003571 &lt;gjob:Details&gt;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +00003572 A GNOME based system that will allow a superuser to configure
3573 compressed and uncompressed files and/or file systems to be backed
3574 up with a supported media in the system. This should be able to
3575 perform via find commands generating a list of files that are passed
3576 to tar, dd, cpio, cp, gzip, etc., to be directed to the tape machine
3577 or via operations performed on the filesystem itself. Email
3578 notification and GUI status display very important.
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00003579 &lt;/gjob:Details&gt;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +00003580
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00003581 &lt;/gjob:Job&gt;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +00003582
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00003583 &lt;/gjob:Jobs&gt;
3584&lt;/gjob:Helping&gt;</pre>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003585
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +00003586<p>While loading the XML file into an internal DOM tree is a matter of
3587calling only a couple of functions, browsing the tree to gather the ata and
3588generate the internal structures is harder, and more error prone.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003589
3590<p>The suggested principle is to be tolerant with respect to the input
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +00003591structure. For example, the ordering of the attributes is not significant,
3592the XML specification is clear about it. It's also usually a good idea not to
Daniel Veillardec70e912001-02-26 20:10:45 +00003593depend on the order of the children of a given node, unless it really makes
3594things harder. Here is some code to parse the information for a person:</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003595<pre>/*
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +00003596 * A person record
3597 */
3598typedef struct person {
3599 char *name;
3600 char *email;
3601 char *company;
3602 char *organisation;
3603 char *smail;
3604 char *webPage;
3605 char *phone;
3606} person, *personPtr;
3607
3608/*
3609 * And the code needed to parse it
3610 */
3611personPtr parsePerson(xmlDocPtr doc, xmlNsPtr ns, xmlNodePtr cur) {
3612 personPtr ret = NULL;
3613
3614DEBUG("parsePerson\n");
3615 /*
3616 * allocate the struct
3617 */
3618 ret = (personPtr) malloc(sizeof(person));
3619 if (ret == NULL) {
3620 fprintf(stderr,"out of memory\n");
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003621 return(NULL);
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +00003622 }
3623 memset(ret, 0, sizeof(person));
3624
3625 /* We don't care what the top level element name is */
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00003626 cur = cur-&gt;xmlChildrenNode;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +00003627 while (cur != NULL) {
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00003628 if ((!strcmp(cur-&gt;name, "Person")) &amp;&amp; (cur-&gt;ns == ns))
3629 ret-&gt;name = xmlNodeListGetString(doc, cur-&gt;xmlChildrenNode, 1);
3630 if ((!strcmp(cur-&gt;name, "Email")) &amp;&amp; (cur-&gt;ns == ns))
3631 ret-&gt;email = xmlNodeListGetString(doc, cur-&gt;xmlChildrenNode, 1);
3632 cur = cur-&gt;next;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +00003633 }
3634
3635 return(ret);
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003636}</pre>
3637
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +00003638<p>Here are a couple of things to notice:</p>
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +00003639<ul>
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +00003640 <li>Usually a recursive parsing style is the more convenient one: XML data
3641 is by nature subject to repetitive constructs and usually exibits highly
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003642 stuctured patterns.</li>
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +00003643 <li>The two arguments of type <em>xmlDocPtr</em> and <em>xmlNsPtr</em>,
3644 i.e. the pointer to the global XML document and the namespace reserved to
3645 the application. Document wide information are needed for example to
3646 decode entities and it's a good coding practice to define a namespace for
3647 your application set of data and test that the element and attributes
3648 you're analyzing actually pertains to your application space. This is
3649 done by a simple equality test (cur-&gt;ns == ns).</li>
Daniel Veillardec70e912001-02-26 20:10:45 +00003650 <li>To retrieve text and attributes value, you can use the function
3651 <em>xmlNodeListGetString</em> to gather all the text and entity reference
3652 nodes generated by the DOM output and produce an single text string.</li>
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +00003653</ul>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003654
3655<p>Here is another piece of code used to parse another level of the
3656structure:</p>
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00003657<pre>#include &lt;libxml/tree.h&gt;
Daniel Veillard361d8452000-04-03 19:48:13 +00003658/*
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +00003659 * a Description for a Job
3660 */
3661typedef struct job {
3662 char *projectID;
3663 char *application;
3664 char *category;
3665 personPtr contact;
3666 int nbDevelopers;
3667 personPtr developers[100]; /* using dynamic alloc is left as an exercise */
3668} job, *jobPtr;
3669
3670/*
3671 * And the code needed to parse it
3672 */
3673jobPtr parseJob(xmlDocPtr doc, xmlNsPtr ns, xmlNodePtr cur) {
3674 jobPtr ret = NULL;
3675
3676DEBUG("parseJob\n");
3677 /*
3678 * allocate the struct
3679 */
3680 ret = (jobPtr) malloc(sizeof(job));
3681 if (ret == NULL) {
3682 fprintf(stderr,"out of memory\n");
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003683 return(NULL);
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +00003684 }
3685 memset(ret, 0, sizeof(job));
3686
3687 /* We don't care what the top level element name is */
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00003688 cur = cur-&gt;xmlChildrenNode;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +00003689 while (cur != NULL) {
3690
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00003691 if ((!strcmp(cur-&gt;name, "Project")) &amp;&amp; (cur-&gt;ns == ns)) {
3692 ret-&gt;projectID = xmlGetProp(cur, "ID");
3693 if (ret-&gt;projectID == NULL) {
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003694 fprintf(stderr, "Project has no ID\n");
3695 }
3696 }
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00003697 if ((!strcmp(cur-&gt;name, "Application")) &amp;&amp; (cur-&gt;ns == ns))
3698 ret-&gt;application = xmlNodeListGetString(doc, cur-&gt;xmlChildrenNode, 1);
3699 if ((!strcmp(cur-&gt;name, "Category")) &amp;&amp; (cur-&gt;ns == ns))
3700 ret-&gt;category = xmlNodeListGetString(doc, cur-&gt;xmlChildrenNode, 1);
3701 if ((!strcmp(cur-&gt;name, "Contact")) &amp;&amp; (cur-&gt;ns == ns))
3702 ret-&gt;contact = parsePerson(doc, ns, cur);
3703 cur = cur-&gt;next;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +00003704 }
3705
3706 return(ret);
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003707}</pre>
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +00003708
Daniel Veillardec70e912001-02-26 20:10:45 +00003709<p>Once you are used to it, writing this kind of code is quite simple, but
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +00003710boring. Ultimately, it could be possble to write stubbers taking either C
3711data structure definitions, a set of XML examples or an XML DTD and produce
3712the code needed to import and export the content between C data and XML
3713storage. This is left as an exercise to the reader :-)</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003714
Daniel Veillard6f0adb52000-07-03 11:41:26 +00003715<p>Feel free to use <a href="example/gjobread.c">the code for the full C
3716parsing example</a> as a template, it is also available with Makefile in the
3717Gnome CVS base under gnome-xml/example</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003718
Daniel Veillardc310d562000-06-23 18:32:15 +00003719<h2><a name="Contributi">Contributions</a></h2>
3720<ul>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00003721 <li>Bjorn Reese, William Brack and Thomas Broyer have provided a number of
3722 patches, Gary Pennington worked on the validation API, threading support
3723 and Solaris port.</li>
3724 <li>John Fleck helps maintaining the documentation and man pages.</li>
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +00003725 <li><a href="mailto:ari@lusis.org">Ari Johnson</a> provides a C++ wrapper
3726 for libxml:<br>
Daniel Veillardc6271d22001-10-27 07:50:58 +00003727 Website: <a
3728 href="http://lusis.org/~ari/xml++/">http://lusis.org/~ari/xml++/</a><br>
3729 Download: <a
Daniel Veillard51095312001-10-28 18:51:57 +00003730 href="http://lusis.org/~ari/xml++/libxml++.tar.gz">http://lusis.org/~ari/xml++/libxml++.tar.gz</a></li>
Daniel Veillardb2fb8ed2002-04-01 09:33:12 +00003731 <li><a href="mailto:igor@stud.fh-frankfurt.de">Igor Zlatkovic</a> is now
3732 the maintainer of the Windows port, <a
Daniel Veillard95189532001-07-26 18:30:26 +00003733 href="http://www.fh-frankfurt.de/~igor/projects/libxml/index.html">he
3734 provides binaries</a></li>
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +00003735 <li><a href="mailto:Gary.Pennington@sun.com">Gary Pennington</a> provides
3736 <a href="http://garypennington.net/libxml2/">Solaris binaries</a></li>
Daniel Veillarde356c282001-03-10 12:32:04 +00003737 <li><a
3738 href="http://mail.gnome.org/archives/xml/2001-March/msg00014.html">Matt
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +00003739 Sergeant</a> developped <a
3740 href="http://axkit.org/download/">XML::LibXSLT</a>, a perl wrapper for
3741 libxml2/libxslt as part of the <a href="http://axkit.com/">AxKit XML
3742 application server</a></li>
3743 <li><a href="mailto:fnatter@gmx.net">Felix Natter</a> and <a
3744 href="mailto:geertk@ai.rug.nl">Geert Kloosterman</a> provide <a
Daniel Veillardca989762001-06-23 17:39:29 +00003745 href="libxml-doc.el">an emacs module</a> to lookup libxml(2) functions
Daniel Veillard3f6f7f62000-06-30 17:58:25 +00003746 documentation</li>
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +00003747 <li><a href="mailto:sherwin@nlm.nih.gov">Ziying Sherwin</a> provided <a
3748 href="http://xmlsoft.org/messages/0488.html">man pages</a></li>
Daniel Veillard5168dbf2001-07-07 00:18:23 +00003749 <li>there is a module for <a
3750 href="http://acs-misc.sourceforge.net/nsxml.html">libxml/libxslt support
3751 in OpenNSD/AOLServer</a></li>
Daniel Veillard2d347fa2002-03-17 10:34:11 +00003752 <li><a href="mailto:dkuhlman@cutter.rexx.com">Dave Kuhlman</a> provided the
3753 first version of libxml/libxslt <a
3754 href="http://www.rexx.com/~dkuhlman">wrappers for Python</a></li>
Daniel Veillard1aadc442001-11-28 13:10:32 +00003755 <li>Petr Kozelka provides <a
3756 href="http://sourceforge.net/projects/libxml2-pas">Pascal units to glue
3757 libxml2</a> with Kylix and Delphi and other Pascal compilers</li>
Daniel Veillard2d347fa2002-03-17 10:34:11 +00003758 <li><a href="mailto:aleksey@aleksey.com">Aleksey Sanin</a> implemented the
3759 <a href="http://www.w3.org/Signature/">XML Canonicalization and XML
3760 Digital Signature</a> <a
3761 href="http://www.aleksey.com/xmlsec/">implementations for libxml2</a></li>
Daniel Veillardc310d562000-06-23 18:32:15 +00003762</ul>
3763
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00003764<p></p>
Daniel Veillardccb09631998-10-27 06:21:04 +00003765</body>
3766</html>