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Daniel Veillard598bec32003-07-06 10:02:03 +00005 <title>The XML C parser and toolkit of Gnome</title>
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Daniel Veillard598bec32003-07-06 10:02:03 +000011<h1 align="center">The XML C parser and toolkit of Gnome</h1>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +000012
Daniel Veillard9c466822001-10-25 12:03:39 +000013<h1>Note: this is the flat content of the <a href="index.html">web
14site</a></h1>
15
Daniel Veillardc9484202001-10-24 12:35:52 +000016<h1 style="text-align: center">libxml, a.k.a. gnome-xml</h1>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +000017
18<p></p>
Daniel Veillard9c466822001-10-25 12:03:39 +000019
Daniel Veillard7ebac022004-02-25 22:36:35 +000020<p
21style="text-align: right; font-style: italic; font-size: 10pt">"Programming
22with libxml2 is like the thrilling embrace of an exotic stranger." <a
23href="http://diveintomark.org/archives/2004/02/18/libxml2">Mark
24Pilgrim</a></p>
25
Daniel Veillard598bec32003-07-06 10:02:03 +000026<p>Libxml2 is the XML C parser and toolkit developed for the Gnome project
Daniel Veillard23a52c52003-08-18 10:01:18 +000027(but usable outside of the Gnome platform), it is free software available
Daniel Veillardeec1ae92003-09-09 13:11:01 +000028under the <a href="http://www.opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.html">MIT
29License</a>. XML itself is a metalanguage to design markup languages, i.e.
30text language where semantic and structure are added to the content using
31extra "markup" information enclosed between angle brackets. HTML is the most
32well-known markup language. Though the library is written in C <a
33href="python.html">a variety of language bindings</a> make it available in
34other environments.</p>
Daniel Veillard9c466822001-10-25 12:03:39 +000035
Daniel Veillard710823b2003-03-04 10:05:52 +000036<p>Libxml2 is known to be very portable, the library should build and work
37without serious troubles on a variety of systems (Linux, Unix, Windows,
38CygWin, MacOS, MacOS X, RISC Os, OS/2, VMS, QNX, MVS, ...)</p>
39
Daniel Veillard9c466822001-10-25 12:03:39 +000040<p>Libxml2 implements a number of existing standards related to markup
41languages:</p>
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +000042<ul>
Daniel Veillard9c466822001-10-25 12:03:39 +000043 <li>the XML standard: <a
44 href="http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml">http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml</a></li>
45 <li>Namespaces in XML: <a
46 href="http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml-names/">http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml-names/</a></li>
47 <li>XML Base: <a
48 href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xmlbase/">http://www.w3.org/TR/xmlbase/</a></li>
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +000049 <li><a href="http://www.cis.ohio-state.edu/rfc/rfc2396.txt">RFC 2396</a> :
50 Uniform Resource Identifiers <a
Daniel Veillard9c466822001-10-25 12:03:39 +000051 href="http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2396.txt">http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2396.txt</a></li>
52 <li>XML Path Language (XPath) 1.0: <a
53 href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xpath">http://www.w3.org/TR/xpath</a></li>
54 <li>HTML4 parser: <a
55 href="http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/">http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/</a></li>
Daniel Veillard23a52c52003-08-18 10:01:18 +000056 <li>XML Pointer Language (XPointer) Version 1.0: <a
Daniel Veillard9c466822001-10-25 12:03:39 +000057 href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xptr">http://www.w3.org/TR/xptr</a></li>
58 <li>XML Inclusions (XInclude) Version 1.0: <a
59 href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xinclude/">http://www.w3.org/TR/xinclude/</a></li>
Daniel Veillard23a52c52003-08-18 10:01:18 +000060 <li>ISO-8859-x encodings, as well as <a
Daniel Veillard9c466822001-10-25 12:03:39 +000061 href="http://www.cis.ohio-state.edu/rfc/rfc2044.txt">rfc2044</a> [UTF-8]
62 and <a href="http://www.cis.ohio-state.edu/rfc/rfc2781.txt">rfc2781</a>
Daniel Veillard23a52c52003-08-18 10:01:18 +000063 [UTF-16] Unicode encodings, and more if using iconv support</li>
Daniel Veillard9c466822001-10-25 12:03:39 +000064 <li>part of SGML Open Technical Resolution TR9401:1997</li>
65 <li>XML Catalogs Working Draft 06 August 2001: <a
66 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 +000067 <li>Canonical XML Version 1.0: <a
68 href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xml-c14n">http://www.w3.org/TR/xml-c14n</a>
Daniel Veillard2d347fa2002-03-17 10:34:11 +000069 and the Exclusive XML Canonicalization CR draft <a
70 href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xml-exc-c14n">http://www.w3.org/TR/xml-exc-c14n</a></li>
Daniel Veillard758c5312003-12-15 11:51:25 +000071 <li>Relax NG, ISO/IEC 19757-2:2003, <a
Daniel Veillard17bed982003-02-24 20:11:43 +000072 href="http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/relax-ng/spec-20011203.html">http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/relax-ng/spec-20011203.html</a></li>
Daniel Veillardf83a2c72003-04-08 13:48:40 +000073 <li>W3C XML Schemas Part 2: Datatypes <a
74 href="http://www.w3.org/TR/2001/REC-xmlschema-2-20010502/">REC 02 May
Daniel Veillard7ecced52003-12-18 14:22:09 +000075 2001</a></li>
Daniel Veillard96984452000-08-31 13:50:12 +000076</ul>
77
Daniel Veillard560c2a42003-07-06 21:13:49 +000078<p>In most cases libxml2 tries to implement the specifications in a
79relatively strictly compliant way. As of release 2.4.16, libxml2 passes all
801800+ tests from the <a
Daniel Veillarda5393562002-02-20 11:40:49 +000081href="http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/xml-conformance/">OASIS XML Tests
82Suite</a>.</p>
Daniel Veillard5b16f582002-02-20 11:38:46 +000083
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +000084<p>To some extent libxml2 provides support for the following additional
85specifications but doesn't claim to implement them completely:</p>
Daniel Veillard9c466822001-10-25 12:03:39 +000086<ul>
87 <li>Document Object Model (DOM) <a
88 href="http://www.w3.org/TR/DOM-Level-2-Core/">http://www.w3.org/TR/DOM-Level-2-Core/</a>
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +000089 it doesn't implement the API itself, gdome2 does this on top of
Daniel Veillard9c466822001-10-25 12:03:39 +000090 libxml2</li>
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +000091 <li><a href="http://www.cis.ohio-state.edu/rfc/rfc959.txt">RFC 959</a> :
Daniel Veillard8a469172003-06-12 16:05:07 +000092 libxml2 implements a basic FTP client code</li>
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +000093 <li><a href="http://www.cis.ohio-state.edu/rfc/rfc1945.txt">RFC 1945</a> :
94 HTTP/1.0, again a basic HTTP client code</li>
Daniel Veillard9c466822001-10-25 12:03:39 +000095 <li>SAX: a minimal SAX implementation compatible with early expat
96 versions</li>
97 <li>DocBook SGML v4: libxml2 includes a hackish parser to transition to
98 XML</li>
99</ul>
100
Daniel Veillardf83a2c72003-04-08 13:48:40 +0000101<p>A partial implementation of <a
102href="http://www.w3.org/TR/2001/REC-xmlschema-1-20010502/">XML Schemas Part
1031: Structure</a> is being worked on but it would be far too early to make any
104conformance statement about it at the moment.</p>
Daniel Veillarde6d8e202002-05-02 06:11:10 +0000105
Daniel Veillard96984452000-08-31 13:50:12 +0000106<p>Separate documents:</p>
107<ul>
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +0000108 <li><a href="http://xmlsoft.org/XSLT/">the libxslt page</a> providing an
Daniel Veillard2d347fa2002-03-17 10:34:11 +0000109 implementation of XSLT 1.0 and common extensions like EXSLT for
110 libxml2</li>
Daniel Veillardc6271d22001-10-27 07:50:58 +0000111 <li><a href="http://www.cs.unibo.it/~casarini/gdome2/">the gdome2 page</a>
Daniel Veillard2d347fa2002-03-17 10:34:11 +0000112 : a standard DOM2 implementation for libxml2</li>
113 <li><a href="http://www.aleksey.com/xmlsec/">the XMLSec page</a>: an
114 implementation of <a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xmldsig-core/">W3C XML
115 Digital Signature</a> for libxml2</li>
Daniel Veillarde6d8e202002-05-02 06:11:10 +0000116 <li>also check the related links section below for more related and active
117 projects.</li>
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000118</ul>
Daniel Veillard252004d2004-03-23 12:32:32 +0000119<!----------------<p>Results of the <a
Daniel Veillard806cada2003-03-19 21:58:59 +0000120href="http://xmlbench.sourceforge.net/results/benchmark/index.html">xmlbench
Daniel Veillard31ae4622004-02-16 07:45:44 +0000121benchmark</a> on sourceforge February 2004 (smaller is better):</p>
Daniel Veillardd8da01c2003-03-24 15:58:23 +0000122
Daniel Veillard31ae4622004-02-16 07:45:44 +0000123<p align="center"><img src="benchmark.png"
Daniel Veillardd8da01c2003-03-24 15:58:23 +0000124alt="benchmark results for Expat Xerces libxml2 Oracle and Sun toolkits"></p>
Daniel Veillardcf80b782004-03-07 19:32:19 +0000125-------------->
Daniel Veillard806cada2003-03-19 21:58:59 +0000126
Daniel Veillard252004d2004-03-23 12:32:32 +0000127
Daniel Veillarde1662542002-08-28 11:50:59 +0000128<p>Logo designed by <a href="mailto:liyanage@access.ch">Marc Liyanage</a>.</p>
129
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000130<h2><a name="Introducti">Introduction</a></h2>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000131
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +0000132<p>This document describes libxml, the <a
Daniel Veillard560c2a42003-07-06 21:13:49 +0000133href="http://www.w3.org/XML/">XML</a> C parser and toolkit developed for the
134<a href="http://www.gnome.org/">Gnome</a> project. <a
Daniel Veillardec78c0f2000-08-25 10:25:23 +0000135href="http://www.w3.org/XML/">XML is a standard</a> for building tag-based
136structured documents/data.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000137
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000138<p>Here are some key points about libxml:</p>
139<ul>
Daniel Veillard8a469172003-06-12 16:05:07 +0000140 <li>Libxml2 exports Push (progressive) and Pull (blocking) type parser
Daniel Veillard2d347fa2002-03-17 10:34:11 +0000141 interfaces for both XML and HTML.</li>
Daniel Veillard8a469172003-06-12 16:05:07 +0000142 <li>Libxml2 can do DTD validation at parse time, using a parsed document
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000143 instance, or with an arbitrary DTD.</li>
Daniel Veillard8a469172003-06-12 16:05:07 +0000144 <li>Libxml2 includes complete <a
Daniel Veillard8c2ecaf2001-07-10 17:53:07 +0000145 href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xpath">XPath</a>, <a
146 href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xptr">XPointer</a> and <a
147 href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xinclude">XInclude</a> implementations.</li>
Daniel Veillardec78c0f2000-08-25 10:25:23 +0000148 <li>It is written in plain C, making as few assumptions as possible, and
Daniel Veillard189446d2000-10-13 10:23:06 +0000149 sticking closely to ANSI C/POSIX for easy embedding. Works on
Daniel Veillardab8500d2000-10-15 21:06:19 +0000150 Linux/Unix/Windows, ported to a number of other platforms.</li>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000151 <li>Basic support for HTTP and FTP client allowing applications to fetch
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000152 remote resources.</li>
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000153 <li>The design is modular, most of the extensions can be compiled out.</li>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000154 <li>The internal document representation is as close as possible to the <a
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000155 href="http://www.w3.org/DOM/">DOM</a> interfaces.</li>
Daniel Veillard560c2a42003-07-06 21:13:49 +0000156 <li>Libxml2 also has a <a
157 href="http://www.megginson.com/SAX/index.html">SAX like interface</a>;
158 the interface is designed to be compatible with <a
Daniel Veillard402e8c82000-02-29 22:57:47 +0000159 href="http://www.jclark.com/xml/expat.html">Expat</a>.</li>
Daniel Veillardc575b992002-02-08 13:28:40 +0000160 <li>This library is released under the <a
161 href="http://www.opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.html">MIT
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000162 License</a>. See the Copyright file in the distribution for the precise
Daniel Veillardc575b992002-02-08 13:28:40 +0000163 wording.</li>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000164</ul>
Daniel Veillardccb09631998-10-27 06:21:04 +0000165
Daniel Veillarde0c1d722001-03-21 10:28:36 +0000166<p>Warning: unless you are forced to because your application links with a
Daniel Veillard2d347fa2002-03-17 10:34:11 +0000167Gnome-1.X library requiring it, <strong><span
Daniel Veillarde0c1d722001-03-21 10:28:36 +0000168style="background-color: #FF0000">Do Not Use libxml1</span></strong>, use
169libxml2</p>
170
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000171<h2><a name="FAQ">FAQ</a></h2>
172
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000173<p>Table of Contents:</p>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000174<ul>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000175 <li><a href="FAQ.html#License">License(s)</a></li>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000176 <li><a href="FAQ.html#Installati">Installation</a></li>
177 <li><a href="FAQ.html#Compilatio">Compilation</a></li>
178 <li><a href="FAQ.html#Developer">Developer corner</a></li>
179</ul>
180
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000181<h3><a name="License">License</a>(s)</h3>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000182<ol>
183 <li><em>Licensing Terms for libxml</em>
Daniel Veillard8a469172003-06-12 16:05:07 +0000184 <p>libxml2 is released under the <a
Daniel Veillardc575b992002-02-08 13:28:40 +0000185 href="http://www.opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.html">MIT
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000186 License</a>; see the file Copyright in the distribution for the precise
Daniel Veillardc575b992002-02-08 13:28:40 +0000187 wording</p>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000188 </li>
Daniel Veillard8a469172003-06-12 16:05:07 +0000189 <li><em>Can I embed libxml2 in a proprietary application ?</em>
Daniel Veillard42766c02002-08-22 20:52:17 +0000190 <p>Yes. The MIT License allows you to keep proprietary the changes you
191 made to libxml, but it would be graceful to send-back bug fixes and
192 improvements as patches for possible incorporation in the main
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000193 development tree.</p>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000194 </li>
195</ol>
196
197<h3><a name="Installati">Installation</a></h3>
198<ol>
Daniel Veillard560c2a42003-07-06 21:13:49 +0000199 <li><strong><span style="background-color: #FF0000">Do Not Use
200 libxml1</span></strong>, use libxml2</li>
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +0000201 <li><em>Where can I get libxml</em> ?
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000202 <p>The original distribution comes from <a
203 href="ftp://rpmfind.net/pub/libxml/">rpmfind.net</a> or <a
Daniel Veillard024f1992003-12-10 16:43:49 +0000204 href="ftp://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/sources/libxml2/2.6/">gnome.org</a></p>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000205 <p>Most Linux and BSD distributions include libxml, this is probably the
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000206 safer way for end-users to use libxml.</p>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000207 <p>David Doolin provides precompiled Windows versions at <a
208 href="http://www.ce.berkeley.edu/~doolin/code/libxmlwin32/ ">http://www.ce.berkeley.edu/~doolin/code/libxmlwin32/</a></p>
209 </li>
210 <li><em>I see libxml and libxml2 releases, which one should I install ?</em>
211 <ul>
Daniel Veillard42766c02002-08-22 20:52:17 +0000212 <li>If you are not constrained by backward compatibility issues with
213 existing applications, install libxml2 only</li>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000214 <li>If you are not doing development, you can safely install both.
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000215 Usually the packages <a
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000216 href="http://rpmfind.net/linux/RPM/libxml.html">libxml</a> and <a
217 href="http://rpmfind.net/linux/RPM/libxml2.html">libxml2</a> are
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000218 compatible (this is not the case for development packages).</li>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000219 <li>If you are a developer and your system provides separate packaging
220 for shared libraries and the development components, it is possible
221 to install libxml and libxml2, and also <a
222 href="http://rpmfind.net/linux/RPM/libxml-devel.html">libxml-devel</a>
223 and <a
224 href="http://rpmfind.net/linux/RPM/libxml2-devel.html">libxml2-devel</a>
225 too for libxml2 &gt;= 2.3.0</li>
226 <li>If you are developing a new application, please develop against
227 libxml2(-devel)</li>
228 </ul>
229 </li>
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000230 <li><em>I can't install the libxml package, it conflicts with libxml0</em>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000231 <p>You probably have an old libxml0 package used to provide the shared
Daniel Veillard42766c02002-08-22 20:52:17 +0000232 library for libxml.so.0, you can probably safely remove it. The libxml
233 packages provided on <a
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000234 href="ftp://rpmfind.net/pub/libxml/">rpmfind.net</a> provide
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000235 libxml.so.0</p>
236 </li>
237 <li><em>I can't install the libxml(2) RPM package due to failed
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000238 dependencies</em>
239 <p>The most generic solution is to re-fetch the latest src.rpm , and
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000240 rebuild it locally with</p>
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000241 <p><code>rpm --rebuild libxml(2)-xxx.src.rpm</code>.</p>
Daniel Veillard42766c02002-08-22 20:52:17 +0000242 <p>If everything goes well it will generate two binary rpm packages (one
243 providing the shared libs and xmllint, and the other one, the -devel
244 package, providing includes, static libraries and scripts needed to build
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000245 applications with libxml(2)) that you can install locally.</p>
246 </li>
247</ol>
248
249<h3><a name="Compilatio">Compilation</a></h3>
250<ol>
Daniel Veillard8a469172003-06-12 16:05:07 +0000251 <li><em>What is the process to compile libxml2 ?</em>
252 <p>As most UNIX libraries libxml2 follows the "standard":</p>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000253 <p><code>gunzip -c xxx.tar.gz | tar xvf -</code></p>
254 <p><code>cd libxml-xxxx</code></p>
255 <p><code>./configure --help</code></p>
256 <p>to see the options, then the compilation/installation proper</p>
257 <p><code>./configure [possible options]</code></p>
258 <p><code>make</code></p>
259 <p><code>make install</code></p>
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000260 <p>At that point you may have to rerun ldconfig or a similar utility to
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000261 update your list of installed shared libs.</p>
262 </li>
Daniel Veillard8a469172003-06-12 16:05:07 +0000263 <li><em>What other libraries are needed to compile/install libxml2 ?</em>
264 <p>Libxml2 does not require any other library, the normal C ANSI API
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000265 should be sufficient (please report any violation to this rule you may
266 find).</p>
Daniel Veillard8a469172003-06-12 16:05:07 +0000267 <p>However if found at configuration time libxml2 will detect and use the
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000268 following libs:</p>
269 <ul>
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +0000270 <li><a href="http://www.info-zip.org/pub/infozip/zlib/">libz</a> : a
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000271 highly portable and available widely compression library.</li>
272 <li>iconv: a powerful character encoding conversion library. It is
273 included by default in recent glibc libraries, so it doesn't need to
274 be installed specifically on Linux. It now seems a <a
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000275 href="http://www.opennc.org/onlinepubs/7908799/xsh/iconv.html">part
276 of the official UNIX</a> specification. Here is one <a
Daniel Veillarddad3f682002-11-17 16:47:27 +0000277 href="http://www.gnu.org/software/libiconv/">implementation of the
278 library</a> which source can be found <a
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000279 href="ftp://ftp.ilog.fr/pub/Users/haible/gnu/">here</a>.</li>
280 </ul>
281 </li>
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000282 <li><em>Make check fails on some platforms</em>
Daniel Veillard42766c02002-08-22 20:52:17 +0000283 <p>Sometimes the regression tests' results don't completely match the
284 value produced by the parser, and the makefile uses diff to print the
285 delta. On some platforms the diff return breaks the compilation process;
286 if the diff is small this is probably not a serious problem.</p>
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000287 <p>Sometimes (especially on Solaris) make checks fail due to limitations
Daniel Veillarde46182c2002-02-12 14:29:11 +0000288 in make. Try using GNU-make instead.</p>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000289 </li>
290 <li><em>I use the CVS version and there is no configure script</em>
Daniel Veillard42766c02002-08-22 20:52:17 +0000291 <p>The configure script (and other Makefiles) are generated. Use the
292 autogen.sh script to regenerate the configure script and Makefiles,
293 like:</p>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000294 <p><code>./autogen.sh --prefix=/usr --disable-shared</code></p>
295 </li>
296 <li><em>I have troubles when running make tests with gcc-3.0</em>
297 <p>It seems the initial release of gcc-3.0 has a problem with the
298 optimizer which miscompiles the URI module. Please use another
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000299 compiler.</p>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000300 </li>
301</ol>
302
303<h3><a name="Developer">Developer</a> corner</h3>
304<ol>
Daniel Veillard93d95252003-04-29 20:25:40 +0000305 <li><em>Troubles compiling or linking programs using libxml2</em>
306 <p>Usually the problem comes from the fact that the compiler doesn't get
307 the right compilation or linking flags. There is a small shell script
308 <code>xml2-config</code> which is installed as part of libxml2 usual
Daniel Veillard560c2a42003-07-06 21:13:49 +0000309 install process which provides those flags. Use</p>
Daniel Veillard93d95252003-04-29 20:25:40 +0000310 <p><code>xml2-config --cflags</code></p>
311 <p>to get the compilation flags and</p>
312 <p><code>xml2-config --libs</code></p>
313 <p>to get the linker flags. Usually this is done directly from the
314 Makefile as:</p>
315 <p><code>CFLAGS=`xml2-config --cflags`</code></p>
316 <p><code>LIBS=`xml2-config --libs`</code></p>
317 </li>
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000318 <li><em>xmlDocDump() generates output on one line.</em>
Daniel Veillard8a469172003-06-12 16:05:07 +0000319 <p>Libxml2 will not <strong>invent</strong> spaces in the content of a
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000320 document since <strong>all spaces in the content of a document are
321 significant</strong>. If you build a tree from the API and want
322 indentation:</p>
323 <ol>
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000324 <li>the correct way is to generate those yourself too.</li>
Daniel Veillard8a469172003-06-12 16:05:07 +0000325 <li>the dangerous way is to ask libxml2 to add those blanks to your
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000326 content <strong>modifying the content of your document in the
327 process</strong>. The result may not be what you expect. There is
328 <strong>NO</strong> way to guarantee that such a modification won't
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000329 affect other parts of the content of your document. See <a
Daniel Veillard5373ea12003-07-24 13:09:13 +0000330 href="http://xmlsoft.org/html/libxml-parser.html#xmlKeepBlanksDefault">xmlKeepBlanksDefault
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000331 ()</a> and <a
Daniel Veillard5373ea12003-07-24 13:09:13 +0000332 href="http://xmlsoft.org/html/libxml-tree.html#xmlSaveFormatFile">xmlSaveFormatFile
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000333 ()</a></li>
334 </ol>
335 </li>
336 <li>Extra nodes in the document:
337 <p><em>For a XML file as below:</em></p>
338 <pre>&lt;?xml version="1.0"?&gt;
339&lt;PLAN xmlns="http://www.argus.ca/autotest/1.0/"&gt;
340&lt;NODE CommFlag="0"/&gt;
341&lt;NODE CommFlag="1"/&gt;
342&lt;/PLAN&gt;</pre>
343 <p><em>after parsing it with the function
344 pxmlDoc=xmlParseFile(...);</em></p>
345 <p><em>I want to the get the content of the first node (node with the
346 CommFlag="0")</em></p>
347 <p><em>so I did it as following;</em></p>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000348 <pre>xmlNodePtr pnode;
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000349pnode=pxmlDoc-&gt;children-&gt;children;</pre>
350 <p><em>but it does not work. If I change it to</em></p>
351 <pre>pnode=pxmlDoc-&gt;children-&gt;children-&gt;next;</pre>
352 <p><em>then it works. Can someone explain it to me.</em></p>
353 <p></p>
354 <p>In XML all characters in the content of the document are significant
355 <strong>including blanks and formatting line breaks</strong>.</p>
356 <p>The extra nodes you are wondering about are just that, text nodes with
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000357 the formatting spaces which are part of the document but that people tend
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000358 to forget. There is a function <a
359 href="http://xmlsoft.org/html/libxml-parser.html">xmlKeepBlanksDefault
360 ()</a> to remove those at parse time, but that's an heuristic, and its
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000361 use should be limited to cases where you are certain there is no
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000362 mixed-content in the document.</p>
363 </li>
364 <li><em>I get compilation errors of existing code like when accessing
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000365 <strong>root</strong> or <strong>child fields</strong> of nodes.</em>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000366 <p>You are compiling code developed for libxml version 1 and using a
367 libxml2 development environment. Either switch back to libxml v1 devel or
368 even better fix the code to compile with libxml2 (or both) by <a
369 href="upgrade.html">following the instructions</a>.</p>
370 </li>
371 <li><em>I get compilation errors about non existing
372 <strong>xmlRootNode</strong> or <strong>xmlChildrenNode</strong>
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000373 fields.</em>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000374 <p>The source code you are using has been <a
375 href="upgrade.html">upgraded</a> to be able to compile with both libxml
376 and libxml2, but you need to install a more recent version:
377 libxml(-devel) &gt;= 1.8.8 or libxml2(-devel) &gt;= 2.1.0</p>
378 </li>
379 <li><em>XPath implementation looks seriously broken</em>
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000380 <p>XPath implementation prior to 2.3.0 was really incomplete. Upgrade to
381 a recent version, there are no known bugs in the current version.</p>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000382 </li>
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000383 <li><em>The example provided in the web page does not compile.</em>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000384 <p>It's hard to maintain the documentation in sync with the code
385 &lt;grin/&gt; ...</p>
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000386 <p>Check the previous points 1/ and 2/ raised before, and please send
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000387 patches.</p>
388 </li>
Daniel Veillard8d7b5c72003-11-15 18:24:36 +0000389 <li><em>Where can I get more examples and information than provided on the
Daniel Veillard42766c02002-08-22 20:52:17 +0000390 web page?</em>
Daniel Veillard8a469172003-06-12 16:05:07 +0000391 <p>Ideally a libxml2 book would be nice. I have no such plan ... But you
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000392 can:</p>
393 <ul>
394 <li>check more deeply the <a href="html/libxml-lib.html">existing
395 generated doc</a></li>
Daniel Veillardc480c4e2003-12-10 13:24:38 +0000396 <li>have a look at <a href="examples/index.html">the set of
397 examples</a>.</li>
Daniel Veillard8a469172003-06-12 16:05:07 +0000398 <li>look for examples of use for libxml2 function using the Gnome code.
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000399 For example the following will query the full Gnome CVS base for the
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000400 use of the <strong>xmlAddChild()</strong> function:
401 <p><a
402 href="http://cvs.gnome.org/lxr/search?string=xmlAddChild">http://cvs.gnome.org/lxr/search?string=xmlAddChild</a></p>
403 <p>This may be slow, a large hardware donation to the gnome project
404 could cure this :-)</p>
405 </li>
406 <li><a
Daniel Veillardc480c4e2003-12-10 13:24:38 +0000407 href="http://cvs.gnome.org/bonsai/rview.cgi?cvsroot=/cvs/gnome&amp;dir=gnome-xml">Browse
408 the libxml2 source</a> , I try to write code as clean and documented
Daniel Veillard42766c02002-08-22 20:52:17 +0000409 as possible, so looking at it may be helpful. In particular the code
410 of xmllint.c and of the various testXXX.c test programs should
411 provide good examples of how to do things with the library.</li>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000412 </ul>
413 </li>
414 <li>What about C++ ?
Daniel Veillard8a469172003-06-12 16:05:07 +0000415 <p>libxml2 is written in pure C in order to allow easy reuse on a number
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000416 of platforms, including embedded systems. I don't intend to convert to
417 C++.</p>
Daniel Veillard91e69c52003-08-04 01:43:07 +0000418 <p>There is however a C++ wrapper which may fulfill your needs:</p>
Daniel Veillard9b6fd302002-05-13 12:06:47 +0000419 <ul>
420 <li>by Ari Johnson &lt;ari@btigate.com&gt;:
421 <p>Website: <a
Daniel Veillard91e69c52003-08-04 01:43:07 +0000422 href="http://libxmlplusplus.sourceforge.net/">http://libxmlplusplus.sourceforge.net/</a></p>
Daniel Veillard9b6fd302002-05-13 12:06:47 +0000423 <p>Download: <a
Daniel Veillard91e69c52003-08-04 01:43:07 +0000424 href="http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=12999">http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=12999</a></p>
Daniel Veillard9b6fd302002-05-13 12:06:47 +0000425 </li>
Daniel Veillard83ee40d2003-08-09 22:24:09 +0000426 <!-- Website is currently unavailable as of 2003-08-02
Daniel Veillard9b6fd302002-05-13 12:06:47 +0000427 <li>by Peter Jones &lt;pjones@pmade.org&gt;
Daniel Veillard83ee40d2003-08-09 22:24:09 +0000428 <p>Website: <a
429 href="http://pmade.org/pjones/software/xmlwrapp/">http://pmade.org/pjones/software/xmlwrapp/</a></p>
Daniel Veillard9b6fd302002-05-13 12:06:47 +0000430 </li>
Daniel Veillard83ee40d2003-08-09 22:24:09 +0000431 -->
Daniel Veillard9b6fd302002-05-13 12:06:47 +0000432 </ul>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000433 </li>
434 <li>How to validate a document a posteriori ?
435 <p>It is possible to validate documents which had not been validated at
Daniel Veillard42766c02002-08-22 20:52:17 +0000436 initial parsing time or documents which have been built from scratch
437 using the API. Use the <a
Daniel Veillard5373ea12003-07-24 13:09:13 +0000438 href="http://xmlsoft.org/html/libxml-valid.html#xmlValidateDtd">xmlValidateDtd()</a>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000439 function. It is also possible to simply add a DTD to an existing
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000440 document:</p>
441 <pre>xmlDocPtr doc; /* your existing document */
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000442xmlDtdPtr dtd = xmlParseDTD(NULL, filename_of_dtd); /* parse the DTD */
443
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000444 dtd-&gt;name = xmlStrDup((xmlChar*)"root_name"); /* use the given root */
445
446 doc-&gt;intSubset = dtd;
447 if (doc-&gt;children == NULL) xmlAddChild((xmlNodePtr)doc, (xmlNodePtr)dtd);
448 else xmlAddPrevSibling(doc-&gt;children, (xmlNodePtr)dtd);
449 </pre>
450 </li>
Daniel Veillarddad3f682002-11-17 16:47:27 +0000451 <li>So what is this funky "xmlChar" used all the time?
452 <p>It is a null terminated sequence of utf-8 characters. And only utf-8!
453 You need to convert strings encoded in different ways to utf-8 before
454 passing them to the API. This can be accomplished with the iconv library
455 for instance.</p>
John Fleck61f6fb62002-10-31 15:23:29 +0000456 </li>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000457 <li>etc ...</li>
458</ol>
459
460<p></p>
461
Daniel Veillard66f68e72003-08-18 16:39:51 +0000462<h2><a name="Documentat">Developer Menu</a></h2>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000463
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000464<p>There are several on-line resources related to using libxml:</p>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000465<ol>
MST 2003 John Fleck2b7142a2003-11-22 03:55:27 +0000466 <li>Use the <a href="search.php">search engine</a> to look up
467 information.</li>
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000468 <li>Check the <a href="FAQ.html">FAQ.</a></li>
Daniel Veillardc19fccc2000-07-03 11:52:01 +0000469 <li>Check the <a href="http://xmlsoft.org/html/libxml-lib.html">extensive
MST 2003 John Fleck2b7142a2003-11-22 03:55:27 +0000470 documentation</a> automatically extracted from code comments.</li>
Daniel Veillard8d869642000-07-14 12:12:59 +0000471 <li>Look at the documentation about <a href="encoding.html">libxml
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000472 internationalization support</a>.</li>
Daniel Veillardbc66f852002-01-14 09:49:20 +0000473 <li>This page provides a global overview and <a href="example.html">some
Daniel Veillard402e8c82000-02-29 22:57:47 +0000474 examples</a> on how to use libxml.</li>
Daniel Veillardc480c4e2003-12-10 13:24:38 +0000475 <li><a href="examples/index.html">Code examples</a></li>
Daniel Veillard560c2a42003-07-06 21:13:49 +0000476 <li>John Fleck's libxml2 tutorial: <a href="tutorial/index.html">html</a>
477 or <a href="tutorial/xmltutorial.pdf">pdf</a>.</li>
Daniel Veillard1177ca42003-04-26 22:29:54 +0000478 <li>If you need to parse large files, check the <a
479 href="xmlreader.html">xmlReader</a> API tutorial</li>
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +0000480 <li><a href="mailto:james@daa.com.au">James Henstridge</a> wrote <a
Daniel Veillard402e8c82000-02-29 22:57:47 +0000481 href="http://www.daa.com.au/~james/gnome/xml-sax/xml-sax.html">some nice
482 documentation</a> explaining how to use the libxml SAX interface.</li>
Daniel Veillardc480c4e2003-12-10 13:24:38 +0000483 <li>George Lebl wrote <a
MST 2003 John Fleck2b7142a2003-11-22 03:55:27 +0000484 href="http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/library/l-gnome3/">an article
Daniel Veillard402e8c82000-02-29 22:57:47 +0000485 for IBM developerWorks</a> about using libxml.</li>
Daniel Veillardec303412000-03-24 13:41:54 +0000486 <li>Check <a href="http://cvs.gnome.org/lxr/source/gnome-xml/TODO">the TODO
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000487 file</a>.</li>
Daniel Veillard42766c02002-08-22 20:52:17 +0000488 <li>Read the <a href="upgrade.html">1.x to 2.x upgrade path</a>
489 description. If you are starting a new project using libxml you should
490 really use the 2.x version.</li>
Daniel Veillard845cce42002-01-09 11:51:37 +0000491 <li>And don't forget to look at the <a
492 href="http://mail.gnome.org/archives/xml/">mailing-list archive</a>.</li>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000493</ol>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000494
Daniel Veillardd5f97f82000-09-17 16:38:14 +0000495<h2><a name="Reporting">Reporting bugs and getting help</a></h2>
Daniel Veillard4c3a2031999-11-19 17:46:26 +0000496
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000497<p>Well, bugs or missing features are always possible, and I will make a
498point of fixing them in a timely fashion. The best way to report a bug is to
Daniel Veillardccf996f2003-08-14 10:48:38 +0000499use the <a href="http://bugzilla.gnome.org/buglist.cgi?product=libxml2">Gnome
Daniel Veillard42766c02002-08-22 20:52:17 +0000500bug tracking database</a> (make sure to use the "libxml2" module name). I
501look at reports there regularly and it's good to have a reminder when a bug
502is still open. Be sure to specify that the bug is for the package libxml2.</p>
Daniel Veillard4c3a2031999-11-19 17:46:26 +0000503
Daniel Veillard4ac494b2003-09-18 15:08:00 +0000504<p>For small problems you can try to get help on IRC, the #xml channel on
505irc.gnome.org (port 6667) usually have a few person subscribed which may help
506(but there is no garantee and if a real issue is raised it should go on the
507mailing-list for archival).</p>
Daniel Veillard9582d6c2003-09-16 11:40:04 +0000508
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000509<p>There is also a mailing-list <a
Daniel Veillard3197f162001-04-04 00:40:08 +0000510href="mailto:xml@gnome.org">xml@gnome.org</a> for libxml, with an <a
511href="http://mail.gnome.org/archives/xml/">on-line archive</a> (<a
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000512href="http://xmlsoft.org/messages">old</a>). To subscribe to this list,
513please visit the <a
514href="http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/xml">associated Web</a> page and
515follow the instructions. <strong>Do not send code, I won't debug it</strong>
516(but patches are really appreciated!).</p>
Daniel Veillardd99224d2004-04-06 10:04:16 +0000517
518<p>Please note that with the current amount of virus and SPAM, sending mail
519to the list without being subscribed won't work. There is *far too many
520bounces* (in the order of a thousand a day !) I cannot approve them manually
521anymore. If your mail to the list bounced waiting for administrator approval,
522it is LOST ! Repost it and fix the problem triggering the error.</p>
Daniel Veillard234547b2001-07-05 09:46:10 +0000523
Daniel Veillard008186f2001-09-13 14:24:44 +0000524<p>Check the following <strong><span style="color: #FF0000">before
525posting</span></strong>:</p>
Daniel Veillard234547b2001-07-05 09:46:10 +0000526<ul>
Daniel Veillard321be0c2002-10-08 21:26:42 +0000527 <li>Read the <a href="FAQ.html">FAQ</a> and <a href="search.php">use the
Daniel Veillarda37aab82003-06-09 09:10:36 +0000528 search engine</a> to get information related to your problem.</li>
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000529 <li>Make sure you are <a href="ftp://xmlsoft.org/">using a recent
530 version</a>, and that the problem still shows up in a recent version.</li>
531 <li>Check the <a href="http://mail.gnome.org/archives/xml/">list
532 archives</a> to see if the problem was reported already. In this case
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000533 there is probably a fix available, similarly check the <a
Daniel Veillardccf996f2003-08-14 10:48:38 +0000534 href="http://bugzilla.gnome.org/buglist.cgi?product=libxml2">registered
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000535 open bugs</a>.</li>
536 <li>Make sure you can reproduce the bug with xmllint or one of the test
537 programs found in source in the distribution.</li>
Daniel Veillard234547b2001-07-05 09:46:10 +0000538 <li>Please send the command showing the error as well as the input (as an
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +0000539 attachment)</li>
Daniel Veillard234547b2001-07-05 09:46:10 +0000540</ul>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000541
Daniel Veillarda37aab82003-06-09 09:10:36 +0000542<p>Then send the bug with associated information to reproduce it to the <a
Daniel Veillard33a67802001-03-07 09:44:02 +0000543href="mailto:xml@gnome.org">xml@gnome.org</a> list; if it's really libxml
Daniel Veillard98d071d2003-01-10 09:22:44 +0000544related I will approve it. Please do not send mail to me directly, it makes
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000545things really hard to track and in some cases I am not the best person to
Daniel Veillard98d071d2003-01-10 09:22:44 +0000546answer a given question, ask on the list.</p>
547
548<p>To <span style="color: #E50000">be really clear about support</span>:</p>
549<ul>
Daniel Veillarda37aab82003-06-09 09:10:36 +0000550 <li>Support or help <span style="color: #E50000">requests MUST be sent to
Daniel Veillard98d071d2003-01-10 09:22:44 +0000551 the list or on bugzilla</span> in case of problems, so that the Question
552 and Answers can be shared publicly. Failing to do so carries the implicit
553 message "I want free support but I don't want to share the benefits with
Daniel Veillard831e8fd2003-01-25 11:45:34 +0000554 others" and is not welcome. I will automatically Carbon-Copy the
555 xml@gnome.org mailing list for any technical reply made about libxml2 or
556 libxslt.</li>
Daniel Veillard560c2a42003-07-06 21:13:49 +0000557 <li>There is <span style="color: #E50000">no garantee of support</span>, if
558 your question remains unanswered after a week, repost it, making sure you
559 gave all the detail needed and the information requested.</li>
Daniel Veillarda37aab82003-06-09 09:10:36 +0000560 <li>Failing to provide information as requested or double checking first
Daniel Veillard98d071d2003-01-10 09:22:44 +0000561 for prior feedback also carries the implicit message "the time of the
562 library maintainers is less valuable than my time" and might not be
563 welcome.</li>
564</ul>
Daniel Veillard4c3a2031999-11-19 17:46:26 +0000565
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000566<p>Of course, bugs reported with a suggested patch for fixing them will
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000567probably be processed faster than those without.</p>
Daniel Veillardec303412000-03-24 13:41:54 +0000568
569<p>If you're looking for help, a quick look at <a
Daniel Veillardf7ed3362001-08-17 12:01:21 +0000570href="http://mail.gnome.org/archives/xml/">the list archive</a> may actually
Daniel Veillard560c2a42003-07-06 21:13:49 +0000571provide the answer. I usually send source samples when answering libxml2
572usage questions. The <a
573href="http://xmlsoft.org/html/book1.html">auto-generated documentation</a> is
574not as polished as I would like (i need to learn more about DocBook), but
575it's a good starting point.</p>
Daniel Veillardec303412000-03-24 13:41:54 +0000576
Daniel Veillardd5f97f82000-09-17 16:38:14 +0000577<h2><a name="help">How to help</a></h2>
578
579<p>You can help the project in various ways, the best thing to do first is to
580subscribe to the mailing-list as explained before, check the <a
Daniel Veillardf7ed3362001-08-17 12:01:21 +0000581href="http://mail.gnome.org/archives/xml/">archives </a>and the <a
Daniel Veillardccf996f2003-08-14 10:48:38 +0000582href="http://bugzilla.gnome.org/buglist.cgi?product=libxml2">Gnome bug
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000583database</a>:</p>
Daniel Veillardd5f97f82000-09-17 16:38:14 +0000584<ol>
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000585 <li>Provide patches when you find problems.</li>
Daniel Veillard8a469172003-06-12 16:05:07 +0000586 <li>Provide the diffs when you port libxml2 to a new platform. They may not
Daniel Veillardab8500d2000-10-15 21:06:19 +0000587 be integrated in all cases but help pinpointing portability problems
588 and</li>
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000589 <li>Provide documentation fixes (either as patches to the code comments or
Daniel Veillardd5f97f82000-09-17 16:38:14 +0000590 as HTML diffs).</li>
Daniel Veillard42766c02002-08-22 20:52:17 +0000591 <li>Provide new documentations pieces (translations, examples, etc
592 ...).</li>
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000593 <li>Check the TODO file and try to close one of the items.</li>
594 <li>Take one of the points raised in the archive or the bug database and
Daniel Veillarde7ead2d2001-08-22 23:44:09 +0000595 provide a fix. <a href="mailto:daniel@veillard.com">Get in touch with me
596 </a>before to avoid synchronization problems and check that the suggested
597 fix will fit in nicely :-)</li>
Daniel Veillardd5f97f82000-09-17 16:38:14 +0000598</ol>
599
Daniel Veillard10a2c651999-12-12 13:03:50 +0000600<h2><a name="Downloads">Downloads</a></h2>
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000601
Daniel Veillard688f6692004-03-26 10:57:38 +0000602<p>The latest versions of libxml2 can be found on the <a
Daniel Veillardd99224d2004-04-06 10:04:16 +0000603href="ftp://xmlsoft.org/">xmlsoft.org</a> server (FTP and rsync are
604available), there is also mirrors (<a
Daniel Veillard20c8cf22001-06-26 22:47:36 +0000605href="ftp://speakeasy.rpmfind.net/pub/libxml/">Seattle</a>, <a
606href="ftp://fr.rpmfind.net/pub/libxml/">France</a>) or on the <a
Daniel Veillardd99224d2004-04-06 10:04:16 +0000607href="ftp://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/MIRRORS.html">Gnome FTP server</a> as <a
608href="ftp://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/sources/libxml2/2.6/">source archive</a>
Daniel Veillard688f6692004-03-26 10:57:38 +0000609, Antonin Sprinzl also provide <a href="ftp://gd.tuwien.ac.at/pub/libxml/">a
Daniel Veillarde16b5742002-09-26 17:50:03 +0000610mirror in Austria</a>. (NOTE that you need both the <a
Daniel Veillardc19fccc2000-07-03 11:52:01 +0000611href="http://rpmfind.net/linux/RPM/libxml2.html">libxml(2)</a> and <a
612href="http://rpmfind.net/linux/RPM/libxml2-devel.html">libxml(2)-devel</a>
Daniel Veillardb46a5732003-04-08 13:35:48 +0000613packages installed to compile applications using libxml.)</p>
614
615<p>Binary ports:</p>
616<ul>
617 <li>Red Hat RPMs for i386 are available directly on <a
618 href="ftp://xmlsoft.org/">xmlsoft.org</a>, the source RPM will compile on
619 any architecture supported by Red Hat.</li>
Daniel Veillardf83a2c72003-04-08 13:48:40 +0000620 <li><p><a href="mailto:igor@zlatkovic.com">Igor Zlatkovic</a></p>
Daniel Veillardce192eb2003-04-16 15:58:05 +0000621 is now the maintainer of the Windows port, <a
Daniel Veillardb46a5732003-04-08 13:35:48 +0000622 href="http://www.zlatkovic.com/projects/libxml/index.html">he provides
623 binaries</a>.</li>
624 <li><a href="mailto:Gary.Pennington@sun.com">Gary Pennington</a> provides
625 <a href="http://garypennington.net/libxml2/">Solaris binaries</a>.</li>
626 <li><a href="mailto:Steve.Ball@zveno.com">Steve Ball</a> provides <a
627 href="http://www.zveno.com/open_source/libxml2xslt.html">Mac Os X
628 binaries</a>.</li>
629 <li>The HP-UX porting center provides <a
630 href="http://hpux.connect.org.uk/hppd/hpux/Gnome/">HP-UX binaries</a></li>
631</ul>
632
633<p>If you know other supported binary ports, please <a
634href="http://veillard.com/">contact me</a>.</p>
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000635
Daniel Veillard6c8b1172000-03-01 00:40:41 +0000636<p><a name="Snapshot">Snapshot:</a></p>
637<ul>
Daniel Veillard8a469172003-06-12 16:05:07 +0000638 <li>Code from the W3C cvs base gnome-xml <a
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000639 href="ftp://xmlsoft.org/cvs-snapshot.tar.gz">cvs-snapshot.tar.gz</a>.</li>
Daniel Veillard6c8b1172000-03-01 00:40:41 +0000640 <li>Docs, content of the web site, the list archive included <a
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +0000641 href="ftp://xmlsoft.org/libxml-docs.tar.gz">libxml-docs.tar.gz</a>.</li>
Daniel Veillard6c8b1172000-03-01 00:40:41 +0000642</ul>
643
Daniel Veillardc6271d22001-10-27 07:50:58 +0000644<p><a name="Contribs">Contributions:</a></p>
Daniel Veillard6c8b1172000-03-01 00:40:41 +0000645
646<p>I do accept external contributions, especially if compiling on another
Daniel Veillardd99224d2004-04-06 10:04:16 +0000647platform, get in touch with the list to upload the package, wrappers for
648various languages have been provided, and can be found in the <a
649href="python.html">bindings section</a></p>
Daniel Veillard6c8b1172000-03-01 00:40:41 +0000650
Daniel Veillard8a469172003-06-12 16:05:07 +0000651<p>Libxml2 is also available from CVS:</p>
Daniel Veillard10a2c651999-12-12 13:03:50 +0000652<ul>
Daniel Veillard10a2c651999-12-12 13:03:50 +0000653 <li><p>The <a
654 href="http://cvs.gnome.org/bonsai/rview.cgi?cvsroot=/cvs/gnome&amp;dir=gnome-xml">Gnome
Daniel Veillard402e8c82000-02-29 22:57:47 +0000655 CVS base</a>. Check the <a
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000656 href="http://developer.gnome.org/tools/cvs.html">Gnome CVS Tools</a>
Daniel Veillardd99224d2004-04-06 10:04:16 +0000657 page; the CVS module is <b>libxml2</b>.</p>
Daniel Veillard10a2c651999-12-12 13:03:50 +0000658 </li>
Daniel Veillard82687162001-01-22 15:32:01 +0000659 <li>The <strong>libxslt</strong> module is also present there</li>
Daniel Veillard10a2c651999-12-12 13:03:50 +0000660</ul>
661
662<h2><a name="News">News</a></h2>
663
Daniel Veillarde6d8e202002-05-02 06:11:10 +0000664<p>Items not finished and worked on, get in touch with the list if you want
Daniel Veillard688f6692004-03-26 10:57:38 +0000665to help those</p>
Daniel Veillardab8500d2000-10-15 21:06:19 +0000666<ul>
Daniel Veillard72fef162003-02-05 14:31:19 +0000667 <li>More testing on RelaxNG</li>
Daniel Veillardcf27f7c2002-04-30 07:12:39 +0000668 <li>Finishing up <a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xmlschema-1/">XML
Daniel Veillard72fef162003-02-05 14:31:19 +0000669 Schemas</a></li>
670</ul>
671
Daniel Veillardd99224d2004-04-06 10:04:16 +0000672<p>There is the list of public releases:</p>
673
Daniel Veillard252004d2004-03-23 12:32:32 +0000674<h3>2.6.8: Mar 23 2004</h3>
675<ul>
676 <li>First step of the cleanup of the serialization code and APIs</li>
677 <li>XML Schemas: mixed content (Adam Dickmeiss), QName handling fixes (Adam
678 Dickmeiss), anyURI for "" (John Belmonte)</li>
679 <li>Python: Canonicalization C14N support added (Anthony Carrico)</li>
680 <li>xmlDocCopyNode() extension (William)</li>
681 <li>Relax-NG: fix when processing XInclude results (William), external
682 reference in interleave (William), missing error on &lt;choice&gt;
683 failure (William), memory leak in schemas datatype facets.</li>
684 <li>xmlWriter: patch for better DTD support (Alfred Mickautsch)</li>
685 <li>bug fixes: xmlXPathLangFunction memory leak (Mike Hommey and William
686 Brack), no ID errors if using HTML_PARSE_NOERROR, xmlcatalog fallbacks to
687 URI on SYSTEM lookup failure, XInclude parse flags inheritance (William),
688 XInclude and XPointer fixes for entities (William), XML parser bug
689 reported by Holger Rauch, nanohttp fd leak (William), regexps char
690 groups '-' handling (William), dictionnary reference counting problems,
Daniel Veillardd99224d2004-04-06 10:04:16 +0000691 do not close stderr.</li>
Daniel Veillard252004d2004-03-23 12:32:32 +0000692 <li>performance patches from Petr Pajas</li>
693 <li>Documentation fixes: XML_CATALOG_FILES in man pages (Mike Hommey)</li>
694 <li>compilation and portability fixes: --without-valid, catalog cleanups
695 (Peter Breitenlohner), MingW patch (Roland Schwingel), cross-compilation
696 to Windows (Christophe de Vienne), --with-html-dir fixup (Julio Merino
697 Vidal), Windows build (Eric Zurcher)</li>
698</ul>
699
Daniel Veillard92914492004-02-23 16:33:21 +0000700<h3>2.6.7: Feb 23 2004</h3>
701<ul>
702 <li>documentation: tutorial updates (John Fleck), benchmark results</li>
703 <li>xmlWriter: updates and fixes (Alfred Mickautsch, Lucas Brasilino)</li>
704 <li>XPath optimization (Petr Pajas)</li>
705 <li>DTD ID handling optimization</li>
706 <li>bugfixes: xpath number with &gt; 19 fractional (William Brack), push
707 mode with unescaped '&gt;' characters, fix xmllint --stream --timing, fix
708 xmllint --memory --stream memory usage, xmlAttrSerializeTxtContent
709 handling NULL, trying to fix Relax-NG/Perl interface.</li>
710 <li>python: 2.3 compatibility, whitespace fixes (Malcolm Tredinnick)</li>
711 <li>Added relaxng option to xmllint --shell</li>
712</ul>
713
Daniel Veillard5c9547e2004-02-12 15:31:49 +0000714<h3>2.6.6: Feb 12 2004</h3>
715<ul>
716 <li>nanohttp and nanoftp: buffer overflow error on URI parsing (Igor and
717 William) reported by Yuuichi Teranishi</li>
718 <li>bugfixes: make test and path issues, xmlWriter attribute serialization
719 (William Brack), xmlWriter indentation (William), schemas validation
720 (Eric Haszlakiewicz), XInclude dictionnaries issues (William and Oleg
721 Paraschenko), XInclude empty fallback (William), HTML warnings (William),
722 XPointer in XInclude (William), Python namespace serialization,
723 isolat1ToUTF8 bound error (Alfred Mickautsch), output of parameter
724 entities in internal subset (William), internal subset bug in push mode,
725 &lt;xs:all&gt; fix (Alexey Sarytchev)</li>
726 <li>Build: fix for automake-1.8 (Alexander Winston), warnings removal
727 (Philip Ludlam), SOCKLEN_T detection fixes (Daniel Richard), fix
728 --with-minimum configuration.</li>
729 <li>XInclude: allow the 2001 namespace without warning.</li>
730 <li>Documentation: missing example/index.html (John Fleck), version
731 dependancies (John Fleck)</li>
732 <li>reader API: structured error reporting (Steve Ball)</li>
733 <li>Windows compilation: mingw, msys (Mikhail Grushinskiy), function
734 prototype (Cameron Johnson), MSVC6 compiler warnings, _WINSOCKAPI_
735 patch</li>
736 <li>Parsers: added xmlByteConsumed(ctxt) API to get the byte offest in
737 input.</li>
738</ul>
739
Daniel Veillard189f46b2004-01-25 21:03:04 +0000740<h3>2.6.5: Jan 25 2004</h3>
741<ul>
742 <li>Bugfixes: dictionnaries for schemas (William Brack), regexp segfault
743 (William), xs:all problem (William), a number of XPointer bugfixes
744 (William), xmllint error go to stderr, DTD validation problem with
745 namespace, memory leak (William), SAX1 cleanup and minimal options fixes
746 (Mark Vadoc), parser context reset on error (Shaun McCance), XPath union
747 evaluation problem (William) , xmlReallocLoc with NULL (Aleksey Sanin),
748 XML Schemas double free (Steve Ball), XInclude with no href, argument
749 callbacks order for XPath callbacks (Frederic Peters)</li>
750 <li>Documentation: python scripts (William Brack), xslt stylesheets (John
751 Fleck), doc (Sven Zimmerman), I/O example.</li>
752 <li>Python bindings: fixes (William), enum support (Stéphane Bidoul),
753 structured error reporting (Stéphane Bidoul)</li>
754 <li>XInclude: various fixes for conformance, problem related to dictionnary
755 references (William &amp; me), recursion (William)</li>
756 <li>xmlWriter: indentation (Lucas Brasilino), memory leaks (Alfred
Daniel Veillard5c9547e2004-02-12 15:31:49 +0000757 Mickautsch),</li>
Daniel Veillard189f46b2004-01-25 21:03:04 +0000758 <li>xmlSchemas: normalizedString datatype (John Belmonte)</li>
759 <li>code cleanup for strings functions (William)</li>
760 <li>Windows: compiler patches (Mark Vakoc)</li>
761 <li>Parser optimizations, a few new XPath and dictionnary APIs for future
762 XSLT optimizations.</li>
763</ul>
764
Daniel Veillarde6e59cd2003-12-24 11:56:44 +0000765<h3>2.6.4: Dec 24 2003</h3>
766<ul>
767 <li>Windows build fixes (Igor Zlatkovic)</li>
Daniel Veillard189f46b2004-01-25 21:03:04 +0000768 <li>Some serious XInclude problems reported by Oleg Paraschenko and</li>
769 <li>Unix and Makefile packaging fixes (me, William Brack,</li>
Daniel Veillarde6e59cd2003-12-24 11:56:44 +0000770 <li>Documentation improvements (John Fleck, William Brack), example fix
771 (Lucas Brasilino)</li>
772 <li>bugfixes: xmlTextReaderExpand() with xmlReaderWalker, XPath handling of
773 NULL strings (William Brack) , API building reader or parser from
774 filedescriptor should not close it, changed XPath sorting to be stable
775 again (William Brack), xmlGetNodePath() generating '(null)' (William
776 Brack), DTD validation and namespace bug (William Brack), XML Schemas
777 double inclusion behaviour</li>
778</ul>
779
Daniel Veillardc480c4e2003-12-10 13:24:38 +0000780<h3>2.6.3: Dec 10 2003</h3>
781<ul>
782 <li>documentation updates and cleanup (DV, William Brack, John Fleck)</li>
783 <li>added a repository of examples, examples from Aleksey Sanin, Dodji
Daniel Veillarde6e59cd2003-12-24 11:56:44 +0000784 Seketeli, Alfred Mickautsch</li>
Daniel Veillardc480c4e2003-12-10 13:24:38 +0000785 <li>Windows updates: Mark Vakoc, Igor Zlatkovic, Eric Zurcher, Mingw
786 (Kenneth Haley)</li>
787 <li>Unicode range checking (William Brack)</li>
788 <li>code cleanup (William Brack)</li>
789 <li>Python bindings: doc (John Fleck), bug fixes</li>
790 <li>UTF-16 cleanup and BOM issues (William Brack)</li>
791 <li>bug fixes: ID and xmlReader validation, XPath (William Brack),
792 xmlWriter (Alfred Mickautsch), hash.h inclusion problem, HTML parser
793 (James Bursa), attribute defaulting and validation, some serialization
794 cleanups, XML_GET_LINE macro, memory debug when using threads (William
795 Brack), serialization of attributes and entities content, xmlWriter
796 (Daniel Schulman)</li>
797 <li>XInclude bugfix, new APIs and update to the last version including the
798 namespace change.</li>
799 <li>XML Schemas improvements: include (Robert Stepanek), import and
800 namespace handling, fixed the regression tests troubles, added examples
Daniel Veillarde6e59cd2003-12-24 11:56:44 +0000801 based on Eric van der Vlist book, regexp fixes</li>
Daniel Veillardc480c4e2003-12-10 13:24:38 +0000802 <li>preliminary pattern support for streaming (needed for schemas
803 constraints), added xmlTextReaderPreservePattern() to collect subdocument
804 when streaming.</li>
805 <li>various fixes in the structured error handling</li>
806</ul>
807
Daniel Veillard6d373a22003-11-04 10:26:43 +0000808<h3>2.6.2: Nov 4 2003</h3>
809<ul>
810 <li>XPath context unregistration fixes</li>
811 <li>text node coalescing fixes (Mark Lilback)</li>
812 <li>API to screate a W3C Schemas from an existing document (Steve Ball)</li>
813 <li>BeOS patches (Marcin 'Shard' Konicki)</li>
814 <li>xmlStrVPrintf function added (Aleksey Sanin)</li>
815 <li>compilation fixes (Mark Vakoc)</li>
816 <li>stdin parsing fix (William Brack)</li>
817 <li>a posteriori DTD validation fixes</li>
Daniel Veillardc480c4e2003-12-10 13:24:38 +0000818 <li>xmlReader bug fixes: Walker fixes, python bindings</li>
Daniel Veillard6d373a22003-11-04 10:26:43 +0000819 <li>fixed xmlStopParser() to really stop the parser and errors</li>
820 <li>always generate line numbers when using the new xmlReadxxx
821 functions</li>
822 <li>added XInclude support to the xmlReader interface</li>
823 <li>implemented XML_PARSE_NONET parser option</li>
824 <li>DocBook XSLT processing bug fixed</li>
825 <li>HTML serialization for &lt;p&gt; elements (William Brack and me)</li>
826 <li>XPointer failure in XInclude are now handled as resource errors</li>
827 <li>fixed xmllint --html to use the HTML serializer on output (added
828 --xmlout to implement the previous behaviour of saving it using the XML
829 serializer)</li>
830</ul>
831
Daniel Veillarde4e3f5d2003-10-28 23:06:32 +0000832<h3>2.6.1: Oct 28 2003</h3>
833<ul>
834 <li>Mostly bugfixes after the big 2.6.0 changes</li>
835 <li>Unix compilation patches: libxml.m4 (Patrick Welche), warnings cleanup
836 (William Brack)</li>
837 <li>Windows compilation patches (Joachim Bauch, Stephane Bidoul, Igor
838 Zlatkovic)</li>
839 <li>xmlWriter bugfix (Alfred Mickautsch)</li>
840 <li>chvalid.[ch]: couple of fixes from Stephane Bidoul</li>
Daniel Veillard6d373a22003-11-04 10:26:43 +0000841 <li>context reset: error state reset, push parser reset (Graham
842 Bennett)</li>
Daniel Veillarde4e3f5d2003-10-28 23:06:32 +0000843 <li>context reuse: generate errors if file is not readable</li>
844 <li>defaulted attributes for element coming from internal entities
845 (Stephane Bidoul)</li>
846 <li>Python: tab and spaces mix (William Brack)</li>
847 <li>Error handler could crash in DTD validation in 2.6.0</li>
848 <li>xmlReader: do not use the document or element _private field</li>
849 <li>testSAX.c: avoid a problem with some PIs (Massimo Morara)</li>
850 <li>general bug fixes: mandatory encoding in text decl, serializing
851 Document Fragment nodes, xmlSearchNs 2.6.0 problem (Kasimier Buchcik),
852 XPath errors not reported, slow HTML parsing of large documents.</li>
853</ul>
854
Daniel Veillard3e35f8e2003-10-21 00:05:38 +0000855<h3>2.6.0: Oct 20 2003</h3>
856<ul>
857 <li>Major revision release: should be API and ABI compatible but got a lot
858 of change</li>
859 <li>Increased the library modularity, far more options can be stripped out,
860 a --with-minimum configuration will weight around 160KBytes</li>
861 <li>Use per parser and per document dictionnary, allocate names and small
862 text nodes from the dictionnary</li>
863 <li>Switch to a SAX2 like parser rewrote most of the XML parser core,
864 provides namespace resolution and defaulted attributes, minimize memory
865 allocations and copies, namespace checking and specific error handling,
866 immutable buffers, make predefined entities static structures, etc...</li>
867 <li>rewrote all the error handling in the library, all errors can be
868 intercepted at a structured level, with precise information
869 available.</li>
870 <li>New simpler and more generic XML and HTML parser APIs, allowing to
871 easilly modify the parsing options and reuse parser context for multiple
872 consecutive documents.</li>
873 <li>Similar new APIs for the xmlReader, for options and reuse, provided new
874 functions to access content as const strings, use them for Python
875 bindings</li>
876 <li>a lot of other smaller API improvements: xmlStrPrintf (Aleksey Sanin),
877 Walker i.e. reader on a document tree based on Alfred Mickautsch code,
878 make room in nodes for line numbers, reference counting and future PSVI
879 extensions, generation of character ranges to be checked with faster
880 algorithm (William), xmlParserMaxDepth (Crutcher Dunnavant), buffer
881 access</li>
882 <li>New xmlWriter API provided by Alfred Mickautsch</li>
883 <li>Schemas: base64 support by Anthony Carrico</li>
884 <li>Parser&lt;-&gt;HTTP integration fix, proper processing of the Mime-Type
885 and charset informations if available.</li>
886 <li>Relax-NG: bug fixes including the one reported by Martijn Faassen and
887 zeroOrMore, better error reporting.</li>
888 <li>Python bindings (Stéphane Bidoul), never use stdout for errors
889 output</li>
890 <li>Portability: all the headers have macros for export and calling
891 convention definitions (Igor Zlatkovic), VMS update (Craig A. Berry),
892 Windows: threads (Jesse Pelton), Borland compiler (Eric Zurcher, Igor),
893 Mingw (Igor), typos (Mark Vakoc), beta version (Stephane Bidoul),
894 warning cleanups on AIX and MIPS compilers (William Brack), BeOS (Marcin
895 'Shard' Konicki)</li>
896 <li>Documentation fixes and README (William Brack), search fix (William),
897 tutorial updates (John Fleck), namespace docs (Stefan Kost)</li>
898 <li>Bug fixes: xmlCleanupParser (Dave Beckett), threading uninitialized
899 mutexes, HTML doctype lowercase, SAX/IO (William), compression detection
900 and restore (William), attribute declaration in DTDs (William), namespace
901 on attribute in HTML output (William), input filename (Rob Richards),
902 namespace DTD validation, xmlReplaceNode (Chris Ryland), I/O callbacks
903 (Markus Keim), CDATA serialization (Shaun McCance), xmlReader (Peter
904 Derr), high codepoint charref like &amp;#x10FFFF;, buffer access in push
905 mode (Justin Fletcher), TLS threads on Windows (Jesse Pelton), XPath bug
906 (William), xmlCleanupParser (Marc Liyanage), CDATA output (William), HTTP
907 error handling.</li>
908 <li>xmllint options: --dtdvalidfpi for Tobias Reif, --sax1 for compat
909 testing, --nodict for building without tree dictionnary, --nocdata to
910 replace CDATA by text, --nsclean to remove surperfluous namespace
911 declarations</li>
912 <li>added xml2-config --libtool-libs option from Kevin P. Fleming</li>
913 <li>a lot of profiling and tuning of the code, speedup patch for
914 xmlSearchNs() by Luca Padovani. The xmlReader should do far less
915 allocation and it speed should get closer to SAX. Chris Anderson worked
916 on speeding and cleaning up repetitive checking code.</li>
917 <li>cleanup of "make tests"</li>
918 <li>libxml-2.0-uninstalled.pc from Malcolm Tredinnick</li>
919 <li>deactivated the broken docBook SGML parser code and plugged the XML
920 parser instead.</li>
921</ul>
922
Daniel Veillardeec1ae92003-09-09 13:11:01 +0000923<h3>2.5.11: Sep 9 2003</h3>
924
925<p>A bugfix only release:</p>
926<ul>
927 <li>risk of crash in Relax-NG</li>
928 <li>risk of crash when using multithreaded programs</li>
929</ul>
930
Daniel Veillardcfba2fe2003-08-15 00:33:43 +0000931<h3>2.5.10: Aug 15 2003</h3>
932
933<p>A bugfixes only release</p>
934<ul>
935 <li>Windows Makefiles (William Brack)</li>
936 <li>UTF-16 support fixes (Mark Itzcovitz)</li>
937 <li>Makefile and portability (William Brack) automake, Linux alpha, Mingw
Daniel Veillardeec1ae92003-09-09 13:11:01 +0000938 on Windows (Mikhail Grushinskiy)</li>
Daniel Veillardcfba2fe2003-08-15 00:33:43 +0000939 <li>HTML parser (Oliver Stoeneberg)</li>
940 <li>XInclude performance problem reported by Kevin Ruscoe</li>
941 <li>XML parser performance problem reported by Grant Goodale</li>
942 <li>xmlSAXParseDTD() bug fix from Malcolm Tredinnick</li>
Daniel Veillardeec1ae92003-09-09 13:11:01 +0000943 <li>and a couple other cleanup</li>
Daniel Veillardcfba2fe2003-08-15 00:33:43 +0000944</ul>
945
Daniel Veillard83ee40d2003-08-09 22:24:09 +0000946<h3>2.5.9: Aug 9 2003</h3>
947<ul>
948 <li>bugfixes: IPv6 portability, xmlHasNsProp (Markus Keim), Windows build
949 (Wiliam Brake, Jesse Pelton, Igor), Schemas (Peter Sobisch), threading
950 (Rob Richards), hexBinary type (), UTF-16 BOM (Dodji Seketeli),
951 xmlReader, Relax-NG schemas compilation, namespace handling, EXSLT (Sean
952 Griffin), HTML parsing problem (William Brack), DTD validation for mixed
953 content + namespaces, HTML serialization, library initialization,
954 progressive HTML parser</li>
955 <li>better interfaces for Relax-NG error handling (Joachim Bauch, )</li>
956 <li>adding xmlXIncludeProcessTree() for XInclud'ing in a subtree</li>
957 <li>doc fixes and improvements (John Fleck)</li>
958 <li>configure flag for -with-fexceptions when embedding in C++</li>
959 <li>couple of new UTF-8 helper functions (William Brack)</li>
960 <li>general encoding cleanup + ISO-8859-x without iconv (Peter Jacobi)</li>
961 <li>xmlTextReader cleanup + enum for node types (Bjorn Reese)</li>
962 <li>general compilation/warning cleanup Solaris/HP-UX/... (William
963 Brack)</li>
964</ul>
965
Daniel Veillard560c2a42003-07-06 21:13:49 +0000966<h3>2.5.8: Jul 6 2003</h3>
967<ul>
968 <li>bugfixes: XPath, XInclude, file/URI mapping, UTF-16 save (Mark
969 Itzcovitz), UTF-8 checking, URI saving, error printing (William Brack),
970 PI related memleak, compilation without schemas or without xpath (Joerg
971 Schmitz-Linneweber/Garry Pennington), xmlUnlinkNode problem with DTDs,
972 rpm problem on , i86_64, removed a few compilation problems from 2.5.7,
973 xmlIOParseDTD, and xmlSAXParseDTD (Malcolm Tredinnick)</li>
974 <li>portability: DJGPP (MsDos) , OpenVMS (Craig A. Berry)</li>
975 <li>William Brack fixed multithreading lock problems</li>
976 <li>IPv6 patch for FTP and HTTP accesses (Archana Shah/Wipro)</li>
977 <li>Windows fixes (Igor Zlatkovic, Eric Zurcher), threading (Stéphane
978 Bidoul)</li>
979 <li>A few W3C Schemas Structure improvements</li>
980 <li>W3C Schemas Datatype improvements (Charlie Bozeman)</li>
981 <li>Python bindings for thread globals (Stéphane Bidoul), and method/class
Daniel Veillard83ee40d2003-08-09 22:24:09 +0000982 generator</li>
983 <li>added --nonet option to xmllint</li>
Daniel Veillard560c2a42003-07-06 21:13:49 +0000984 <li>documentation improvements (John Fleck)</li>
985</ul>
986
Daniel Veillard92fc02c2003-04-24 23:12:35 +0000987<h3>2.5.7: Apr 25 2003</h3>
988<ul>
989 <li>Relax-NG: Compiling to regexp and streaming validation on top of the
990 xmlReader interface, added to xmllint --stream</li>
991 <li>xmlReader: Expand(), Next() and DOM access glue, bug fixes</li>
992 <li>Support for large files: RGN validated a 4.5GB instance</li>
993 <li>Thread support is now configured in by default</li>
994 <li>Fixes: update of the Trio code (Bjorn), WXS Date and Duration fixes
995 (Charles Bozeman), DTD and namespaces (Brent Hendricks), HTML push parser
996 and zero bytes handling, some missing Windows file path conversions,
997 behaviour of the parser and validator in the presence of "out of memory"
Daniel Veillard93d95252003-04-29 20:25:40 +0000998 error conditions</li>
Daniel Veillard92fc02c2003-04-24 23:12:35 +0000999 <li>extended the API to be able to plug a garbage collecting memory
1000 allocator, added xmlMallocAtomic() and modified the allocations
1001 accordingly.</li>
1002 <li>Performances: removed excessive malloc() calls, speedup of the push and
1003 xmlReader interfaces, removed excessive thread locking</li>
1004 <li>Documentation: man page (John Fleck), xmlReader documentation</li>
1005 <li>Python: adding binding for xmlCatalogAddLocal (Brent M Hendricks)</li>
1006</ul>
1007
Daniel Veillardc2d4a932003-04-01 11:13:05 +00001008<h3>2.5.6: Apr 1 2003</h3>
1009<ul>
1010 <li>Fixed W3C XML Schemas datatype, should be compliant now except for
1011 binHex and base64 which are not supported yet.</li>
1012 <li>bug fixes: non-ASCII IDs, HTML output, XInclude on large docs and
1013 XInclude entities handling, encoding detection on external subsets, XML
1014 Schemas bugs and memory leaks, HTML parser (James Bursa)</li>
1015 <li>portability: python/trio (Albert Chin), Sun compiler warnings</li>
1016 <li>documentation: added --relaxng option to xmllint man page (John)</li>
1017 <li>improved error reporting: xml:space, start/end tag mismatches, Relax NG
1018 errors</li>
1019</ul>
1020
1021<h3>2.5.5: Mar 24 2003</h3>
Daniel Veillardd8da01c2003-03-24 15:58:23 +00001022<ul>
1023 <li>Lot of fixes on the Relax NG implementation. More testing including
1024 DocBook and TEI examples.</li>
1025 <li>Increased the support for W3C XML Schemas datatype</li>
1026 <li>Several bug fixes in the URI handling layer</li>
1027 <li>Bug fixes: HTML parser, xmlReader, DTD validation, XPath, encoding
1028 conversion, line counting in the parser.</li>
1029 <li>Added support for $XMLLINT_INDENT environment variable, FTP delete</li>
1030 <li>Fixed the RPM spec file name</li>
1031</ul>
1032
Daniel Veillard17bed982003-02-24 20:11:43 +00001033<h3>2.5.4: Feb 20 2003</h3>
1034<ul>
1035 <li>Conformance testing and lot of fixes on Relax NG and XInclude
1036 implementation</li>
1037 <li>Implementation of XPointer element() scheme</li>
1038 <li>Bug fixes: XML parser, XInclude entities merge, validity checking on
1039 namespaces,
1040 <p>2 serialization bugs, node info generation problems, a DTD regexp
1041 generation problem.</p>
1042 </li>
1043 <li>Portability: windows updates and path canonicalization (Igor)</li>
1044 <li>A few typo fixes (Kjartan Maraas)</li>
1045 <li>Python bindings generator fixes (Stephane Bidoul)</li>
1046</ul>
1047
Daniel Veillard1d788d22003-02-10 16:21:58 +00001048<h3>2.5.3: Feb 10 2003</h3>
1049<ul>
1050 <li>RelaxNG and XML Schemas datatypes improvements, and added a first
1051 version of RelaxNG Python bindings</li>
1052 <li>Fixes: XLink (Sean Chittenden), XInclude (Sean Chittenden), API fix for
1053 serializing namespace nodes, encoding conversion bug, XHTML1
1054 serialization</li>
1055 <li>Portability fixes: Windows (Igor), AMD 64bits RPM spec file</li>
1056</ul>
1057
Daniel Veillard72fef162003-02-05 14:31:19 +00001058<h3>2.5.2: Feb 5 2003</h3>
1059<ul>
1060 <li>First implementation of RelaxNG, added --relaxng flag to xmllint</li>
1061 <li>Schemas support now compiled in by default.</li>
1062 <li>Bug fixes: DTD validation, namespace checking, XInclude and entities,
1063 delegateURI in XML Catalogs, HTML parser, XML reader (Stéphane Bidoul),
1064 XPath parser and evaluation, UTF8ToUTF8 serialization, XML reader memory
1065 consumption, HTML parser, HTML serialization in the presence of
1066 namespaces</li>
1067 <li>added an HTML API to check elements and attributes.</li>
1068 <li>Documentation improvement, PDF for the tutorial (John Fleck), doc
1069 patches (Stefan Kost)</li>
1070 <li>Portability fixes: NetBSD (Julio Merino), Windows (Igor Zlatkovic)</li>
1071 <li>Added python bindings for XPointer, contextual error reporting
1072 (Stéphane Bidoul)</li>
1073 <li>URI/file escaping problems (Stefano Zacchiroli)</li>
Daniel Veillardcf27f7c2002-04-30 07:12:39 +00001074</ul>
1075
Daniel Veillarde2830f12003-01-08 17:47:49 +00001076<h3>2.5.1: Jan 8 2003</h3>
1077<ul>
1078 <li>Fixes a memory leak and configuration/compilation problems in 2.5.0</li>
1079 <li>documentation updates (John)</li>
1080 <li>a couple of XmlTextReader fixes</li>
1081</ul>
1082
Daniel Veillard7b4b2f92003-01-06 13:11:20 +00001083<h3>2.5.0: Jan 6 2003</h3>
1084<ul>
1085 <li>New <a href="xmlreader.html">XmltextReader interface</a> based on C#
1086 API (with help of Stéphane Bidoul)</li>
1087 <li>Windows: more exports, including the new API (Igor)</li>
1088 <li>XInclude fallback fix</li>
1089 <li>Python: bindings for the new API, packaging (Stéphane Bidoul),
1090 drv_libxml2.py Python xml.sax driver (Stéphane Bidoul), fixes, speedup
1091 and iterators for Python-2.2 (Hannu Krosing)</li>
1092 <li>Tutorial fixes (john Fleck and Niraj Tolia) xmllint man update
1093 (John)</li>
1094 <li>Fix an XML parser bug raised by Vyacheslav Pindyura</li>
1095 <li>Fix for VMS serialization (Nigel Hall) and config (Craig A. Berry)</li>
1096 <li>Entities handling fixes</li>
1097 <li>new API to optionally track node creation and deletion (Lukas
1098 Schroeder)</li>
1099 <li>Added documentation for the XmltextReader interface and some <a
1100 href="guidelines.html">XML guidelines</a></li>
1101</ul>
1102
Daniel Veillardc1eed322002-12-12 11:01:32 +00001103<h3>2.4.30: Dec 12 2002</h3>
1104<ul>
1105 <li>2.4.29 broke the python bindings, rereleasing</li>
1106 <li>Improvement/fixes of the XML API generator, and couple of minor code
1107 fixes.</li>
1108</ul>
1109
Daniel Veillard9b4bb4d2002-12-11 19:28:47 +00001110<h3>2.4.29: Dec 11 2002</h3>
1111<ul>
1112 <li>Windows fixes (Igor): Windows CE port, pthread linking, python bindings
1113 (Stéphane Bidoul), Mingw (Magnus Henoch), and export list updates</li>
1114 <li>Fix for prev in python bindings (ERDI Gergo)</li>
1115 <li>Fix for entities handling (Marcus Clarke)</li>
1116 <li>Refactored the XML and HTML dumps to a single code path, fixed XHTML1
1117 dump</li>
1118 <li>Fix for URI parsing when handling URNs with fragment identifiers</li>
1119 <li>Fix for HTTP URL escaping problem</li>
1120 <li>added an TextXmlReader (C#) like API (work in progress)</li>
1121 <li>Rewrote the API in XML generation script, includes a C parser and saves
1122 more informations needed for C# bindings</li>
1123</ul>
1124
Daniel Veillardf9c4cad2002-11-22 15:57:07 +00001125<h3>2.4.28: Nov 22 2002</h3>
1126<ul>
1127 <li>a couple of python binding fixes</li>
1128 <li>2 bug fixes in the XML push parser</li>
1129 <li>potential memory leak removed (Martin Stoilov)</li>
1130 <li>fix to the configure script for Unix (Dimitri Papadopoulos)</li>
1131 <li>added encoding support for XInclude parse="text"</li>
1132 <li>autodetection of XHTML1 and specific serialization rules added</li>
Daniel Veillard9b4bb4d2002-12-11 19:28:47 +00001133 <li>nasty threading bug fixed (William Brack)</li>
Daniel Veillardf9c4cad2002-11-22 15:57:07 +00001134</ul>
1135
Daniel Veillarddad3f682002-11-17 16:47:27 +00001136<h3>2.4.27: Nov 17 2002</h3>
1137<ul>
1138 <li>fixes for the Python bindings</li>
1139 <li>a number of bug fixes: SGML catalogs, xmlParseBalancedChunkMemory(),
1140 HTML parser, Schemas (Charles Bozeman), document fragment support
1141 (Christian Glahn), xmlReconciliateNs (Brian Stafford), XPointer,
1142 xmlFreeNode(), xmlSAXParseMemory (Peter Jones), xmlGetNodePath (Petr
1143 Pajas), entities processing</li>
1144 <li>added grep to xmllint --shell</li>
1145 <li>VMS update patch from Craig A. Berry</li>
1146 <li>cleanup of the Windows build with support for more compilers (Igor),
1147 better thread support on Windows</li>
1148 <li>cleanup of Unix Makefiles and spec file</li>
1149 <li>Improvements to the documentation (John Fleck)</li>
1150</ul>
1151
Daniel Veillard48267432002-10-18 11:21:38 +00001152<h3>2.4.26: Oct 18 2002</h3>
1153<ul>
1154 <li>Patches for Windows CE port, improvements on Windows paths handling</li>
1155 <li>Fixes to the validation code (DTD and Schemas), xmlNodeGetPath() ,
1156 HTML serialization, Namespace compliance, and a number of small
1157 problems</li>
1158</ul>
1159
Daniel Veillarde16b5742002-09-26 17:50:03 +00001160<h3>2.4.25: Sep 26 2002</h3>
1161<ul>
1162 <li>A number of bug fixes: XPath, validation, Python bindings, DOM and
1163 tree, xmlI/O, Html</li>
1164 <li>Serious rewrite of XInclude</li>
1165 <li>Made XML Schemas regexp part of the default build and APIs, small fix
1166 and improvement of the regexp core</li>
1167 <li>Changed the validation code to reuse XML Schemas regexp APIs</li>
1168 <li>Better handling of Windows file paths, improvement of Makefiles (Igor,
1169 Daniel Gehriger, Mark Vakoc)</li>
1170 <li>Improved the python I/O bindings, the tests, added resolver and regexp
Daniel Veillard321be0c2002-10-08 21:26:42 +00001171 APIs</li>
Daniel Veillarde16b5742002-09-26 17:50:03 +00001172 <li>New logos from Marc Liyanage</li>
1173 <li>Tutorial improvements: John Fleck, Christopher Harris</li>
1174 <li>Makefile: Fixes for AMD x86_64 (Mandrake), DESTDIR (Christophe
1175 Merlet)</li>
1176 <li>removal of all stderr/perror use for error reporting</li>
1177 <li>Better error reporting: XPath and DTD validation</li>
1178 <li>update of the trio portability layer (Bjorn Reese)</li>
1179</ul>
1180
Daniel Veillard42766c02002-08-22 20:52:17 +00001181<p><strong>2.4.24: Aug 22 2002</strong></p>
1182<ul>
1183 <li>XPath fixes (William), xf:escape-uri() (Wesley Terpstra)</li>
1184 <li>Python binding fixes: makefiles (William), generator, rpm build, x86-64
1185 (fcrozat)</li>
1186 <li>HTML &lt;style&gt; and boolean attributes serializer fixes</li>
1187 <li>C14N improvements by Aleksey</li>
Daniel Veillarde1662542002-08-28 11:50:59 +00001188 <li>doc cleanups: Rick Jones</li>
Daniel Veillard42766c02002-08-22 20:52:17 +00001189 <li>Windows compiler makefile updates: Igor and Elizabeth Barham</li>
1190 <li>XInclude: implementation of fallback and xml:base fixup added</li>
1191</ul>
1192
Daniel Veillard782afda2002-07-08 15:12:49 +00001193<h3>2.4.23: July 6 2002</h3>
1194<ul>
1195 <li>performances patches: Peter Jacobi</li>
1196 <li>c14n fixes, testsuite and performances: Aleksey Sanin</li>
1197 <li>added xmlDocFormatDump: Chema Celorio</li>
1198 <li>new tutorial: John Fleck</li>
1199 <li>new hash functions and performances: Sander Vesik, portability fix from
1200 Peter Jacobi</li>
1201 <li>a number of bug fixes: XPath (William Brack, Richard Jinks), XML and
1202 HTML parsers, ID lookup function</li>
1203 <li>removal of all remaining sprintf: Aleksey Sanin</li>
1204</ul>
1205
Daniel Veillardc0801af2002-05-28 16:28:42 +00001206<h3>2.4.22: May 27 2002</h3>
1207<ul>
1208 <li>a number of bug fixes: configure scripts, base handling, parser, memory
1209 usage, HTML parser, XPath, documentation (Christian Cornelssen),
Daniel Veillard21473672002-06-17 07:29:22 +00001210 indentation, URI parsing</li>
Daniel Veillardc0801af2002-05-28 16:28:42 +00001211 <li>Optimizations for XMLSec, fixing and making public some of the network
1212 protocol handlers (Aleksey)</li>
1213 <li>performance patch from Gary Pennington</li>
1214 <li>Charles Bozeman provided date and time support for XML Schemas
1215 datatypes</li>
1216</ul>
1217
Daniel Veillardcf27f7c2002-04-30 07:12:39 +00001218<h3>2.4.21: Apr 29 2002</h3>
1219
1220<p>This release is both a bug fix release and also contains the early XML
1221Schemas <a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xmlschema-1/">structures</a> and <a
1222href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xmlschema-2/">datatypes</a> code, beware, all
1223interfaces are likely to change, there is huge holes, it is clearly a work in
1224progress and don't even think of putting this code in a production system,
Daniel Veillarde6d8e202002-05-02 06:11:10 +00001225it's actually not compiled in by default. The real fixes are:</p>
Daniel Veillardcf27f7c2002-04-30 07:12:39 +00001226<ul>
1227 <li>a couple of bugs or limitations introduced in 2.4.20</li>
1228 <li>patches for Borland C++ and MSC by Igor</li>
1229 <li>some fixes on XPath strings and conformance patches by Richard
1230 Jinks</li>
1231 <li>patch from Aleksey for the ExcC14N specification</li>
1232 <li>OSF/1 bug fix by Bjorn</li>
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +00001233</ul>
1234
Daniel Veillarda7084cd2002-04-15 17:12:47 +00001235<h3>2.4.20: Apr 15 2002</h3>
1236<ul>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00001237 <li>bug fixes: file descriptor leak, XPath, HTML output, DTD validation</li>
Daniel Veillarda7084cd2002-04-15 17:12:47 +00001238 <li>XPath conformance testing by Richard Jinks</li>
1239 <li>Portability fixes: Solaris, MPE/iX, Windows, OSF/1, python bindings,
1240 libxml.m4</li>
1241</ul>
1242
Daniel Veillard19274092002-03-25 16:48:03 +00001243<h3>2.4.19: Mar 25 2002</h3>
1244<ul>
1245 <li>bug fixes: half a dozen XPath bugs, Validation, ISO-Latin to UTF8
1246 encoder</li>
1247 <li>portability fixes in the HTTP code</li>
Daniel Veillardb2fb8ed2002-04-01 09:33:12 +00001248 <li>memory allocation checks using valgrind, and profiling tests</li>
Daniel Veillard19274092002-03-25 16:48:03 +00001249 <li>revamp of the Windows build and Makefiles</li>
1250</ul>
1251
Daniel Veillard34ce8be2002-03-18 19:37:11 +00001252<h3>2.4.18: Mar 18 2002</h3>
1253<ul>
1254 <li>bug fixes: tree, SAX, canonicalization, validation, portability,
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00001255 XPath</li>
Daniel Veillard34ce8be2002-03-18 19:37:11 +00001256 <li>removed the --with-buffer option it was becoming unmaintainable</li>
1257 <li>serious cleanup of the Python makefiles</li>
1258 <li>speedup patch to XPath very effective for DocBook stylesheets</li>
1259 <li>Fixes for Windows build, cleanup of the documentation</li>
1260</ul>
1261
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +00001262<h3>2.4.17: Mar 8 2002</h3>
1263<ul>
1264 <li>a lot of bug fixes, including "namespace nodes have no parents in
1265 XPath"</li>
1266 <li>fixed/improved the Python wrappers, added more examples and more
1267 regression tests, XPath extension functions can now return node-sets</li>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00001268 <li>added the XML Canonicalization support from Aleksey Sanin</li>
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +00001269</ul>
1270
Daniel Veillard5f4b5992002-02-20 10:22:49 +00001271<h3>2.4.16: Feb 20 2002</h3>
1272<ul>
1273 <li>a lot of bug fixes, most of them were triggered by the XML Testsuite
1274 from OASIS and W3C. Compliance has been significantly improved.</li>
1275 <li>a couple of portability fixes too.</li>
1276</ul>
1277
Daniel Veillard397ff112002-02-11 18:27:20 +00001278<h3>2.4.15: Feb 11 2002</h3>
1279<ul>
1280 <li>Fixed the Makefiles, especially the python module ones</li>
1281 <li>A few bug fixes and cleanup</li>
1282 <li>Includes cleanup</li>
1283</ul>
1284
Daniel Veillardb6c1e2f2002-02-08 14:52:52 +00001285<h3>2.4.14: Feb 8 2002</h3>
1286<ul>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00001287 <li>Change of License to the <a
Daniel Veillardb6c1e2f2002-02-08 14:52:52 +00001288 href="http://www.opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.html">MIT
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00001289 License</a> basically for integration in XFree86 codebase, and removing
1290 confusion around the previous dual-licensing</li>
Daniel Veillardb6c1e2f2002-02-08 14:52:52 +00001291 <li>added Python bindings, beta software but should already be quite
1292 complete</li>
1293 <li>a large number of fixes and cleanups, especially for all tree
1294 manipulations</li>
1295 <li>cleanup of the headers, generation of a reference API definition in
1296 XML</li>
1297</ul>
1298
1299<h3>2.4.13: Jan 14 2002</h3>
Daniel Veillard744683d2002-01-14 17:30:20 +00001300<ul>
1301 <li>update of the documentation: John Fleck and Charlie Bozeman</li>
1302 <li>cleanup of timing code from Justin Fletcher</li>
1303 <li>fixes for Windows and initial thread support on Win32: Igor and Serguei
1304 Narojnyi</li>
1305 <li>Cygwin patch from Robert Collins</li>
1306 <li>added xmlSetEntityReferenceFunc() for Keith Isdale work on xsldbg</li>
1307</ul>
1308
Daniel Veillardef90ba72001-12-07 14:24:22 +00001309<h3>2.4.12: Dec 7 2001</h3>
1310<ul>
1311 <li>a few bug fixes: thread (Gary Pennington), xmllint (Geert Kloosterman),
1312 XML parser (Robin Berjon), XPointer (Danny Jamshy), I/O cleanups
1313 (robert)</li>
1314 <li>Eric Lavigne contributed project files for MacOS</li>
1315 <li>some makefiles cleanups</li>
1316</ul>
1317
Daniel Veillarda4871052001-11-26 13:19:48 +00001318<h3>2.4.11: Nov 26 2001</h3>
1319<ul>
1320 <li>fixed a couple of errors in the includes, fixed a few bugs, some code
1321 cleanups</li>
1322 <li>xmllint man pages improvement by Heiko Rupp</li>
1323 <li>updated VMS build instructions from John A Fotheringham</li>
1324 <li>Windows Makefiles updates from Igor</li>
1325</ul>
1326
Daniel Veillard43d3f612001-11-10 11:57:23 +00001327<h3>2.4.10: Nov 10 2001</h3>
1328<ul>
1329 <li>URI escaping fix (Joel Young)</li>
1330 <li>added xmlGetNodePath() (for paths or XPointers generation)</li>
1331 <li>Fixes namespace handling problems when using DTD and validation</li>
1332 <li>improvements on xmllint: Morus Walter patches for --format and
1333 --encode, Stefan Kost and Heiko Rupp improvements on the --shell</li>
1334 <li>fixes for xmlcatalog linking pointed by Weiqi Gao</li>
1335 <li>fixes to the HTML parser</li>
1336</ul>
1337
1338<h3>2.4.9: Nov 6 2001</h3>
1339<ul>
1340 <li>fixes more catalog bugs</li>
1341 <li>avoid a compilation problem, improve xmlGetLineNo()</li>
1342</ul>
1343
Daniel Veillarded421aa2001-11-04 21:22:45 +00001344<h3>2.4.8: Nov 4 2001</h3>
1345<ul>
1346 <li>fixed SGML catalogs broken in previous release, updated xmlcatalog
1347 tool</li>
1348 <li>fixed a compile errors and some includes troubles.</li>
1349</ul>
1350
Daniel Veillard52dcab32001-10-30 12:51:17 +00001351<h3>2.4.7: Oct 30 2001</h3>
1352<ul>
1353 <li>exported some debugging interfaces</li>
1354 <li>serious rewrite of the catalog code</li>
1355 <li>integrated Gary Pennington thread safety patch, added configure option
1356 and regression tests</li>
1357 <li>removed an HTML parser bug</li>
1358 <li>fixed a couple of potentially serious validation bugs</li>
1359 <li>integrated the SGML DocBook support in xmllint</li>
1360 <li>changed the nanoftp anonymous login passwd</li>
1361 <li>some I/O cleanup and a couple of interfaces for Perl wrapper</li>
1362 <li>general bug fixes</li>
1363 <li>updated xmllint man page by John Fleck</li>
1364 <li>some VMS and Windows updates</li>
1365</ul>
1366
Daniel Veillard60087f32001-10-10 09:45:09 +00001367<h3>2.4.6: Oct 10 2001</h3>
1368<ul>
Daniel Veillard52dcab32001-10-30 12:51:17 +00001369 <li>added an updated man pages by John Fleck</li>
Daniel Veillard60087f32001-10-10 09:45:09 +00001370 <li>portability and configure fixes</li>
1371 <li>an infinite loop on the HTML parser was removed (William)</li>
1372 <li>Windows makefile patches from Igor</li>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00001373 <li>fixed half a dozen bugs reported for libxml or libxslt</li>
Daniel Veillard60087f32001-10-10 09:45:09 +00001374 <li>updated xmlcatalog to be able to modify SGML super catalogs</li>
1375</ul>
1376
Daniel Veillarddadd0872001-09-15 09:21:44 +00001377<h3>2.4.5: Sep 14 2001</h3>
1378<ul>
1379 <li>Remove a few annoying bugs in 2.4.4</li>
1380 <li>forces the HTML serializer to output decimal charrefs since some
1381 version of Netscape can't handle hexadecimal ones</li>
1382</ul>
1383
1384<h3>1.8.16: Sep 14 2001</h3>
1385<ul>
1386 <li>maintenance release of the old libxml1 branch, couple of bug and
1387 portability fixes</li>
1388</ul>
1389
Daniel Veillard04382ae2001-09-12 18:51:30 +00001390<h3>2.4.4: Sep 12 2001</h3>
1391<ul>
1392 <li>added --convert to xmlcatalog, bug fixes and cleanups of XML
1393 Catalog</li>
1394 <li>a few bug fixes and some portability changes</li>
1395 <li>some documentation cleanups</li>
1396</ul>
1397
Daniel Veillard39936902001-08-24 00:49:01 +00001398<h3>2.4.3: Aug 23 2001</h3>
1399<ul>
1400 <li>XML Catalog support see the doc</li>
1401 <li>New NaN/Infinity floating point code</li>
1402 <li>A few bug fixes</li>
1403</ul>
1404
1405<h3>2.4.2: Aug 15 2001</h3>
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +00001406<ul>
1407 <li>adds xmlLineNumbersDefault() to control line number generation</li>
1408 <li>lot of bug fixes</li>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00001409 <li>the Microsoft MSC projects files should now be up to date</li>
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +00001410 <li>inheritance of namespaces from DTD defaulted attributes</li>
1411 <li>fixes a serious potential security bug</li>
1412 <li>added a --format option to xmllint</li>
1413</ul>
1414
1415<h3>2.4.1: July 24 2001</h3>
1416<ul>
1417 <li>possibility to keep line numbers in the tree</li>
1418 <li>some computation NaN fixes</li>
1419 <li>extension of the XPath API</li>
1420 <li>cleanup for alpha and ia64 targets</li>
1421 <li>patch to allow saving through HTTP PUT or POST</li>
Daniel Veillard09ab7e12001-07-10 15:49:44 +00001422</ul>
1423
1424<h3>2.4.0: July 10 2001</h3>
1425<ul>
1426 <li>Fixed a few bugs in XPath, validation, and tree handling.</li>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00001427 <li>Fixed XML Base implementation, added a couple of examples to the
Daniel Veillard09ab7e12001-07-10 15:49:44 +00001428 regression tests</li>
1429 <li>A bit of cleanup</li>
Daniel Veillardab8500d2000-10-15 21:06:19 +00001430</ul>
1431
Daniel Veillard5b43fde2001-07-05 23:31:40 +00001432<h3>2.3.14: July 5 2001</h3>
1433<ul>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00001434 <li>fixed some entities problems and reduce memory requirement when
1435 substituting them</li>
Daniel Veillard5b43fde2001-07-05 23:31:40 +00001436 <li>lots of improvements in the XPath queries interpreter can be
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00001437 substantially faster</li>
Daniel Veillard5b43fde2001-07-05 23:31:40 +00001438 <li>Makefiles and configure cleanups</li>
1439 <li>Fixes to XPath variable eval, and compare on empty node set</li>
1440 <li>HTML tag closing bug fixed</li>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00001441 <li>Fixed an URI reference computation problem when validating</li>
Daniel Veillard5b43fde2001-07-05 23:31:40 +00001442</ul>
1443
Daniel Veillard2adbb512001-06-28 16:20:36 +00001444<h3>2.3.13: June 28 2001</h3>
1445<ul>
1446 <li>2.3.12 configure.in was broken as well as the push mode XML parser</li>
1447 <li>a few more fixes for compilation on Windows MSC by Yon Derek</li>
1448</ul>
1449
1450<h3>1.8.14: June 28 2001</h3>
1451<ul>
1452 <li>Zbigniew Chyla gave a patch to use the old XML parser in push mode</li>
1453 <li>Small Makefile fix</li>
1454</ul>
1455
Daniel Veillard11648102001-06-26 16:08:24 +00001456<h3>2.3.12: June 26 2001</h3>
1457<ul>
1458 <li>lots of cleanup</li>
1459 <li>a couple of validation fix</li>
1460 <li>fixed line number counting</li>
1461 <li>fixed serious problems in the XInclude processing</li>
1462 <li>added support for UTF8 BOM at beginning of entities</li>
1463 <li>fixed a strange gcc optimizer bugs in xpath handling of float, gcc-3.0
1464 miscompile uri.c (William), Thomas Leitner provided a fix for the
1465 optimizer on Tru64</li>
1466 <li>incorporated Yon Derek and Igor Zlatkovic fixes and improvements for
1467 compilation on Windows MSC</li>
1468 <li>update of libxml-doc.el (Felix Natter)</li>
1469 <li>fixed 2 bugs in URI normalization code</li>
1470</ul>
1471
Daniel Veillarde3c81b52001-06-17 14:50:34 +00001472<h3>2.3.11: June 17 2001</h3>
1473<ul>
1474 <li>updates to trio, Makefiles and configure should fix some portability
1475 problems (alpha)</li>
1476 <li>fixed some HTML serialization problems (pre, script, and block/inline
1477 handling), added encoding aware APIs, cleanup of this code</li>
1478 <li>added xmlHasNsProp()</li>
1479 <li>implemented a specific PI for encoding support in the DocBook SGML
1480 parser</li>
1481 <li>some XPath fixes (-Infinity, / as a function parameter and namespaces
1482 node selection)</li>
1483 <li>fixed a performance problem and an error in the validation code</li>
1484 <li>fixed XInclude routine to implement the recursive behaviour</li>
1485 <li>fixed xmlFreeNode problem when libxml is included statically twice</li>
1486 <li>added --version to xmllint for bug reports</li>
1487</ul>
1488
Daniel Veillard2e4f1882001-06-01 10:11:57 +00001489<h3>2.3.10: June 1 2001</h3>
1490<ul>
1491 <li>fixed the SGML catalog support</li>
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +00001492 <li>a number of reported bugs got fixed, in XPath, iconv detection,
1493 XInclude processing</li>
Daniel Veillard2e4f1882001-06-01 10:11:57 +00001494 <li>XPath string function should now handle unicode correctly</li>
1495</ul>
1496
Daniel Veillard4623acd2001-05-19 15:13:15 +00001497<h3>2.3.9: May 19 2001</h3>
1498
1499<p>Lots of bugfixes, and added a basic SGML catalog support:</p>
1500<ul>
1501 <li>HTML push bugfix #54891 and another patch from Jonas Borgström</li>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00001502 <li>some serious speed optimization again</li>
Daniel Veillard4623acd2001-05-19 15:13:15 +00001503 <li>some documentation cleanups</li>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00001504 <li>trying to get better linking on Solaris (-R)</li>
Daniel Veillard4623acd2001-05-19 15:13:15 +00001505 <li>XPath API cleanup from Thomas Broyer</li>
1506 <li>Validation bug fixed #54631, added a patch from Gary Pennington, fixed
1507 xmlValidGetValidElements()</li>
1508 <li>Added an INSTALL file</li>
1509 <li>Attribute removal added to API: #54433</li>
1510 <li>added a basic support for SGML catalogs</li>
1511 <li>fixed xmlKeepBlanksDefault(0) API</li>
1512 <li>bugfix in xmlNodeGetLang()</li>
1513 <li>fixed a small configure portability problem</li>
1514 <li>fixed an inversion of SYSTEM and PUBLIC identifier in HTML document</li>
1515</ul>
1516
Daniel Veillarda265af72001-05-14 11:13:58 +00001517<h3>1.8.13: May 14 2001</h3>
1518<ul>
1519 <li>bugfixes release of the old libxml1 branch used by Gnome</li>
1520</ul>
1521
Daniel Veillard3bbbe6f2001-05-03 11:15:37 +00001522<h3>2.3.8: May 3 2001</h3>
1523<ul>
1524 <li>Integrated an SGML DocBook parser for the Gnome project</li>
1525 <li>Fixed a few things in the HTML parser</li>
1526 <li>Fixed some XPath bugs raised by XSLT use, tried to fix the floating
1527 point portability issue</li>
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +00001528 <li>Speed improvement (8M/s for SAX, 3M/s for DOM, 1.5M/s for
1529 DOM+validation using the XML REC as input and a 700MHz celeron).</li>
Daniel Veillard3bbbe6f2001-05-03 11:15:37 +00001530 <li>incorporated more Windows cleanup</li>
1531 <li>added xmlSaveFormatFile()</li>
1532 <li>fixed problems in copying nodes with entities references (gdome)</li>
1533 <li>removed some troubles surrounding the new validation module</li>
1534</ul>
1535
Daniel Veillarda41123c2001-04-22 19:31:20 +00001536<h3>2.3.7: April 22 2001</h3>
1537<ul>
1538 <li>lots of small bug fixes, corrected XPointer</li>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00001539 <li>Non deterministic content model validation support</li>
Daniel Veillarda41123c2001-04-22 19:31:20 +00001540 <li>added xmlDocCopyNode for gdome2</li>
1541 <li>revamped the way the HTML parser handles end of tags</li>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00001542 <li>XPath: corrections of namespaces support and number formatting</li>
Daniel Veillarda41123c2001-04-22 19:31:20 +00001543 <li>Windows: Igor Zlatkovic patches for MSC compilation</li>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00001544 <li>HTML output fixes from P C Chow and William M. Brack</li>
Daniel Veillarda41123c2001-04-22 19:31:20 +00001545 <li>Improved validation speed sensible for DocBook</li>
1546 <li>fixed a big bug with ID declared in external parsed entities</li>
1547 <li>portability fixes, update of Trio from Bjorn Reese</li>
1548</ul>
1549
Daniel Veillardafc73112001-04-11 11:51:41 +00001550<h3>2.3.6: April 8 2001</h3>
1551<ul>
1552 <li>Code cleanup using extreme gcc compiler warning options, found and
1553 cleared half a dozen potential problem</li>
1554 <li>the Eazel team found an XML parser bug</li>
1555 <li>cleaned up the user of some of the string formatting function. used the
1556 trio library code to provide the one needed when the platform is missing
1557 them</li>
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +00001558 <li>xpath: removed a memory leak and fixed the predicate evaluation
1559 problem, extended the testsuite and cleaned up the result. XPointer seems
1560 broken ...</li>
Daniel Veillardafc73112001-04-11 11:51:41 +00001561</ul>
1562
Daniel Veillard56a4cb82001-03-24 17:00:36 +00001563<h3>2.3.5: Mar 23 2001</h3>
1564<ul>
1565 <li>Biggest change is separate parsing and evaluation of XPath expressions,
1566 there is some new APIs for this too</li>
1567 <li>included a number of bug fixes(XML push parser, 51876, notations,
1568 52299)</li>
1569 <li>Fixed some portability issues</li>
1570</ul>
1571
Daniel Veillarde356c282001-03-10 12:32:04 +00001572<h3>2.3.4: Mar 10 2001</h3>
1573<ul>
1574 <li>Fixed bugs #51860 and #51861</li>
1575 <li>Added a global variable xmlDefaultBufferSize to allow default buffer
1576 size to be application tunable.</li>
1577 <li>Some cleanup in the validation code, still a bug left and this part
1578 should probably be rewritten to support ambiguous content model :-\</li>
1579 <li>Fix a couple of serious bugs introduced or raised by changes in 2.3.3
1580 parser</li>
1581 <li>Fixed another bug in xmlNodeGetContent()</li>
1582 <li>Bjorn fixed XPath node collection and Number formatting</li>
1583 <li>Fixed a loop reported in the HTML parsing</li>
1584 <li>blank space are reported even if the Dtd content model proves that they
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00001585 are formatting spaces, this is for XML conformance</li>
Daniel Veillarde356c282001-03-10 12:32:04 +00001586</ul>
1587
Daniel Veillardb402c072001-03-01 17:28:58 +00001588<h3>2.3.3: Mar 1 2001</h3>
1589<ul>
1590 <li>small change in XPath for XSLT</li>
1591 <li>documentation cleanups</li>
1592 <li>fix in validation by Gary Pennington</li>
1593 <li>serious parsing performances improvements</li>
1594</ul>
1595
Daniel Veillardec70e912001-02-26 20:10:45 +00001596<h3>2.3.2: Feb 24 2001</h3>
Daniel Veillard71681102001-02-24 17:48:53 +00001597<ul>
1598 <li>chasing XPath bugs, found a bunch, completed some TODO</li>
1599 <li>fixed a Dtd parsing bug</li>
1600 <li>fixed a bug in xmlNodeGetContent</li>
1601 <li>ID/IDREF support partly rewritten by Gary Pennington</li>
1602</ul>
1603
Daniel Veillardec70e912001-02-26 20:10:45 +00001604<h3>2.3.1: Feb 15 2001</h3>
Daniel Veillard6e6a6cc2001-02-15 15:55:44 +00001605<ul>
1606 <li>some XPath and HTML bug fixes for XSLT</li>
1607 <li>small extension of the hash table interfaces for DOM gdome2
1608 implementation</li>
1609 <li>A few bug fixes</li>
1610</ul>
1611
Daniel Veillardec70e912001-02-26 20:10:45 +00001612<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 +00001613<ul>
1614 <li>Lots of XPath bug fixes</li>
1615 <li>Add a mode with Dtd lookup but without validation error reporting for
1616 XSLT</li>
1617 <li>Add support for text node without escaping (XSLT)</li>
1618 <li>bug fixes for xmlCheckFilename</li>
1619 <li>validation code bug fixes from Gary Pennington</li>
1620 <li>Patch from Paul D. Smith correcting URI path normalization</li>
1621 <li>Patch to allow simultaneous install of libxml-devel and
1622 libxml2-devel</li>
1623 <li>the example Makefile is now fixed</li>
1624 <li>added HTML to the RPM packages</li>
1625 <li>tree copying bugfixes</li>
1626 <li>updates to Windows makefiles</li>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00001627 <li>optimization patch from Bjorn Reese</li>
Daniel Veillard6e6a6cc2001-02-15 15:55:44 +00001628</ul>
1629
Daniel Veillardec70e912001-02-26 20:10:45 +00001630<h3>2.2.11: Jan 4 2001</h3>
Daniel Veillard503b8932001-01-05 06:36:31 +00001631<ul>
1632 <li>bunch of bug fixes (memory I/O, xpath, ftp/http, ...)</li>
1633 <li>added htmlHandleOmittedElem()</li>
1634 <li>Applied Bjorn Reese's IPV6 first patch</li>
1635 <li>Applied Paul D. Smith patches for validation of XInclude results</li>
Daniel Veillard82687162001-01-22 15:32:01 +00001636 <li>added XPointer xmlns() new scheme support</li>
Daniel Veillard503b8932001-01-05 06:36:31 +00001637</ul>
1638
Daniel Veillard2ddd23d2000-11-25 10:42:19 +00001639<h3>2.2.10: Nov 25 2000</h3>
Daniel Veillard9d343c42000-11-25 10:12:43 +00001640<ul>
1641 <li>Fix the Windows problems of 2.2.8</li>
1642 <li>integrate OpenVMS patches</li>
1643 <li>better handling of some nasty HTML input</li>
1644 <li>Improved the XPointer implementation</li>
1645 <li>integrate a number of provided patches</li>
1646</ul>
1647
Daniel Veillard2ddd23d2000-11-25 10:42:19 +00001648<h3>2.2.9: Nov 25 2000</h3>
1649<ul>
1650 <li>erroneous release :-(</li>
1651</ul>
1652
Daniel Veillard28929b22000-11-13 18:22:49 +00001653<h3>2.2.8: Nov 13 2000</h3>
1654<ul>
1655 <li>First version of <a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xinclude">XInclude</a>
1656 support</li>
1657 <li>Patch in conditional section handling</li>
1658 <li>updated MS compiler project</li>
1659 <li>fixed some XPath problems</li>
1660 <li>added an URI escaping function</li>
1661 <li>some other bug fixes</li>
1662</ul>
1663
1664<h3>2.2.7: Oct 31 2000</h3>
1665<ul>
1666 <li>added message redirection</li>
1667 <li>XPath improvements (thanks TOM !)</li>
1668 <li>xmlIOParseDTD() added</li>
1669 <li>various small fixes in the HTML, URI, HTTP and XPointer support</li>
1670 <li>some cleanup of the Makefile, autoconf and the distribution content</li>
1671</ul>
1672
Daniel Veillard29a11cc2000-10-25 13:32:39 +00001673<h3>2.2.6: Oct 25 2000:</h3>
1674<ul>
1675 <li>Added an hash table module, migrated a number of internal structure to
1676 those</li>
1677 <li>Fixed a posteriori validation problems</li>
1678 <li>HTTP module cleanups</li>
1679 <li>HTML parser improvements (tag errors, script/style handling, attribute
1680 normalization)</li>
1681 <li>coalescing of adjacent text nodes</li>
1682 <li>couple of XPath bug fixes, exported the internal API</li>
1683</ul>
1684
Daniel Veillardab8500d2000-10-15 21:06:19 +00001685<h3>2.2.5: Oct 15 2000:</h3>
Daniel Veillard4c3a2031999-11-19 17:46:26 +00001686<ul>
Daniel Veillard189446d2000-10-13 10:23:06 +00001687 <li>XPointer implementation and testsuite</li>
1688 <li>Lot of XPath fixes, added variable and functions registration, more
1689 tests</li>
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +00001690 <li>Portability fixes, lots of enhancements toward an easy Windows build
1691 and release</li>
Daniel Veillard189446d2000-10-13 10:23:06 +00001692 <li>Late validation fixes</li>
1693 <li>Integrated a lot of contributed patches</li>
1694 <li>added memory management docs</li>
Daniel Veillardab8500d2000-10-15 21:06:19 +00001695 <li>a performance problem when using large buffer seems fixed</li>
Daniel Veillard189446d2000-10-13 10:23:06 +00001696</ul>
1697
1698<h3>2.2.4: Oct 1 2000:</h3>
1699<ul>
1700 <li>main XPath problem fixed</li>
1701 <li>Integrated portability patches for Windows</li>
1702 <li>Serious bug fixes on the URI and HTML code</li>
Daniel Veillard361d8452000-04-03 19:48:13 +00001703</ul>
1704
Daniel Veillardd5f97f82000-09-17 16:38:14 +00001705<h3>2.2.3: Sep 17 2000</h3>
1706<ul>
1707 <li>bug fixes</li>
1708 <li>cleanup of entity handling code</li>
1709 <li>overall review of all loops in the parsers, all sprintf usage has been
1710 checked too</li>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00001711 <li>Far better handling of larges Dtd. Validating against DocBook XML Dtd
Daniel Veillardd5f97f82000-09-17 16:38:14 +00001712 works smoothly now.</li>
1713</ul>
1714
1715<h3>1.8.10: Sep 6 2000</h3>
1716<ul>
1717 <li>bug fix release for some Gnome projects</li>
1718</ul>
1719
1720<h3>2.2.2: August 12 2000</h3>
Daniel Veillard786d7c82000-08-12 23:38:57 +00001721<ul>
1722 <li>mostly bug fixes</li>
Daniel Veillardec78c0f2000-08-25 10:25:23 +00001723 <li>started adding routines to access xml parser context options</li>
Daniel Veillard786d7c82000-08-12 23:38:57 +00001724</ul>
1725
Daniel Veillardd5f97f82000-09-17 16:38:14 +00001726<h3>2.2.1: July 21 2000</h3>
Daniel Veillarda2679fa2000-07-22 02:38:15 +00001727<ul>
1728 <li>a purely bug fixes release</li>
1729 <li>fixed an encoding support problem when parsing from a memory block</li>
1730 <li>fixed a DOCTYPE parsing problem</li>
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +00001731 <li>removed a bug in the function allowing to override the memory
1732 allocation routines</li>
Daniel Veillarda2679fa2000-07-22 02:38:15 +00001733</ul>
1734
Daniel Veillardd5f97f82000-09-17 16:38:14 +00001735<h3>2.2.0: July 14 2000</h3>
Daniel Veillard94e90602000-07-17 14:38:19 +00001736<ul>
1737 <li>applied a lot of portability fixes</li>
1738 <li>better encoding support/cleanup and saving (content is now always
1739 encoded in UTF-8)</li>
1740 <li>the HTML parser now correctly handles encodings</li>
1741 <li>added xmlHasProp()</li>
1742 <li>fixed a serious problem with &amp;#38;</li>
1743 <li>propagated the fix to FTP client</li>
1744 <li>cleanup, bugfixes, etc ...</li>
1745 <li>Added a page about <a href="encoding.html">libxml Internationalization
1746 support</a></li>
1747</ul>
1748
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00001749<h3>1.8.9: July 9 2000</h3>
1750<ul>
1751 <li>fixed the spec the RPMs should be better</li>
1752 <li>fixed a serious bug in the FTP implementation, released 1.8.9 to solve
1753 rpmfind users problem</li>
1754</ul>
1755
Daniel Veillard6388e172000-07-03 16:07:19 +00001756<h3>2.1.1: July 1 2000</h3>
1757<ul>
1758 <li>fixes a couple of bugs in the 2.1.0 packaging</li>
1759 <li>improvements on the HTML parser</li>
1760</ul>
1761
Daniel Veillard3f6f7f62000-06-30 17:58:25 +00001762<h3>2.1.0 and 1.8.8: June 29 2000</h3>
1763<ul>
Daniel Veillardc0801af2002-05-28 16:28:42 +00001764 <li>1.8.8 is mostly a commodity package for upgrading to libxml2 according
1765 to <a href="upgrade.html">new instructions</a>. It fixes a nasty problem
Daniel Veillard3f6f7f62000-06-30 17:58:25 +00001766 about &amp;#38; charref parsing</li>
1767 <li>2.1.0 also ease the upgrade from libxml v1 to the recent version. it
1768 also contains numerous fixes and enhancements:
1769 <ul>
1770 <li>added xmlStopParser() to stop parsing</li>
1771 <li>improved a lot parsing speed when there is large CDATA blocs</li>
1772 <li>includes XPath patches provided by Picdar Technology</li>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00001773 <li>tried to fix as much as possible DTD validation and namespace
Daniel Veillard3f6f7f62000-06-30 17:58:25 +00001774 related problems</li>
1775 <li>output to a given encoding has been added/tested</li>
1776 <li>lot of various fixes</li>
1777 </ul>
1778 </li>
1779</ul>
1780
Daniel Veillarde0aed302000-04-16 08:52:20 +00001781<h3>2.0.0: Apr 12 2000</h3>
Daniel Veillard361d8452000-04-03 19:48:13 +00001782<ul>
1783 <li>First public release of libxml2. If you are using libxml, it's a good
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00001784 idea to check the 1.x to 2.x upgrade instructions. NOTE: while initially
1785 scheduled for Apr 3 the release occurred only on Apr 12 due to massive
Daniel Veillarde0aed302000-04-16 08:52:20 +00001786 workload.</li>
Daniel Veillard361d8452000-04-03 19:48:13 +00001787 <li>The include are now located under $prefix/include/libxml (instead of
Daniel Veillarde0aed302000-04-16 08:52:20 +00001788 $prefix/include/gnome-xml), they also are referenced by
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00001789 <pre>#include &lt;libxml/xxx.h&gt;</pre>
Daniel Veillarde0aed302000-04-16 08:52:20 +00001790 <p>instead of</p>
Daniel Veillard361d8452000-04-03 19:48:13 +00001791 <pre>#include "xxx.h"</pre>
1792 </li>
Daniel Veillard8f621982000-03-20 13:07:15 +00001793 <li>a new URI module for parsing URIs and following strictly RFC 2396</li>
1794 <li>the memory allocation routines used by libxml can now be overloaded
1795 dynamically by using xmlMemSetup()</li>
Daniel Veillard361d8452000-04-03 19:48:13 +00001796 <li>The previously CVS only tool tester has been renamed
1797 <strong>xmllint</strong> and is now installed as part of the libxml2
1798 package</li>
Daniel Veillarde0aed302000-04-16 08:52:20 +00001799 <li>The I/O interface has been revamped. There is now ways to plug in
1800 specific I/O modules, either at the URI scheme detection level using
1801 xmlRegisterInputCallbacks() or by passing I/O functions when creating a
1802 parser context using xmlCreateIOParserCtxt()</li>
1803 <li>there is a C preprocessor macro LIBXML_VERSION providing the version
1804 number of the libxml module in use</li>
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +00001805 <li>a number of optional features of libxml can now be excluded at
1806 configure time (FTP/HTTP/HTML/XPath/Debug)</li>
Daniel Veillardedfb29b2000-03-14 19:59:05 +00001807</ul>
1808
1809<h3>2.0.0beta: Mar 14 2000</h3>
1810<ul>
1811 <li>This is a first Beta release of libxml version 2</li>
Daniel Veillarde356c282001-03-10 12:32:04 +00001812 <li>It's available only from<a href="ftp://xmlsoft.org/">xmlsoft.org
1813 FTP</a>, it's packaged as libxml2-2.0.0beta and available as tar and
1814 RPMs</li>
Daniel Veillardedfb29b2000-03-14 19:59:05 +00001815 <li>This version is now the head in the Gnome CVS base, the old one is
1816 available under the tag LIB_XML_1_X</li>
Daniel Veillardc0801af2002-05-28 16:28:42 +00001817 <li>This includes a very large set of changes. From a programmatic point
1818 of view applications should not have to be modified too much, check the
1819 <a href="upgrade.html">upgrade page</a></li>
Daniel Veillardedfb29b2000-03-14 19:59:05 +00001820 <li>Some interfaces may changes (especially a bit about encoding).</li>
1821 <li>the updates includes:
Daniel Veillard6c8b1172000-03-01 00:40:41 +00001822 <ul>
Daniel Veillardedfb29b2000-03-14 19:59:05 +00001823 <li>fix I18N support. ISO-Latin-x/UTF-8/UTF-16 (nearly) seems correctly
1824 handled now</li>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00001825 <li>Better handling of entities, especially well-formedness checking
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +00001826 and proper PEref extensions in external subsets</li>
Daniel Veillard6c8b1172000-03-01 00:40:41 +00001827 <li>DTD conditional sections</li>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00001828 <li>Validation now correctly handle entities content</li>
Daniel Veillard6c8b1172000-03-01 00:40:41 +00001829 <li><a href="http://rpmfind.net/tools/gdome/messages/0039.html">change
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00001830 structures to accommodate DOM</a></li>
Daniel Veillard6c8b1172000-03-01 00:40:41 +00001831 </ul>
1832 </li>
Daniel Veillardedfb29b2000-03-14 19:59:05 +00001833 <li>Serious progress were made toward compliance, <a
1834 href="conf/result.html">here are the result of the test</a> against the
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00001835 OASIS testsuite (except the Japanese tests since I don't support that
Daniel Veillardedfb29b2000-03-14 19:59:05 +00001836 encoding yet). This URL is rebuilt every couple of hours using the CVS
1837 head version.</li>
Daniel Veillarde41f2b72000-01-30 20:00:07 +00001838</ul>
1839
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +00001840<h3>1.8.7: Mar 6 2000</h3>
1841<ul>
1842 <li>This is a bug fix release:</li>
1843 <li>It is possible to disable the ignorable blanks heuristic used by
1844 libxml-1.x, a new function xmlKeepBlanksDefault(0) will allow this. Note
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +00001845 that for adherence to XML spec, this behaviour will be disabled by
1846 default in 2.x . The same function will allow to keep compatibility for
1847 old code.</li>
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00001848 <li>Blanks in &lt;a&gt; &lt;/a&gt; constructs are not ignored anymore,
1849 avoiding heuristic is really the Right Way :-\</li>
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +00001850 <li>The unchecked use of snprintf which was breaking libxml-1.8.6
1851 compilation on some platforms has been fixed</li>
1852 <li>nanoftp.c nanohttp.c: Fixed '#' and '?' stripping when processing
1853 URIs</li>
1854</ul>
1855
Daniel Veillarde41f2b72000-01-30 20:00:07 +00001856<h3>1.8.6: Jan 31 2000</h3>
1857<ul>
1858 <li>added a nanoFTP transport module, debugged until the new version of <a
1859 href="http://rpmfind.net/linux/rpm2html/rpmfind.html">rpmfind</a> can use
1860 it without troubles</li>
Daniel Veillardda07c342000-01-25 18:31:22 +00001861</ul>
1862
1863<h3>1.8.5: Jan 21 2000</h3>
1864<ul>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +00001865 <li>adding APIs to parse a well balanced chunk of XML (production <a
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +00001866 href="http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml#NT-content">[43] content</a> of the
1867 XML spec)</li>
Daniel Veillard461a66c2000-01-18 18:01:01 +00001868 <li>fixed a hideous bug in xmlGetProp pointed by Rune.Djurhuus@fast.no</li>
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00001869 <li>Jody Goldberg &lt;jgoldberg@home.com&gt; provided another patch trying
1870 to solve the zlib checks problems</li>
Daniel Veillard461a66c2000-01-18 18:01:01 +00001871 <li>The current state in gnome CVS base is expected to ship as 1.8.5 with
1872 gnumeric soon</li>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +00001873</ul>
1874
1875<h3>1.8.4: Jan 13 2000</h3>
1876<ul>
1877 <li>bug fixes, reintroduced xmlNewGlobalNs(), fixed xmlNewNs()</li>
1878 <li>all exit() call should have been removed from libxml</li>
1879 <li>fixed a problem with INCLUDE_WINSOCK on WIN32 platform</li>
1880 <li>added newDocFragment()</li>
Daniel Veillardf84f71f2000-01-05 19:54:23 +00001881</ul>
1882
1883<h3>1.8.3: Jan 5 2000</h3>
1884<ul>
1885 <li>a Push interface for the XML and HTML parsers</li>
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +00001886 <li>a shell-like interface to the document tree (try tester --shell :-)</li>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00001887 <li>lots of bug fixes and improvement added over XMas holidays</li>
Daniel Veillard437b87b2000-01-03 17:30:46 +00001888 <li>fixed the DTD parsing code to work with the xhtml DTD</li>
Daniel Veillardf84f71f2000-01-05 19:54:23 +00001889 <li>added xmlRemoveProp(), xmlRemoveID() and xmlRemoveRef()</li>
1890 <li>Fixed bugs in xmlNewNs()</li>
Daniel Veillard437b87b2000-01-03 17:30:46 +00001891 <li>External entity loading code has been revamped, now it uses
Daniel Veillardf84f71f2000-01-05 19:54:23 +00001892 xmlLoadExternalEntity(), some fix on entities processing were added</li>
Daniel Veillard437b87b2000-01-03 17:30:46 +00001893 <li>cleaned up WIN32 includes of socket stuff</li>
Daniel Veillard5cb5ab81999-12-21 15:35:29 +00001894</ul>
1895
1896<h3>1.8.2: Dec 21 1999</h3>
1897<ul>
Daniel Veillardb24054a1999-12-18 15:32:46 +00001898 <li>I got another problem with includes and C++, I hope this issue is fixed
1899 for good this time</li>
Daniel Veillard5cb5ab81999-12-21 15:35:29 +00001900 <li>Added a few tree modification functions: xmlReplaceNode,
1901 xmlAddPrevSibling, xmlAddNextSibling, xmlNodeSetName and
1902 xmlDocSetRootElement</li>
1903 <li>Tried to improve the HTML output with help from <a
1904 href="mailto:clahey@umich.edu">Chris Lahey</a></li>
Daniel Veillarde4e51311999-12-18 15:32:46 +00001905</ul>
Daniel Veillardb24054a1999-12-18 15:32:46 +00001906
Daniel Veillarde4e51311999-12-18 15:32:46 +00001907<h3>1.8.1: Dec 18 1999</h3>
1908<ul>
1909 <li>various patches to avoid troubles when using libxml with C++ compilers
1910 the "namespace" keyword and C escaping in include files</li>
1911 <li>a problem in one of the core macros IS_CHAR was corrected</li>
1912 <li>fixed a bug introduced in 1.8.0 breaking default namespace processing,
1913 and more specifically the Dia application</li>
Daniel Veillard944b5ff1999-12-15 19:08:24 +00001914 <li>fixed a posteriori validation (validation after parsing, or by using a
1915 Dtd not specified in the original document)</li>
Daniel Veillardb24054a1999-12-18 15:32:46 +00001916 <li>fixed a bug in</li>
Daniel Veillard10a2c651999-12-12 13:03:50 +00001917</ul>
1918
1919<h3>1.8.0: Dec 12 1999</h3>
1920<ul>
1921 <li>cleanup, especially memory wise</li>
1922 <li>the parser should be more reliable, especially the HTML one, it should
1923 not crash, whatever the input !</li>
1924 <li>Integrated various patches, especially a speedup improvement for large
1925 dataset from <a href="mailto:cnygard@bellatlantic.net">Carl Nygard</a>,
1926 configure with --with-buffers to enable them.</li>
1927 <li>attribute normalization, oops should have been added long ago !</li>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00001928 <li>attributes defaulted from DTDs should be available, xmlSetProp() now
1929 does entities escaping by default.</li>
Daniel Veillard4c3a2031999-11-19 17:46:26 +00001930</ul>
Daniel Veillard35008381999-10-25 13:15:52 +00001931
1932<h3>1.7.4: Oct 25 1999</h3>
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +00001933<ul>
Daniel Veillard35008381999-10-25 13:15:52 +00001934 <li>Lots of HTML improvement</li>
1935 <li>Fixed some errors when saving both XML and HTML</li>
1936 <li>More examples, the regression tests should now look clean</li>
1937 <li>Fixed a bug with contiguous charref</li>
1938</ul>
1939
1940<h3>1.7.3: Sep 29 1999</h3>
1941<ul>
1942 <li>portability problems fixed</li>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00001943 <li>snprintf was used unconditionally, leading to link problems on system
Daniel Veillard35008381999-10-25 13:15:52 +00001944 were it's not available, fixed</li>
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +00001945</ul>
1946
1947<h3>1.7.1: Sep 24 1999</h3>
1948<ul>
1949 <li>The basic type for strings manipulated by libxml has been renamed in
1950 1.7.1 from <strong>CHAR</strong> to <strong>xmlChar</strong>. The reason
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +00001951 is that CHAR was conflicting with a predefined type on Windows. However
1952 on non WIN32 environment, compatibility is provided by the way of a
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +00001953 <strong>#define </strong>.</li>
1954 <li>Changed another error : the use of a structure field called errno, and
1955 leading to troubles on platforms where it's a macro</li>
1956</ul>
1957
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00001958<h3>1.7.0: Sep 23 1999</h3>
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +00001959<ul>
1960 <li>Added the ability to fetch remote DTD or parsed entities, see the <a
Daniel Veillard9cb5ff42001-01-29 08:22:21 +00001961 href="html/libxml-nanohttp.html">nanohttp</a> module.</li>
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +00001962 <li>Added an errno to report errors by another mean than a simple printf
1963 like callback</li>
1964 <li>Finished ID/IDREF support and checking when validation</li>
1965 <li>Serious memory leaks fixed (there is now a <a
Daniel Veillard9cb5ff42001-01-29 08:22:21 +00001966 href="html/libxml-xmlmemory.html">memory wrapper</a> module)</li>
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +00001967 <li>Improvement of <a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xpath">XPath</a>
1968 implementation</li>
1969 <li>Added an HTML parser front-end</li>
1970</ul>
1971
1972<h2><a name="XML">XML</a></h2>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00001973
Daniel Veillard402e8c82000-02-29 22:57:47 +00001974<p><a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml">XML is a standard</a> for
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +00001975markup-based structured documents. Here is <a name="example">an example XML
1976document</a>:</p>
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00001977<pre>&lt;?xml version="1.0"?&gt;
1978&lt;EXAMPLE prop1="gnome is great" prop2="&amp;amp; linux too"&gt;
1979 &lt;head&gt;
1980 &lt;title&gt;Welcome to Gnome&lt;/title&gt;
1981 &lt;/head&gt;
1982 &lt;chapter&gt;
1983 &lt;title&gt;The Linux adventure&lt;/title&gt;
1984 &lt;p&gt;bla bla bla ...&lt;/p&gt;
1985 &lt;image href="linus.gif"/&gt;
1986 &lt;p&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;
1987 &lt;/chapter&gt;
1988&lt;/EXAMPLE&gt;</pre>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00001989
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +00001990<p>The first line specifies that it is an XML document and gives useful
Daniel Veillard42766c02002-08-22 20:52:17 +00001991information about its encoding. Then the rest of the document is a text
1992format whose structure is specified by tags between brackets. <strong>Each
1993tag opened has to be closed</strong>. XML is pedantic about this. However, if
1994a tag is empty (no content), a single tag can serve as both the opening and
1995closing tag if it ends with <code>/&gt;</code> rather than with
1996<code>&gt;</code>. Note that, for example, the image tag has no content (just
1997an attribute) and is closed by ending the tag with <code>/&gt;</code>.</p>
Daniel Veillardccb09631998-10-27 06:21:04 +00001998
Daniel Veillard42766c02002-08-22 20:52:17 +00001999<p>XML can be applied successfully to a wide range of tasks, ranging from
2000long term structured document maintenance (where it follows the steps of
2001SGML) to simple data encoding mechanisms like configuration file formatting
2002(glade), spreadsheets (gnumeric), or even shorter lived documents such as
2003WebDAV where it is used to encode remote calls between a client and a
2004server.</p>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00002005
Daniel Veillard82687162001-01-22 15:32:01 +00002006<h2><a name="XSLT">XSLT</a></h2>
2007
Daniel Veillard6e6a6cc2001-02-15 15:55:44 +00002008<p>Check <a href="http://xmlsoft.org/XSLT">the separate libxslt page</a></p>
2009
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +00002010<p><a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xslt">XSL Transformations</a>, is a
2011language for transforming XML documents into other XML documents (or
2012HTML/textual output).</p>
Daniel Veillard82687162001-01-22 15:32:01 +00002013
Daniel Veillard560c2a42003-07-06 21:13:49 +00002014<p>A separate library called libxslt is available implementing XSLT-1.0 for
2015libxml2. This module "libxslt" too can be found in the Gnome CVS base.</p>
Daniel Veillard82687162001-01-22 15:32:01 +00002016
Daniel Veillard383b1472001-01-23 11:39:52 +00002017<p>You can check the <a
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +00002018href="http://cvs.gnome.org/lxr/source/libxslt/FEATURES">features</a>
2019supported and the progresses on the <a
Daniel Veillard6dbcaf82002-02-20 14:37:47 +00002020href="http://cvs.gnome.org/lxr/source/libxslt/ChangeLog"
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +00002021name="Changelog">Changelog</a>.</p>
Daniel Veillard6dbcaf82002-02-20 14:37:47 +00002022
2023<h2><a name="Python">Python and bindings</a></h2>
2024
Daniel Veillard42766c02002-08-22 20:52:17 +00002025<p>There are a number of language bindings and wrappers available for
2026libxml2, the list below is not exhaustive. Please contact the <a
Daniel Veillard6dbcaf82002-02-20 14:37:47 +00002027href="http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/xml-bindings">xml-bindings@gnome.org</a>
2028(<a href="http://mail.gnome.org/archives/xml-bindings/">archives</a>) in
2029order to get updates to this list or to discuss the specific topic of libxml2
2030or libxslt wrappers or bindings:</p>
2031<ul>
Daniel Veillardc14401e2002-11-20 14:28:17 +00002032 <li><a href="http://libxmlplusplus.sourceforge.net/">Libxml++</a> seems the
2033 most up-to-date C++ bindings for libxml2, check the <a
2034 href="http://libxmlplusplus.sourceforge.net/reference/html/hierarchy.html">documentation</a>
2035 and the <a
2036 href="http://cvs.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/libxmlplusplus/libxml%2b%2b/examples/">examples</a>.</li>
Daniel Veillard6dbcaf82002-02-20 14:37:47 +00002037 <li>There is another <a href="http://libgdome-cpp.berlios.de/">C++ wrapper
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +00002038 based on the gdome2 bindings</a> maintained by Tobias Peters.</li>
Daniel Veillard9b6fd302002-05-13 12:06:47 +00002039 <li>and a third C++ wrapper by Peter Jones &lt;pjones@pmade.org&gt;
2040 <p>Website: <a
2041 href="http://pmade.org/pjones/software/xmlwrapp/">http://pmade.org/pjones/software/xmlwrapp/</a></p>
2042 </li>
Daniel Veillard6dbcaf82002-02-20 14:37:47 +00002043 <li><a
2044 href="http://mail.gnome.org/archives/xml/2001-March/msg00014.html">Matt
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00002045 Sergeant</a> developed <a
2046 href="http://axkit.org/download/">XML::LibXSLT</a>, a Perl wrapper for
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +00002047 libxml2/libxslt as part of the <a href="http://axkit.com/">AxKit XML
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +00002048 application server</a>.</li>
Daniel Veillard4ac494b2003-09-18 15:08:00 +00002049 <li>If you're interested into scripting XML processing, have a look at <a
2050 href="http://xsh.sourceforge.net/">XSH</a> an XML editing shell based on
2051 Libxml2 Perl bindings.</li>
Daniel Veillard21473672002-06-17 07:29:22 +00002052 <li><a href="mailto:dkuhlman@cutter.rexx.com">Dave Kuhlman</a> provides an
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +00002053 earlier version of the libxml/libxslt <a
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +00002054 href="http://www.rexx.com/~dkuhlman">wrappers for Python</a>.</li>
Daniel Veillard21473672002-06-17 07:29:22 +00002055 <li>Gopal.V and Peter Minten develop <a
2056 href="http://savannah.gnu.org/projects/libxmlsharp">libxml#</a>, a set of
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +00002057 C# libxml2 bindings.</li>
Daniel Veillard6dbcaf82002-02-20 14:37:47 +00002058 <li>Petr Kozelka provides <a
2059 href="http://sourceforge.net/projects/libxml2-pas">Pascal units to glue
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +00002060 libxml2</a> with Kylix, Delphi and other Pascal compilers.</li>
Daniel Veillardb2fb8ed2002-04-01 09:33:12 +00002061 <li>Uwe Fechner also provides <a
2062 href="http://sourceforge.net/projects/idom2-pas/">idom2</a>, a DOM2
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +00002063 implementation for Kylix2/D5/D6 from Borland.</li>
Daniel Veillard6dbcaf82002-02-20 14:37:47 +00002064 <li>Wai-Sun "Squidster" Chia provides <a
2065 href="http://www.rubycolor.org/arc/redist/">bindings for Ruby</a> and
2066 libxml2 bindings are also available in Ruby through the <a
2067 href="http://libgdome-ruby.berlios.de/">libgdome-ruby</a> module
2068 maintained by Tobias Peters.</li>
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +00002069 <li>Steve Ball and contributors maintains <a
2070 href="http://tclxml.sourceforge.net/">libxml2 and libxslt bindings for
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +00002071 Tcl</a>.</li>
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +00002072 <li>There is support for libxml2 in the DOM module of PHP.</li>
Daniel Veillard41b01a82003-02-27 11:09:06 +00002073 <li><a href="http://savannah.gnu.org/projects/classpathx/">LibxmlJ</a> is
Daniel Veillard806cada2003-03-19 21:58:59 +00002074 an effort to create a 100% JAXP-compatible Java wrapper for libxml2 and
2075 libxslt as part of GNU ClasspathX project.</li>
Daniel Veillard6d373a22003-11-04 10:26:43 +00002076 <li>Patrick McPhee provides Rexx bindings fof libxml2 and libxslt, look for
2077 <a href="http://www.interlog.com/~ptjm/software.html">RexxXML</a>.</li>
Daniel Veillard6dbcaf82002-02-20 14:37:47 +00002078</ul>
2079
Daniel Veillardc0801af2002-05-28 16:28:42 +00002080<p>The distribution includes a set of Python bindings, which are guaranteed
2081to be maintained as part of the library in the future, though the Python
Daniel Veillard41b01a82003-02-27 11:09:06 +00002082interface have not yet reached the completeness of the C API.</p>
Daniel Veillard7b4b2f92003-01-06 13:11:20 +00002083
Daniel Veillard27907c72002-12-16 16:05:58 +00002084<p><a href="mailto:stephane.bidoul@softwareag.com">Stéphane Bidoul</a>
Daniel Veillard7b4b2f92003-01-06 13:11:20 +00002085maintains <a href="http://users.skynet.be/sbi/libxml-python/">a Windows port
2086of the Python bindings</a>.</p>
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +00002087
Daniel Veillard7ef0fcb2002-12-14 10:38:55 +00002088<p>Note to people interested in building bindings, the API is formalized as
2089<a href="libxml2-api.xml">an XML API description file</a> which allows to
2090automate a large part of the Python bindings, this includes function
Daniel Veillard7b4b2f92003-01-06 13:11:20 +00002091descriptions, enums, structures, typedefs, etc... The Python script used to
2092build the bindings is python/generator.py in the source distribution.</p>
Daniel Veillard7ef0fcb2002-12-14 10:38:55 +00002093
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +00002094<p>To install the Python bindings there are 2 options:</p>
Daniel Veillard0b79dfe2002-02-23 13:02:31 +00002095<ul>
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +00002096 <li>If you use an RPM based distribution, simply install the <a
2097 href="http://rpmfind.net/linux/rpm2html/search.php?query=libxml2-python">libxml2-python
2098 RPM</a> (and if needed the <a
2099 href="http://rpmfind.net/linux/rpm2html/search.php?query=libxslt-python">libxslt-python
2100 RPM</a>).</li>
2101 <li>Otherwise use the <a href="ftp://xmlsoft.org/python/">libxml2-python
2102 module distribution</a> corresponding to your installed version of
2103 libxml2 and libxslt. Note that to install it you will need both libxml2
2104 and libxslt installed and run "python setup.py build install" in the
2105 module tree.</li>
Daniel Veillard0b79dfe2002-02-23 13:02:31 +00002106</ul>
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +00002107
2108<p>The distribution includes a set of examples and regression tests for the
2109python bindings in the <code>python/tests</code> directory. Here are some
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +00002110excerpts from those tests:</p>
Daniel Veillard6dbcaf82002-02-20 14:37:47 +00002111
2112<h3>tst.py:</h3>
2113
2114<p>This is a basic test of the file interface and DOM navigation:</p>
MST 2003 John Fleck2dffb762003-11-29 04:41:24 +00002115<pre>import libxml2, sys
Daniel Veillard6dbcaf82002-02-20 14:37:47 +00002116
2117doc = libxml2.parseFile("tst.xml")
2118if doc.name != "tst.xml":
2119 print "doc.name failed"
2120 sys.exit(1)
2121root = doc.children
2122if root.name != "doc":
2123 print "root.name failed"
2124 sys.exit(1)
2125child = root.children
2126if child.name != "foo":
2127 print "child.name failed"
2128 sys.exit(1)
2129doc.freeDoc()</pre>
2130
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +00002131<p>The Python module is called libxml2; parseFile is the equivalent of
Daniel Veillard6dbcaf82002-02-20 14:37:47 +00002132xmlParseFile (most of the bindings are automatically generated, and the xml
2133prefix is removed and the casing convention are kept). All node seen at the
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00002134binding level share the same subset of accessors:</p>
Daniel Veillard6dbcaf82002-02-20 14:37:47 +00002135<ul>
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +00002136 <li><code>name</code> : returns the node name</li>
Daniel Veillardc0801af2002-05-28 16:28:42 +00002137 <li><code>type</code> : returns a string indicating the node type</li>
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +00002138 <li><code>content</code> : returns the content of the node, it is based on
2139 xmlNodeGetContent() and hence is recursive.</li>
2140 <li><code>parent</code> , <code>children</code>, <code>last</code>,
2141 <code>next</code>, <code>prev</code>, <code>doc</code>,
2142 <code>properties</code>: pointing to the associated element in the tree,
2143 those may return None in case no such link exists.</li>
Daniel Veillard6dbcaf82002-02-20 14:37:47 +00002144</ul>
2145
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00002146<p>Also note the need to explicitly deallocate documents with freeDoc() .
Daniel Veillard6dbcaf82002-02-20 14:37:47 +00002147Reference counting for libxml2 trees would need quite a lot of work to
2148function properly, and rather than risk memory leaks if not implemented
2149correctly it sounds safer to have an explicit function to free a tree. The
2150wrapper python objects like doc, root or child are them automatically garbage
2151collected.</p>
2152
2153<h3>validate.py:</h3>
2154
2155<p>This test check the validation interfaces and redirection of error
2156messages:</p>
2157<pre>import libxml2
2158
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00002159#deactivate error messages from the validation
Daniel Veillard6dbcaf82002-02-20 14:37:47 +00002160def noerr(ctx, str):
2161 pass
2162
2163libxml2.registerErrorHandler(noerr, None)
2164
2165ctxt = libxml2.createFileParserCtxt("invalid.xml")
2166ctxt.validate(1)
2167ctxt.parseDocument()
2168doc = ctxt.doc()
2169valid = ctxt.isValid()
2170doc.freeDoc()
2171if valid != 0:
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00002172 print "validity check failed"</pre>
Daniel Veillard6dbcaf82002-02-20 14:37:47 +00002173
2174<p>The first thing to notice is the call to registerErrorHandler(), it
2175defines a new error handler global to the library. It is used to avoid seeing
2176the error messages when trying to validate the invalid document.</p>
2177
2178<p>The main interest of that test is the creation of a parser context with
2179createFileParserCtxt() and how the behaviour can be changed before calling
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00002180parseDocument() . Similarly the informations resulting from the parsing phase
Daniel Veillard6dbcaf82002-02-20 14:37:47 +00002181are also available using context methods.</p>
2182
2183<p>Contexts like nodes are defined as class and the libxml2 wrappers maps the
2184C function interfaces in terms of objects method as much as possible. The
2185best to get a complete view of what methods are supported is to look at the
2186libxml2.py module containing all the wrappers.</p>
2187
2188<h3>push.py:</h3>
2189
2190<p>This test show how to activate the push parser interface:</p>
2191<pre>import libxml2
2192
2193ctxt = libxml2.createPushParser(None, "&lt;foo", 4, "test.xml")
2194ctxt.parseChunk("/&gt;", 2, 1)
2195doc = ctxt.doc()
2196
2197doc.freeDoc()</pre>
2198
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00002199<p>The context is created with a special call based on the
Daniel Veillard6dbcaf82002-02-20 14:37:47 +00002200xmlCreatePushParser() from the C library. The first argument is an optional
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00002201SAX callback object, then the initial set of data, the length and the name of
Daniel Veillard6dbcaf82002-02-20 14:37:47 +00002202the resource in case URI-References need to be computed by the parser.</p>
2203
2204<p>Then the data are pushed using the parseChunk() method, the last call
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00002205setting the third argument terminate to 1.</p>
Daniel Veillard6dbcaf82002-02-20 14:37:47 +00002206
2207<h3>pushSAX.py:</h3>
2208
2209<p>this test show the use of the event based parsing interfaces. In this case
2210the parser does not build a document, but provides callback information as
2211the parser makes progresses analyzing the data being provided:</p>
2212<pre>import libxml2
2213log = ""
2214
2215class callback:
2216 def startDocument(self):
2217 global log
2218 log = log + "startDocument:"
2219
2220 def endDocument(self):
2221 global log
2222 log = log + "endDocument:"
2223
2224 def startElement(self, tag, attrs):
2225 global log
2226 log = log + "startElement %s %s:" % (tag, attrs)
2227
2228 def endElement(self, tag):
2229 global log
2230 log = log + "endElement %s:" % (tag)
2231
2232 def characters(self, data):
2233 global log
2234 log = log + "characters: %s:" % (data)
2235
2236 def warning(self, msg):
2237 global log
2238 log = log + "warning: %s:" % (msg)
2239
2240 def error(self, msg):
2241 global log
2242 log = log + "error: %s:" % (msg)
2243
2244 def fatalError(self, msg):
2245 global log
2246 log = log + "fatalError: %s:" % (msg)
2247
2248handler = callback()
2249
2250ctxt = libxml2.createPushParser(handler, "&lt;foo", 4, "test.xml")
2251chunk = " url='tst'&gt;b"
2252ctxt.parseChunk(chunk, len(chunk), 0)
2253chunk = "ar&lt;/foo&gt;"
2254ctxt.parseChunk(chunk, len(chunk), 1)
2255
Daniel Veillardfcbfa2d2002-02-21 17:54:27 +00002256reference = "startDocument:startElement foo {'url': 'tst'}:" + \
2257 "characters: bar:endElement foo:endDocument:"
Daniel Veillard6dbcaf82002-02-20 14:37:47 +00002258if log != reference:
2259 print "Error got: %s" % log
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00002260 print "Expected: %s" % reference</pre>
Daniel Veillard6dbcaf82002-02-20 14:37:47 +00002261
2262<p>The key object in that test is the handler, it provides a number of entry
2263points which can be called by the parser as it makes progresses to indicate
2264the information set obtained. The full set of callback is larger than what
2265the callback class in that specific example implements (see the SAX
2266definition for a complete list). The wrapper will only call those supplied by
2267the object when activated. The startElement receives the names of the element
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00002268and a dictionary containing the attributes carried by this element.</p>
Daniel Veillard6dbcaf82002-02-20 14:37:47 +00002269
2270<p>Also note that the reference string generated from the callback shows a
2271single character call even though the string "bar" is passed to the parser
2272from 2 different call to parseChunk()</p>
2273
2274<h3>xpath.py:</h3>
2275
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00002276<p>This is a basic test of XPath wrappers support</p>
Daniel Veillard6dbcaf82002-02-20 14:37:47 +00002277<pre>import libxml2
2278
2279doc = libxml2.parseFile("tst.xml")
2280ctxt = doc.xpathNewContext()
2281res = ctxt.xpathEval("//*")
2282if len(res) != 2:
2283 print "xpath query: wrong node set size"
2284 sys.exit(1)
2285if res[0].name != "doc" or res[1].name != "foo":
2286 print "xpath query: wrong node set value"
2287 sys.exit(1)
2288doc.freeDoc()
2289ctxt.xpathFreeContext()</pre>
2290
2291<p>This test parses a file, then create an XPath context to evaluate XPath
2292expression on it. The xpathEval() method execute an XPath query and returns
2293the result mapped in a Python way. String and numbers are natively converted,
2294and node sets are returned as a tuple of libxml2 Python nodes wrappers. Like
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00002295the document, the XPath context need to be freed explicitly, also not that
Daniel Veillard6dbcaf82002-02-20 14:37:47 +00002296the result of the XPath query may point back to the document tree and hence
2297the document must be freed after the result of the query is used.</p>
2298
2299<h3>xpathext.py:</h3>
2300
2301<p>This test shows how to extend the XPath engine with functions written in
2302python:</p>
2303<pre>import libxml2
2304
2305def foo(ctx, x):
2306 return x + 1
2307
2308doc = libxml2.parseFile("tst.xml")
2309ctxt = doc.xpathNewContext()
2310libxml2.registerXPathFunction(ctxt._o, "foo", None, foo)
2311res = ctxt.xpathEval("foo(1)")
2312if res != 2:
2313 print "xpath extension failure"
2314doc.freeDoc()
2315ctxt.xpathFreeContext()</pre>
2316
2317<p>Note how the extension function is registered with the context (but that
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00002318part is not yet finalized, this may change slightly in the future).</p>
Daniel Veillard6dbcaf82002-02-20 14:37:47 +00002319
2320<h3>tstxpath.py:</h3>
2321
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00002322<p>This test is similar to the previous one but shows how the extension
Daniel Veillard6dbcaf82002-02-20 14:37:47 +00002323function can access the XPath evaluation context:</p>
2324<pre>def foo(ctx, x):
2325 global called
2326
2327 #
2328 # test that access to the XPath evaluation contexts
2329 #
2330 pctxt = libxml2.xpathParserContext(_obj=ctx)
2331 ctxt = pctxt.context()
2332 called = ctxt.function()
2333 return x + 1</pre>
2334
2335<p>All the interfaces around the XPath parser(or rather evaluation) context
2336are not finalized, but it should be sufficient to do contextual work at the
2337evaluation point.</p>
2338
2339<h3>Memory debugging:</h3>
2340
2341<p>last but not least, all tests starts with the following prologue:</p>
2342<pre>#memory debug specific
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +00002343libxml2.debugMemory(1)</pre>
Daniel Veillard6dbcaf82002-02-20 14:37:47 +00002344
2345<p>and ends with the following epilogue:</p>
2346<pre>#memory debug specific
2347libxml2.cleanupParser()
2348if libxml2.debugMemory(1) == 0:
2349 print "OK"
2350else:
2351 print "Memory leak %d bytes" % (libxml2.debugMemory(1))
2352 libxml2.dumpMemory()</pre>
2353
2354<p>Those activate the memory debugging interface of libxml2 where all
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00002355allocated block in the library are tracked. The prologue then cleans up the
Daniel Veillard6dbcaf82002-02-20 14:37:47 +00002356library state and checks that all allocated memory has been freed. If not it
2357calls dumpMemory() which saves that list in a <code>.memdump</code> file.</p>
Daniel Veillard82687162001-01-22 15:32:01 +00002358
Daniel Veillard8a469172003-06-12 16:05:07 +00002359<h2><a name="architecture">libxml2 architecture</a></h2>
Daniel Veillard4540be42000-08-19 16:40:28 +00002360
Daniel Veillard560c2a42003-07-06 21:13:49 +00002361<p>Libxml2 is made of multiple components; some of them are optional, and
2362most of the block interfaces are public. The main components are:</p>
Daniel Veillard4540be42000-08-19 16:40:28 +00002363<ul>
2364 <li>an Input/Output layer</li>
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +00002365 <li>FTP and HTTP client layers (optional)</li>
Daniel Veillard4540be42000-08-19 16:40:28 +00002366 <li>an Internationalization layer managing the encodings support</li>
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +00002367 <li>a URI module</li>
Daniel Veillard4540be42000-08-19 16:40:28 +00002368 <li>the XML parser and its basic SAX interface</li>
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +00002369 <li>an HTML parser using the same SAX interface (optional)</li>
Daniel Veillard4540be42000-08-19 16:40:28 +00002370 <li>a SAX tree module to build an in-memory DOM representation</li>
2371 <li>a tree module to manipulate the DOM representation</li>
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +00002372 <li>a validation module using the DOM representation (optional)</li>
Daniel Veillard4540be42000-08-19 16:40:28 +00002373 <li>an XPath module for global lookup in a DOM representation
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +00002374 (optional)</li>
2375 <li>a debug module (optional)</li>
Daniel Veillard4540be42000-08-19 16:40:28 +00002376</ul>
2377
2378<p>Graphically this gives the following:</p>
2379
2380<p><img src="libxml.gif" alt="a graphical view of the various"></p>
2381
2382<p></p>
2383
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +00002384<h2><a name="tree">The tree output</a></h2>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00002385
2386<p>The parser returns a tree built during the document analysis. The value
Daniel Veillard402e8c82000-02-29 22:57:47 +00002387returned is an <strong>xmlDocPtr</strong> (i.e., a pointer to an
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +00002388<strong>xmlDoc</strong> structure). This structure contains information such
Daniel Veillard306be992000-07-03 12:38:45 +00002389as the file name, the document type, and a <strong>children</strong> pointer
2390which is the root of the document (or more exactly the first child under the
2391root which is the document). The tree is made of <strong>xmlNode</strong>s,
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +00002392chained in double-linked lists of siblings and with a children&lt;-&gt;parent
Daniel Veillard306be992000-07-03 12:38:45 +00002393relationship. An xmlNode can also carry properties (a chain of xmlAttr
2394structures). An attribute may have a value which is a list of TEXT or
2395ENTITY_REF nodes.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00002396
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00002397<p>Here is an example (erroneous with respect to the XML spec since there
2398should be only one ELEMENT under the root):</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00002399
2400<p><img src="structure.gif" alt=" structure.gif "></p>
2401
2402<p>In the source package there is a small program (not installed by default)
Daniel Veillard361d8452000-04-03 19:48:13 +00002403called <strong>xmllint</strong> which parses XML files given as argument and
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +00002404prints them back as parsed. This is useful for detecting errors both in XML
2405code and in the XML parser itself. It has an option <strong>--debug</strong>
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +00002406which prints the actual in-memory structure of the document; here is the
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +00002407result with the <a href="#example">example</a> given before:</p>
Daniel Veillard10c6a8f1998-10-28 01:00:12 +00002408<pre>DOCUMENT
2409version=1.0
2410standalone=true
2411 ELEMENT EXAMPLE
2412 ATTRIBUTE prop1
2413 TEXT
2414 content=gnome is great
2415 ATTRIBUTE prop2
2416 ENTITY_REF
2417 TEXT
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +00002418 content= linux too
Daniel Veillard402e8c82000-02-29 22:57:47 +00002419 ELEMENT head
Daniel Veillard10c6a8f1998-10-28 01:00:12 +00002420 ELEMENT title
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +00002421 TEXT
2422 content=Welcome to Gnome
Daniel Veillard10c6a8f1998-10-28 01:00:12 +00002423 ELEMENT chapter
2424 ELEMENT title
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +00002425 TEXT
2426 content=The Linux adventure
Daniel Veillard10c6a8f1998-10-28 01:00:12 +00002427 ELEMENT p
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +00002428 TEXT
2429 content=bla bla bla ...
Daniel Veillard10c6a8f1998-10-28 01:00:12 +00002430 ELEMENT image
2431 ATTRIBUTE href
2432 TEXT
2433 content=linus.gif
2434 ELEMENT p
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +00002435 TEXT
2436 content=...</pre>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00002437
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00002438<p>This should be useful for learning the internal representation model.</p>
Daniel Veillardccb09631998-10-27 06:21:04 +00002439
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +00002440<h2><a name="interface">The SAX interface</a></h2>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00002441
Daniel Veillard402e8c82000-02-29 22:57:47 +00002442<p>Sometimes the DOM tree output is just too large to fit reasonably into
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00002443memory. In that case (and if you don't expect to save back the XML document
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +00002444loaded using libxml), it's better to use the SAX interface of libxml. SAX is
2445a <strong>callback-based interface</strong> to the parser. Before parsing,
2446the application layer registers a customized set of callbacks which are
2447called by the library as it progresses through the XML input.</p>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00002448
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00002449<p>To get more detailed step-by-step guidance on using the SAX interface of
Daniel Veillard4540be42000-08-19 16:40:28 +00002450libxml, see the <a
2451href="http://www.daa.com.au/~james/gnome/xml-sax/xml-sax.html">nice
2452documentation</a>.written by <a href="mailto:james@daa.com.au">James
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00002453Henstridge</a>.</p>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00002454
2455<p>You can debug the SAX behaviour by using the <strong>testSAX</strong>
2456program located in the gnome-xml module (it's usually not shipped in the
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00002457binary packages of libxml, but you can find it in the tar source
Daniel Veillard402e8c82000-02-29 22:57:47 +00002458distribution). Here is the sequence of callbacks that would be reported by
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00002459testSAX when parsing the example XML document shown earlier:</p>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00002460<pre>SAX.setDocumentLocator()
2461SAX.startDocument()
2462SAX.getEntity(amp)
2463SAX.startElement(EXAMPLE, prop1='gnome is great', prop2='&amp;amp; linux too')
2464SAX.characters( , 3)
2465SAX.startElement(head)
2466SAX.characters( , 4)
2467SAX.startElement(title)
2468SAX.characters(Welcome to Gnome, 16)
2469SAX.endElement(title)
2470SAX.characters( , 3)
2471SAX.endElement(head)
2472SAX.characters( , 3)
2473SAX.startElement(chapter)
2474SAX.characters( , 4)
2475SAX.startElement(title)
2476SAX.characters(The Linux adventure, 19)
2477SAX.endElement(title)
2478SAX.characters( , 4)
2479SAX.startElement(p)
2480SAX.characters(bla bla bla ..., 15)
2481SAX.endElement(p)
2482SAX.characters( , 4)
2483SAX.startElement(image, href='linus.gif')
2484SAX.endElement(image)
2485SAX.characters( , 4)
2486SAX.startElement(p)
2487SAX.characters(..., 3)
2488SAX.endElement(p)
2489SAX.characters( , 3)
2490SAX.endElement(chapter)
2491SAX.characters( , 1)
2492SAX.endElement(EXAMPLE)
2493SAX.endDocument()</pre>
2494
Daniel Veillard8a469172003-06-12 16:05:07 +00002495<p>Most of the other interfaces of libxml2 are based on the DOM tree-building
Daniel Veillardec70e912001-02-26 20:10:45 +00002496facility, so nearly everything up to the end of this document presupposes the
2497use of the standard DOM tree build. Note that the DOM tree itself is built by
2498a set of registered default callbacks, without internal specific
2499interface.</p>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00002500
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002501<h2><a name="Validation">Validation &amp; DTDs</a></h2>
2502
2503<p>Table of Content:</p>
2504<ol>
2505 <li><a href="#General5">General overview</a></li>
2506 <li><a href="#definition">The definition</a></li>
2507 <li><a href="#Simple">Simple rules</a>
2508 <ol>
Daniel Veillard9c466822001-10-25 12:03:39 +00002509 <li><a href="#reference">How to reference a DTD from a document</a></li>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002510 <li><a href="#Declaring">Declaring elements</a></li>
2511 <li><a href="#Declaring1">Declaring attributes</a></li>
2512 </ol>
2513 </li>
2514 <li><a href="#Some">Some examples</a></li>
2515 <li><a href="#validate">How to validate</a></li>
2516 <li><a href="#Other">Other resources</a></li>
2517</ol>
2518
2519<h3><a name="General5">General overview</a></h3>
2520
2521<p>Well what is validation and what is a DTD ?</p>
2522
2523<p>DTD is the acronym for Document Type Definition. This is a description of
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00002524the content for a family of XML files. This is part of the XML 1.0
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +00002525specification, and allows one to describe and verify that a given document
2526instance conforms to the set of rules detailing its structure and content.</p>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002527
2528<p>Validation is the process of checking a document against a DTD (more
2529generally against a set of construction rules).</p>
2530
2531<p>The validation process and building DTDs are the two most difficult parts
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +00002532of the XML life cycle. Briefly a DTD defines all the possible elements to be
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002533found within your document, what is the formal shape of your document tree
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +00002534(by defining the allowed content of an element; either text, a regular
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002535expression for the allowed list of children, or mixed content i.e. both text
Daniel Veillard42766c02002-08-22 20:52:17 +00002536and children). The DTD also defines the valid attributes for all elements and
2537the types of those attributes.</p>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002538
2539<h3><a name="definition1">The definition</a></h3>
2540
2541<p>The <a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml">W3C XML Recommendation</a> (<a
2542href="http://www.xml.com/axml/axml.html">Tim Bray's annotated version of
2543Rev1</a>):</p>
2544<ul>
2545 <li><a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml#elemdecls">Declaring
2546 elements</a></li>
2547 <li><a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml#attdecls">Declaring
2548 attributes</a></li>
2549</ul>
2550
2551<p>(unfortunately) all this is inherited from the SGML world, the syntax is
2552ancient...</p>
2553
2554<h3><a name="Simple1">Simple rules</a></h3>
2555
Daniel Veillard42766c02002-08-22 20:52:17 +00002556<p>Writing DTDs can be done in many ways. The rules to build them if you need
2557something permanent or something which can evolve over time can be radically
2558different. Really complex DTDs like DocBook ones are flexible but quite
2559harder to design. I will just focus on DTDs for a formats with a fixed simple
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002560structure. It is just a set of basic rules, and definitely not exhaustive nor
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00002561usable for complex DTD design.</p>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002562
2563<h4><a name="reference1">How to reference a DTD from a document</a>:</h4>
2564
2565<p>Assuming the top element of the document is <code>spec</code> and the dtd
2566is placed in the file <code>mydtd</code> in the subdirectory
2567<code>dtds</code> of the directory from where the document were loaded:</p>
2568
2569<p><code>&lt;!DOCTYPE spec SYSTEM "dtds/mydtd"&gt;</code></p>
2570
2571<p>Notes:</p>
2572<ul>
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +00002573 <li>The system string is actually an URI-Reference (as defined in <a
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002574 href="http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2396.txt">RFC 2396</a>) so you can use a
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +00002575 full URL string indicating the location of your DTD on the Web. This is a
2576 really good thing to do if you want others to validate your document.</li>
2577 <li>It is also possible to associate a <code>PUBLIC</code> identifier (a
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00002578 magic string) so that the DTD is looked up in catalogs on the client side
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +00002579 without having to locate it on the web.</li>
2580 <li>A DTD contains a set of element and attribute declarations, but they
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00002581 don't define what the root of the document should be. This is explicitly
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002582 told to the parser/validator as the first element of the
2583 <code>DOCTYPE</code> declaration.</li>
2584</ul>
2585
2586<h4><a name="Declaring2">Declaring elements</a>:</h4>
2587
2588<p>The following declares an element <code>spec</code>:</p>
2589
2590<p><code>&lt;!ELEMENT spec (front, body, back?)&gt;</code></p>
2591
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +00002592<p>It also expresses that the spec element contains one <code>front</code>,
Daniel Veillardc0801af2002-05-28 16:28:42 +00002593one <code>body</code> and one optional <code>back</code> children elements in
2594this order. The declaration of one element of the structure and its content
2595are done in a single declaration. Similarly the following declares
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002596<code>div1</code> elements:</p>
2597
Daniel Veillard51737272002-01-23 23:10:38 +00002598<p><code>&lt;!ELEMENT div1 (head, (p | list | note)*, div2?)&gt;</code></p>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002599
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +00002600<p>which means div1 contains one <code>head</code> then a series of optional
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002601<code>p</code>, <code>list</code>s and <code>note</code>s and then an
2602optional <code>div2</code>. And last but not least an element can contain
2603text:</p>
2604
2605<p><code>&lt;!ELEMENT b (#PCDATA)&gt;</code></p>
2606
2607<p><code>b</code> contains text or being of mixed content (text and elements
2608in no particular order):</p>
2609
2610<p><code>&lt;!ELEMENT p (#PCDATA|a|ul|b|i|em)*&gt;</code></p>
2611
2612<p><code>p </code>can contain text or <code>a</code>, <code>ul</code>,
2613<code>b</code>, <code>i </code>or <code>em</code> elements in no particular
2614order.</p>
2615
2616<h4><a name="Declaring1">Declaring attributes</a>:</h4>
2617
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +00002618<p>Again the attributes declaration includes their content definition:</p>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002619
2620<p><code>&lt;!ATTLIST termdef name CDATA #IMPLIED&gt;</code></p>
2621
2622<p>means that the element <code>termdef</code> can have a <code>name</code>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00002623attribute containing text (<code>CDATA</code>) and which is optional
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002624(<code>#IMPLIED</code>). The attribute value can also be defined within a
2625set:</p>
2626
2627<p><code>&lt;!ATTLIST list type (bullets|ordered|glossary)
2628"ordered"&gt;</code></p>
2629
2630<p>means <code>list</code> element have a <code>type</code> attribute with 3
2631allowed values "bullets", "ordered" or "glossary" and which default to
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00002632"ordered" if the attribute is not explicitly specified.</p>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002633
2634<p>The content type of an attribute can be text (<code>CDATA</code>),
2635anchor/reference/references
2636(<code>ID</code>/<code>IDREF</code>/<code>IDREFS</code>), entity(ies)
2637(<code>ENTITY</code>/<code>ENTITIES</code>) or name(s)
2638(<code>NMTOKEN</code>/<code>NMTOKENS</code>). The following defines that a
2639<code>chapter</code> element can have an optional <code>id</code> attribute
2640of type <code>ID</code>, usable for reference from attribute of type
2641IDREF:</p>
2642
2643<p><code>&lt;!ATTLIST chapter id ID #IMPLIED&gt;</code></p>
2644
2645<p>The last value of an attribute definition can be <code>#REQUIRED
2646</code>meaning that the attribute has to be given, <code>#IMPLIED</code>
2647meaning that it is optional, or the default value (possibly prefixed by
2648<code>#FIXED</code> if it is the only allowed).</p>
2649
2650<p>Notes:</p>
2651<ul>
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +00002652 <li>Usually the attributes pertaining to a given element are declared in a
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002653 single expression, but it is just a convention adopted by a lot of DTD
2654 writers:
2655 <pre>&lt;!ATTLIST termdef
2656 id ID #REQUIRED
2657 name CDATA #IMPLIED&gt;</pre>
2658 <p>The previous construct defines both <code>id</code> and
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +00002659 <code>name</code> attributes for the element <code>termdef</code>.</p>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002660 </li>
2661</ul>
2662
2663<h3><a name="Some1">Some examples</a></h3>
2664
Daniel Veillard8a469172003-06-12 16:05:07 +00002665<p>The directory <code>test/valid/dtds/</code> in the libxml2 distribution
Daniel Veillard42766c02002-08-22 20:52:17 +00002666contains some complex DTD examples. The example in the file
2667<code>test/valid/dia.xml</code> shows an XML file where the simple DTD is
2668directly included within the document.</p>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002669
2670<h3><a name="validate1">How to validate</a></h3>
2671
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +00002672<p>The simplest way is to use the xmllint program included with libxml. The
2673<code>--valid</code> option turns-on validation of the files given as input.
2674For example the following validates a copy of the first revision of the XML
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +000026751.0 specification:</p>
2676
2677<p><code>xmllint --valid --noout test/valid/REC-xml-19980210.xml</code></p>
2678
Daniel Veillard0b28e882002-07-24 23:47:05 +00002679<p>the -- noout is used to disable output of the resulting tree.</p>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002680
Daniel Veillard42766c02002-08-22 20:52:17 +00002681<p>The <code>--dtdvalid dtd</code> allows validation of the document(s)
2682against a given DTD.</p>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002683
Daniel Veillard8a469172003-06-12 16:05:07 +00002684<p>Libxml2 exports an API to handle DTDs and validation, check the <a
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002685href="http://xmlsoft.org/html/libxml-valid.html">associated
2686description</a>.</p>
2687
2688<h3><a name="Other1">Other resources</a></h3>
2689
2690<p>DTDs are as old as SGML. So there may be a number of examples on-line, I
2691will just list one for now, others pointers welcome:</p>
2692<ul>
2693 <li><a href="http://www.xml101.com:8081/dtd/">XML-101 DTD</a></li>
2694</ul>
2695
2696<p>I suggest looking at the examples found under test/valid/dtd and any of
2697the large number of books available on XML. The dia example in test/valid
2698should be both simple and complete enough to allow you to build your own.</p>
2699
2700<p></p>
2701
2702<h2><a name="Memory">Memory Management</a></h2>
2703
2704<p>Table of Content:</p>
2705<ol>
2706 <li><a href="#General3">General overview</a></li>
Daniel Veillard8a469172003-06-12 16:05:07 +00002707 <li><a href="#setting">Setting libxml2 set of memory routines</a></li>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002708 <li><a href="#cleanup">Cleaning up after parsing</a></li>
2709 <li><a href="#Debugging">Debugging routines</a></li>
2710 <li><a href="#General4">General memory requirements</a></li>
2711</ol>
2712
2713<h3><a name="General3">General overview</a></h3>
2714
2715<p>The module <code><a
2716href="http://xmlsoft.org/html/libxml-xmlmemory.html">xmlmemory.h</a></code>
Daniel Veillard8a469172003-06-12 16:05:07 +00002717provides the interfaces to the libxml2 memory system:</p>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002718<ul>
Daniel Veillard8a469172003-06-12 16:05:07 +00002719 <li>libxml2 does not use the libc memory allocator directly but xmlFree(),
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002720 xmlMalloc() and xmlRealloc()</li>
2721 <li>those routines can be reallocated to a specific set of routine, by
2722 default the libc ones i.e. free(), malloc() and realloc()</li>
2723 <li>the xmlmemory.c module includes a set of debugging routine</li>
2724</ul>
2725
Daniel Veillard8a469172003-06-12 16:05:07 +00002726<h3><a name="setting">Setting libxml2 set of memory routines</a></h3>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002727
2728<p>It is sometimes useful to not use the default memory allocator, either for
2729debugging, analysis or to implement a specific behaviour on memory management
2730(like on embedded systems). Two function calls are available to do so:</p>
2731<ul>
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +00002732 <li><a href="http://xmlsoft.org/html/libxml-xmlmemory.html">xmlMemGet
2733 ()</a> which return the current set of functions in use by the parser</li>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002734 <li><a
2735 href="http://xmlsoft.org/html/libxml-xmlmemory.html">xmlMemSetup()</a>
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +00002736 which allow to set up a new set of memory allocation functions</li>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002737</ul>
2738
2739<p>Of course a call to xmlMemSetup() should probably be done before calling
Daniel Veillard8a469172003-06-12 16:05:07 +00002740any other libxml2 routines (unless you are sure your allocations routines are
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002741compatibles).</p>
2742
2743<h3><a name="cleanup">Cleaning up after parsing</a></h3>
2744
Daniel Veillard8a469172003-06-12 16:05:07 +00002745<p>Libxml2 is not stateless, there is a few set of memory structures needing
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00002746allocation before the parser is fully functional (some encoding structures
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002747for example). This also mean that once parsing is finished there is a tiny
2748amount of memory (a few hundred bytes) which can be recollected if you don't
2749reuse the parser immediately:</p>
2750<ul>
2751 <li><a href="http://xmlsoft.org/html/libxml-parser.html">xmlCleanupParser
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +00002752 ()</a> is a centralized routine to free the parsing states. Note that it
2753 won't deallocate any produced tree if any (use the xmlFreeDoc() and
2754 related routines for this).</li>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002755 <li><a href="http://xmlsoft.org/html/libxml-parser.html">xmlInitParser
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +00002756 ()</a> is the dual routine allowing to preallocate the parsing state
2757 which can be useful for example to avoid initialization reentrancy
Daniel Veillard8a469172003-06-12 16:05:07 +00002758 problems when using libxml2 in multithreaded applications</li>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002759</ul>
2760
2761<p>Generally xmlCleanupParser() is safe, if needed the state will be rebuild
2762at the next invocation of parser routines, but be careful of the consequences
2763in multithreaded applications.</p>
2764
2765<h3><a name="Debugging">Debugging routines</a></h3>
2766
Daniel Veillard8a469172003-06-12 16:05:07 +00002767<p>When configured using --with-mem-debug flag (off by default), libxml2 uses
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00002768a set of memory allocation debugging routines keeping track of all allocated
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002769blocks and the location in the code where the routine was called. A couple of
2770other debugging routines allow to dump the memory allocated infos to a file
2771or call a specific routine when a given block number is allocated:</p>
2772<ul>
2773 <li><a
2774 href="http://xmlsoft.org/html/libxml-xmlmemory.html">xmlMallocLoc()</a>
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +00002775 <a
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002776 href="http://xmlsoft.org/html/libxml-xmlmemory.html">xmlReallocLoc()</a>
2777 and <a
2778 href="http://xmlsoft.org/html/libxml-xmlmemory.html">xmlMemStrdupLoc()</a>
2779 are the memory debugging replacement allocation routines</li>
2780 <li><a href="http://xmlsoft.org/html/libxml-xmlmemory.html">xmlMemoryDump
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +00002781 ()</a> dumps all the informations about the allocated memory block lefts
2782 in the <code>.memdump</code> file</li>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002783</ul>
2784
Daniel Veillard8a469172003-06-12 16:05:07 +00002785<p>When developing libxml2 memory debug is enabled, the tests programs call
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002786xmlMemoryDump () and the "make test" regression tests will check for any
2787memory leak during the full regression test sequence, this helps a lot
Daniel Veillard8a469172003-06-12 16:05:07 +00002788ensuring that libxml2 does not leak memory and bullet proof memory
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002789allocations use (some libc implementations are known to be far too permissive
2790resulting in major portability problems!).</p>
2791
2792<p>If the .memdump reports a leak, it displays the allocation function and
2793also tries to give some informations about the content and structure of the
2794allocated blocks left. This is sufficient in most cases to find the culprit,
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00002795but not always. Assuming the allocation problem is reproducible, it is
2796possible to find more easily:</p>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002797<ol>
2798 <li>write down the block number xxxx not allocated</li>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00002799 <li>export the environment variable XML_MEM_BREAKPOINT=xxxx , the easiest
Daniel Veillard75794822002-04-11 16:24:32 +00002800 when using GDB is to simply give the command
2801 <p><code>set environment XML_MEM_BREAKPOINT xxxx</code></p>
2802 <p>before running the program.</p>
2803 </li>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002804 <li>run the program under a debugger and set a breakpoint on
2805 xmlMallocBreakpoint() a specific function called when this precise block
2806 is allocated</li>
2807 <li>when the breakpoint is reached you can then do a fine analysis of the
2808 allocation an step to see the condition resulting in the missing
2809 deallocation.</li>
2810</ol>
2811
Daniel Veillard8a469172003-06-12 16:05:07 +00002812<p>I used to use a commercial tool to debug libxml2 memory problems but after
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002813noticing that it was not detecting memory leaks that simple mechanism was
Daniel Veillard75794822002-04-11 16:24:32 +00002814used and proved extremely efficient until now. Lately I have also used <a
2815href="http://developer.kde.org/~sewardj/">valgrind</a> with quite some
2816success, it is tied to the i386 architecture since it works by emulating the
2817processor and instruction set, it is slow but extremely efficient, i.e. it
2818spot memory usage errors in a very precise way.</p>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002819
2820<h3><a name="General4">General memory requirements</a></h3>
2821
Daniel Veillard8a469172003-06-12 16:05:07 +00002822<p>How much libxml2 memory require ? It's hard to tell in average it depends
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002823of a number of things:</p>
2824<ul>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00002825 <li>the parser itself should work in a fixed amount of memory, except for
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002826 information maintained about the stacks of names and entities locations.
2827 The I/O and encoding handlers will probably account for a few KBytes.
2828 This is true for both the XML and HTML parser (though the HTML parser
2829 need more state).</li>
2830 <li>If you are generating the DOM tree then memory requirements will grow
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00002831 nearly linear with the size of the data. In general for a balanced
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002832 textual document the internal memory requirement is about 4 times the
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00002833 size of the UTF8 serialization of this document (example the XML-1.0
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002834 recommendation is a bit more of 150KBytes and takes 650KBytes of main
2835 memory when parsed). Validation will add a amount of memory required for
2836 maintaining the external Dtd state which should be linear with the
2837 complexity of the content model defined by the Dtd</li>
Daniel Veillardce192eb2003-04-16 15:58:05 +00002838 <li>If you need to work with fixed memory requirements or don't need the
2839 full DOM tree then using the <a href="xmlreader.html">xmlReader
2840 interface</a> is probably the best way to proceed, it still allows to
2841 validate or operate on subset of the tree if needed.</li>
Daniel Veillard8a469172003-06-12 16:05:07 +00002842 <li>If you don't care about the advanced features of libxml2 like
Daniel Veillardce192eb2003-04-16 15:58:05 +00002843 validation, DOM, XPath or XPointer, don't use entities, need to work with
2844 fixed memory requirements, and try to get the fastest parsing possible
2845 then the SAX interface should be used, but it has known restrictions.</li>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002846</ul>
2847
2848<p></p>
2849
2850<h2><a name="Encodings">Encodings support</a></h2>
2851
2852<p>Table of Content:</p>
2853<ol>
2854 <li><a href="encoding.html#What">What does internationalization support
2855 mean ?</a></li>
2856 <li><a href="encoding.html#internal">The internal encoding, how and
2857 why</a></li>
2858 <li><a href="encoding.html#implemente">How is it implemented ?</a></li>
2859 <li><a href="encoding.html#Default">Default supported encodings</a></li>
2860 <li><a href="encoding.html#extend">How to extend the existing
2861 support</a></li>
2862</ol>
2863
2864<h3><a name="What">What does internationalization support mean ?</a></h3>
2865
Daniel Veillarde6e59cd2003-12-24 11:56:44 +00002866<p>If you are not really familiar with Internationalization (usual shortcut
2867is I18N) , Unicode, characters and glyphs, I suggest you read a <a
Daniel Veillard238836e2003-04-07 22:57:29 +00002868href="http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2003/04/06/Unicode">presentation</a>
2869by Tim Bray on Unicode and why you should care about it.</p>
2870
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002871<p>XML was designed from the start to allow the support of any character set
2872by using Unicode. Any conformant XML parser has to support the UTF-8 and
2873UTF-16 default encodings which can both express the full unicode ranges. UTF8
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00002874is a variable length encoding whose greatest points are to reuse the same
2875encoding for ASCII and to save space for Western encodings, but it is a bit
Daniel Veillardabfca612004-01-07 23:38:02 +00002876more complex to handle in practice. UTF-16 use 2 bytes per character (and
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002877sometimes combines two pairs), it makes implementation easier, but looks a
2878bit overkill for Western languages encoding. Moreover the XML specification
Daniel Veillard189f46b2004-01-25 21:03:04 +00002879allows the document to be encoded in other encodings at the condition that
2880they are clearly labeled as such. For example the following is a wellformed
2881XML document encoded in ISO-8859-1 and using accentuated letters that we
2882French like for both markup and content:</p>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002883<pre>&lt;?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?&gt;
2884&lt;très&gt;là&lt;/très&gt;</pre>
2885
Daniel Veillard8a469172003-06-12 16:05:07 +00002886<p>Having internationalization support in libxml2 means the following:</p>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002887<ul>
2888 <li>the document is properly parsed</li>
2889 <li>informations about it's encoding are saved</li>
2890 <li>it can be modified</li>
2891 <li>it can be saved in its original encoding</li>
Daniel Veillard8a469172003-06-12 16:05:07 +00002892 <li>it can also be saved in another encoding supported by libxml2 (for
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002893 example straight UTF8 or even an ASCII form)</li>
2894</ul>
2895
Daniel Veillard8a469172003-06-12 16:05:07 +00002896<p>Another very important point is that the whole libxml2 API, with the
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002897exception of a few routines to read with a specific encoding or save to a
2898specific encoding, is completely agnostic about the original encoding of the
2899document.</p>
2900
Daniel Veillard8a469172003-06-12 16:05:07 +00002901<p>It should be noted too that the HTML parser embedded in libxml2 now obey
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002902the same rules too, the following document will be (as of 2.2.2) handled in
Daniel Veillard8a469172003-06-12 16:05:07 +00002903an internationalized fashion by libxml2 too:</p>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002904<pre>&lt;!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN"
2905 "http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd"&gt;
2906&lt;html lang="fr"&gt;
2907&lt;head&gt;
2908 &lt;META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Type" CONTENT="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1"&gt;
2909&lt;/head&gt;
2910&lt;body&gt;
2911&lt;p&gt;W3C crée des standards pour le Web.&lt;/body&gt;
2912&lt;/html&gt;</pre>
2913
2914<h3><a name="internal">The internal encoding, how and why</a></h3>
2915
Daniel Veillardabfca612004-01-07 23:38:02 +00002916<p>One of the core decisions was to force all documents to be converted to a
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002917default internal encoding, and that encoding to be UTF-8, here are the
Daniel Veillardabfca612004-01-07 23:38:02 +00002918rationales for those choices:</p>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002919<ul>
2920 <li>keeping the native encoding in the internal form would force the libxml
2921 users (or the code associated) to be fully aware of the encoding of the
2922 original document, for examples when adding a text node to a document,
2923 the content would have to be provided in the document encoding, i.e. the
2924 client code would have to check it before hand, make sure it's conformant
2925 to the encoding, etc ... Very hard in practice, though in some specific
2926 cases this may make sense.</li>
2927 <li>the second decision was which encoding. From the XML spec only UTF8 and
2928 UTF16 really makes sense as being the two only encodings for which there
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00002929 is mandatory support. UCS-4 (32 bits fixed size encoding) could be
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002930 considered an intelligent choice too since it's a direct Unicode mapping
2931 support. I selected UTF-8 on the basis of efficiency and compatibility
2932 with surrounding software:
2933 <ul>
2934 <li>UTF-8 while a bit more complex to convert from/to (i.e. slightly
2935 more costly to import and export CPU wise) is also far more compact
2936 than UTF-16 (and UCS-4) for a majority of the documents I see it used
2937 for right now (RPM RDF catalogs, advogato data, various configuration
2938 file formats, etc.) and the key point for today's computer
2939 architecture is efficient uses of caches. If one nearly double the
2940 memory requirement to store the same amount of data, this will trash
2941 caches (main memory/external caches/internal caches) and my take is
2942 that this harms the system far more than the CPU requirements needed
2943 for the conversion to UTF-8</li>
Daniel Veillard8a469172003-06-12 16:05:07 +00002944 <li>Most of libxml2 version 1 users were using it with straight ASCII
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002945 most of the time, doing the conversion with an internal encoding
2946 requiring all their code to be rewritten was a serious show-stopper
2947 for using UTF-16 or UCS-4.</li>
2948 <li>UTF-8 is being used as the de-facto internal encoding standard for
2949 related code like the <a href="http://www.pango.org/">pango</a>
Daniel Veillardabfca612004-01-07 23:38:02 +00002950 upcoming Gnome text widget, and a lot of Unix code (yet another place
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002951 where Unix programmer base takes a different approach from Microsoft
2952 - they are using UTF-16)</li>
2953 </ul>
2954 </li>
2955</ul>
2956
Daniel Veillard8a469172003-06-12 16:05:07 +00002957<p>What does this mean in practice for the libxml2 user:</p>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002958<ul>
Daniel Veillard8a469172003-06-12 16:05:07 +00002959 <li>xmlChar, the libxml2 data type is a byte, those bytes must be assembled
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002960 as UTF-8 valid strings. The proper way to terminate an xmlChar * string
2961 is simply to append 0 byte, as usual.</li>
2962 <li>One just need to make sure that when using chars outside the ASCII set,
2963 the values has been properly converted to UTF-8</li>
2964</ul>
2965
2966<h3><a name="implemente">How is it implemented ?</a></h3>
2967
2968<p>Let's describe how all this works within libxml, basically the I18N
2969(internationalization) support get triggered only during I/O operation, i.e.
2970when reading a document or saving one. Let's look first at the reading
2971sequence:</p>
2972<ol>
2973 <li>when a document is processed, we usually don't know the encoding, a
Daniel Veillard189f46b2004-01-25 21:03:04 +00002974 simple heuristic allows to detect UTF-16 and UCS-4 from encodings where
2975 the ASCII range (0-0x7F) maps with ASCII</li>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002976 <li>the xml declaration if available is parsed, including the encoding
2977 declaration. At that point, if the autodetected encoding is different
2978 from the one declared a call to xmlSwitchEncoding() is issued.</li>
2979 <li>If there is no encoding declaration, then the input has to be in either
2980 UTF-8 or UTF-16, if it is not then at some point when processing the
2981 input, the converter/checker of UTF-8 form will raise an encoding error.
2982 You may end-up with a garbled document, or no document at all ! Example:
2983 <pre>~/XML -&gt; ./xmllint err.xml
2984err.xml:1: error: Input is not proper UTF-8, indicate encoding !
2985&lt;très&gt;là&lt;/très&gt;
2986 ^
2987err.xml:1: error: Bytes: 0xE8 0x73 0x3E 0x6C
2988&lt;très&gt;là&lt;/très&gt;
2989 ^</pre>
2990 </li>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00002991 <li>xmlSwitchEncoding() does an encoding name lookup, canonicalize it, and
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00002992 then search the default registered encoding converters for that encoding.
2993 If it's not within the default set and iconv() support has been compiled
2994 it, it will ask iconv for such an encoder. If this fails then the parser
2995 will report an error and stops processing:
2996 <pre>~/XML -&gt; ./xmllint err2.xml
2997err2.xml:1: error: Unsupported encoding UnsupportedEnc
2998&lt;?xml version="1.0" encoding="UnsupportedEnc"?&gt;
2999 ^</pre>
3000 </li>
Daniel Veillard46c5c1d2002-05-20 07:15:54 +00003001 <li>From that point the encoder processes progressively the input (it is
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00003002 plugged as a front-end to the I/O module) for that entity. It captures
Daniel Veillardabfca612004-01-07 23:38:02 +00003003 and converts on-the-fly the document to be parsed to UTF-8. The parser
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00003004 itself just does UTF-8 checking of this input and process it
3005 transparently. The only difference is that the encoding information has
3006 been added to the parsing context (more precisely to the input
3007 corresponding to this entity).</li>
3008 <li>The result (when using DOM) is an internal form completely in UTF-8
3009 with just an encoding information on the document node.</li>
3010</ol>
3011
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00003012<p>Ok then what happens when saving the document (assuming you
3013collected/built an xmlDoc DOM like structure) ? It depends on the function
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00003014called, xmlSaveFile() will just try to save in the original encoding, while
3015xmlSaveFileTo() and xmlSaveFileEnc() can optionally save to a given
3016encoding:</p>
3017<ol>
Daniel Veillard8a469172003-06-12 16:05:07 +00003018 <li>if no encoding is given, libxml2 will look for an encoding value
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00003019 associated to the document and if it exists will try to save to that
3020 encoding,
3021 <p>otherwise everything is written in the internal form, i.e. UTF-8</p>
3022 </li>
3023 <li>so if an encoding was specified, either at the API level or on the
Daniel Veillard8a469172003-06-12 16:05:07 +00003024 document, libxml2 will again canonicalize the encoding name, lookup for a
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00003025 converter in the registered set or through iconv. If not found the
3026 function will return an error code</li>
3027 <li>the converter is placed before the I/O buffer layer, as another kind of
Daniel Veillard8a469172003-06-12 16:05:07 +00003028 buffer, then libxml2 will simply push the UTF-8 serialization to through
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00003029 that buffer, which will then progressively be converted and pushed onto
3030 the I/O layer.</li>
3031 <li>It is possible that the converter code fails on some input, for example
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00003032 trying to push an UTF-8 encoded Chinese character through the UTF-8 to
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00003033 ISO-8859-1 converter won't work. Since the encoders are progressive they
3034 will just report the error and the number of bytes converted, at that
Daniel Veillard8a469172003-06-12 16:05:07 +00003035 point libxml2 will decode the offending character, remove it from the
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00003036 buffer and replace it with the associated charRef encoding &amp;#123; and
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00003037 resume the conversion. This guarantees that any document will be saved
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00003038 without losses (except for markup names where this is not legal, this is
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00003039 a problem in the current version, in practice avoid using non-ascii
Daniel Veillard189f46b2004-01-25 21:03:04 +00003040 characters for tag or attribute names). A special "ascii" encoding name
3041 is used to save documents to a pure ascii form can be used when
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00003042 portability is really crucial</li>
3043</ol>
3044
Daniel Veillardabfca612004-01-07 23:38:02 +00003045<p>Here are a few examples based on the same test document:</p>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00003046<pre>~/XML -&gt; ./xmllint isolat1
3047&lt;?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?&gt;
3048&lt;très&gt;là&lt;/très&gt;
3049~/XML -&gt; ./xmllint --encode UTF-8 isolat1
3050&lt;?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?&gt;
3051&lt;très&gt;là  &lt;/très&gt;
3052~/XML -&gt; </pre>
3053
3054<p>The same processing is applied (and reuse most of the code) for HTML I18N
3055processing. Looking up and modifying the content encoding is a bit more
3056difficult since it is located in a &lt;meta&gt; tag under the &lt;head&gt;,
3057so a couple of functions htmlGetMetaEncoding() and htmlSetMetaEncoding() have
3058been provided. The parser also attempts to switch encoding on the fly when
3059detecting such a tag on input. Except for that the processing is the same
3060(and again reuses the same code).</p>
3061
3062<h3><a name="Default">Default supported encodings</a></h3>
3063
Daniel Veillard8a469172003-06-12 16:05:07 +00003064<p>libxml2 has a set of default converters for the following encodings
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00003065(located in encoding.c):</p>
3066<ol>
3067 <li>UTF-8 is supported by default (null handlers)</li>
3068 <li>UTF-16, both little and big endian</li>
3069 <li>ISO-Latin-1 (ISO-8859-1) covering most western languages</li>
3070 <li>ASCII, useful mostly for saving</li>
3071 <li>HTML, a specific handler for the conversion of UTF-8 to ASCII with HTML
3072 predefined entities like &amp;copy; for the Copyright sign.</li>
3073</ol>
3074
Daniel Veillardc0801af2002-05-28 16:28:42 +00003075<p>More over when compiled on an Unix platform with iconv support the full
3076set of encodings supported by iconv can be instantly be used by libxml. On a
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00003077linux machine with glibc-2.1 the list of supported encodings and aliases fill
30783 full pages, and include UCS-4, the full set of ISO-Latin encodings, and the
3079various Japanese ones.</p>
3080
3081<h4>Encoding aliases</h4>
3082
Daniel Veillard8a469172003-06-12 16:05:07 +00003083<p>From 2.2.3, libxml2 has support to register encoding names aliases. The
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00003084goal is to be able to parse document whose encoding is supported but where
3085the name differs (for example from the default set of names accepted by
3086iconv). The following functions allow to register and handle new aliases for
Daniel Veillard8a469172003-06-12 16:05:07 +00003087existing encodings. Once registered libxml2 will automatically lookup the
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00003088aliases when handling a document:</p>
3089<ul>
3090 <li>int xmlAddEncodingAlias(const char *name, const char *alias);</li>
3091 <li>int xmlDelEncodingAlias(const char *alias);</li>
3092 <li>const char * xmlGetEncodingAlias(const char *alias);</li>
3093 <li>void xmlCleanupEncodingAliases(void);</li>
3094</ul>
3095
3096<h3><a name="extend">How to extend the existing support</a></h3>
3097
3098<p>Well adding support for new encoding, or overriding one of the encoders
Daniel Veillardabfca612004-01-07 23:38:02 +00003099(assuming it is buggy) should not be hard, just write input and output
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00003100conversion routines to/from UTF-8, and register them using
3101xmlNewCharEncodingHandler(name, xxxToUTF8, UTF8Toxxx), and they will be
3102called automatically if the parser(s) encounter such an encoding name
3103(register it uppercase, this will help). The description of the encoders,
3104their arguments and expected return values are described in the encoding.h
3105header.</p>
3106
3107<p>A quick note on the topic of subverting the parser to use a different
3108internal encoding than UTF-8, in some case people will absolutely want to
3109keep the internal encoding different, I think it's still possible (but the
3110encoding must be compliant with ASCII on the same subrange) though I didn't
3111tried it. The key is to override the default conversion routines (by
3112registering null encoders/decoders for your charsets), and bypass the UTF-8
3113checking of the parser by setting the parser context charset
3114(ctxt-&gt;charset) to something different than XML_CHAR_ENCODING_UTF8, but
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00003115there is no guarantee that this will work. You may also have some troubles
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00003116saving back.</p>
3117
3118<p>Basically proper I18N support is important, this requires at least
3119libxml-2.0.0, but a lot of features and corrections are really available only
3120starting 2.2.</p>
3121
3122<h2><a name="IO">I/O Interfaces</a></h2>
3123
3124<p>Table of Content:</p>
3125<ol>
3126 <li><a href="#General1">General overview</a></li>
3127 <li><a href="#basic">The basic buffer type</a></li>
3128 <li><a href="#Input">Input I/O handlers</a></li>
3129 <li><a href="#Output">Output I/O handlers</a></li>
3130 <li><a href="#entities">The entities loader</a></li>
3131 <li><a href="#Example2">Example of customized I/O</a></li>
3132</ol>
3133
3134<h3><a name="General1">General overview</a></h3>
3135
3136<p>The module <code><a
3137href="http://xmlsoft.org/html/libxml-xmlio.html">xmlIO.h</a></code> provides
Daniel Veillard8a469172003-06-12 16:05:07 +00003138the interfaces to the libxml2 I/O system. This consists of 4 main parts:</p>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00003139<ul>
3140 <li>Entities loader, this is a routine which tries to fetch the entities
3141 (files) based on their PUBLIC and SYSTEM identifiers. The default loader
Daniel Veillard8a469172003-06-12 16:05:07 +00003142 don't look at the public identifier since libxml2 do not maintain a
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00003143 catalog. You can redefine you own entity loader by using
3144 <code>xmlGetExternalEntityLoader()</code> and
Daniel Veillard9c466822001-10-25 12:03:39 +00003145 <code>xmlSetExternalEntityLoader()</code>. <a href="#entities">Check the
3146 example</a>.</li>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00003147 <li>Input I/O buffers which are a commodity structure used by the parser(s)
3148 input layer to handle fetching the informations to feed the parser. This
3149 provides buffering and is also a placeholder where the encoding
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00003150 converters to UTF8 are piggy-backed.</li>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00003151 <li>Output I/O buffers are similar to the Input ones and fulfill similar
3152 task but when generating a serialization from a tree.</li>
3153 <li>A mechanism to register sets of I/O callbacks and associate them with
3154 specific naming schemes like the protocol part of the URIs.
3155 <p>This affect the default I/O operations and allows to use specific I/O
3156 handlers for certain names.</p>
3157 </li>
3158</ul>
3159
3160<p>The general mechanism used when loading http://rpmfind.net/xml.html for
3161example in the HTML parser is the following:</p>
3162<ol>
3163 <li>The default entity loader calls <code>xmlNewInputFromFile()</code> with
3164 the parsing context and the URI string.</li>
3165 <li>the URI string is checked against the existing registered handlers
3166 using their match() callback function, if the HTTP module was compiled
3167 in, it is registered and its match() function will succeeds</li>
3168 <li>the open() function of the handler is called and if successful will
3169 return an I/O Input buffer</li>
3170 <li>the parser will the start reading from this buffer and progressively
3171 fetch information from the resource, calling the read() function of the
3172 handler until the resource is exhausted</li>
3173 <li>if an encoding change is detected it will be installed on the input
3174 buffer, providing buffering and efficient use of the conversion
3175 routines</li>
3176 <li>once the parser has finished, the close() function of the handler is
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00003177 called once and the Input buffer and associated resources are
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00003178 deallocated.</li>
3179</ol>
3180
3181<p>The user defined callbacks are checked first to allow overriding of the
Daniel Veillard8a469172003-06-12 16:05:07 +00003182default libxml2 I/O routines.</p>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00003183
3184<h3><a name="basic">The basic buffer type</a></h3>
3185
3186<p>All the buffer manipulation handling is done using the
3187<code>xmlBuffer</code> type define in <code><a
3188href="http://xmlsoft.org/html/libxml-tree.html">tree.h</a> </code>which is a
3189resizable memory buffer. The buffer allocation strategy can be selected to be
3190either best-fit or use an exponential doubling one (CPU vs. memory use
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00003191trade-off). The values are <code>XML_BUFFER_ALLOC_EXACT</code> and
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00003192<code>XML_BUFFER_ALLOC_DOUBLEIT</code>, and can be set individually or on a
3193system wide basis using <code>xmlBufferSetAllocationScheme()</code>. A number
3194of functions allows to manipulate buffers with names starting with the
3195<code>xmlBuffer...</code> prefix.</p>
3196
3197<h3><a name="Input">Input I/O handlers</a></h3>
3198
3199<p>An Input I/O handler is a simple structure
3200<code>xmlParserInputBuffer</code> containing a context associated to the
3201resource (file descriptor, or pointer to a protocol handler), the read() and
3202close() callbacks to use and an xmlBuffer. And extra xmlBuffer and a charset
3203encoding handler are also present to support charset conversion when
3204needed.</p>
3205
3206<h3><a name="Output">Output I/O handlers</a></h3>
3207
3208<p>An Output handler <code>xmlOutputBuffer</code> is completely similar to an
3209Input one except the callbacks are write() and close().</p>
3210
3211<h3><a name="entities">The entities loader</a></h3>
3212
3213<p>The entity loader resolves requests for new entities and create inputs for
3214the parser. Creating an input from a filename or an URI string is done
3215through the xmlNewInputFromFile() routine. The default entity loader do not
3216handle the PUBLIC identifier associated with an entity (if any). So it just
3217calls xmlNewInputFromFile() with the SYSTEM identifier (which is mandatory in
3218XML).</p>
3219
3220<p>If you want to hook up a catalog mechanism then you simply need to
3221override the default entity loader, here is an example:</p>
3222<pre>#include &lt;libxml/xmlIO.h&gt;
3223
3224xmlExternalEntityLoader defaultLoader = NULL;
3225
3226xmlParserInputPtr
3227xmlMyExternalEntityLoader(const char *URL, const char *ID,
3228 xmlParserCtxtPtr ctxt) {
3229 xmlParserInputPtr ret;
3230 const char *fileID = NULL;
3231 /* lookup for the fileID depending on ID */
3232
3233 ret = xmlNewInputFromFile(ctxt, fileID);
3234 if (ret != NULL)
3235 return(ret);
3236 if (defaultLoader != NULL)
3237 ret = defaultLoader(URL, ID, ctxt);
3238 return(ret);
3239}
3240
3241int main(..) {
3242 ...
3243
3244 /*
3245 * Install our own entity loader
3246 */
3247 defaultLoader = xmlGetExternalEntityLoader();
3248 xmlSetExternalEntityLoader(xmlMyExternalEntityLoader);
3249
3250 ...
3251}</pre>
3252
3253<h3><a name="Example2">Example of customized I/O</a></h3>
3254
3255<p>This example come from <a href="http://xmlsoft.org/messages/0708.html">a
3256real use case</a>, xmlDocDump() closes the FILE * passed by the application
3257and this was a problem. The <a
3258href="http://xmlsoft.org/messages/0711.html">solution</a> was to redefine a
3259new output handler with the closing call deactivated:</p>
3260<ol>
Daniel Veillardc0801af2002-05-28 16:28:42 +00003261 <li>First define a new I/O output allocator where the output don't close
3262 the file:
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00003263 <pre>xmlOutputBufferPtr
3264xmlOutputBufferCreateOwn(FILE *file, xmlCharEncodingHandlerPtr encoder) {
3265    xmlOutputBufferPtr ret;
3266    
3267    if (xmlOutputCallbackInitialized == 0)
3268        xmlRegisterDefaultOutputCallbacks();
3269
3270    if (file == NULL) return(NULL);
3271    ret = xmlAllocOutputBuffer(encoder);
3272    if (ret != NULL) {
3273        ret-&gt;context = file;
3274        ret-&gt;writecallback = xmlFileWrite;
3275        ret-&gt;closecallback = NULL; /* No close callback */
3276    }
Daniel Veillardf83a2c72003-04-08 13:48:40 +00003277    return(ret);
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00003278} </pre>
3279 </li>
3280 <li>And then use it to save the document:
3281 <pre>FILE *f;
3282xmlOutputBufferPtr output;
3283xmlDocPtr doc;
3284int res;
3285
3286f = ...
3287doc = ....
3288
3289output = xmlOutputBufferCreateOwn(f, NULL);
3290res = xmlSaveFileTo(output, doc, NULL);
3291 </pre>
3292 </li>
3293</ol>
3294
3295<h2><a name="Catalog">Catalog support</a></h2>
3296
3297<p>Table of Content:</p>
3298<ol>
3299 <li><a href="General2">General overview</a></li>
3300 <li><a href="#definition">The definition</a></li>
3301 <li><a href="#Simple">Using catalogs</a></li>
3302 <li><a href="#Some">Some examples</a></li>
3303 <li><a href="#reference">How to tune catalog usage</a></li>
3304 <li><a href="#validate">How to debug catalog processing</a></li>
3305 <li><a href="#Declaring">How to create and maintain catalogs</a></li>
3306 <li><a href="#implemento">The implementor corner quick review of the
3307 API</a></li>
3308 <li><a href="#Other">Other resources</a></li>
3309</ol>
3310
3311<h3><a name="General2">General overview</a></h3>
3312
3313<p>What is a catalog? Basically it's a lookup mechanism used when an entity
3314(a file or a remote resource) references another entity. The catalog lookup
3315is inserted between the moment the reference is recognized by the software
3316(XML parser, stylesheet processing, or even images referenced for inclusion
3317in a rendering) and the time where loading that resource is actually
3318started.</p>
3319
3320<p>It is basically used for 3 things:</p>
3321<ul>
3322 <li>mapping from "logical" names, the public identifiers and a more
3323 concrete name usable for download (and URI). For example it can associate
3324 the logical name
3325 <p>"-//OASIS//DTD DocBook XML V4.1.2//EN"</p>
3326 <p>of the DocBook 4.1.2 XML DTD with the actual URL where it can be
3327 downloaded</p>
3328 <p>http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/xml/4.1.2/docbookx.dtd</p>
3329 </li>
3330 <li>remapping from a given URL to another one, like an HTTP indirection
3331 saying that
3332 <p>"http://www.oasis-open.org/committes/tr.xsl"</p>
3333 <p>should really be looked at</p>
3334 <p>"http://www.oasis-open.org/committes/entity/stylesheets/base/tr.xsl"</p>
3335 </li>
3336 <li>providing a local cache mechanism allowing to load the entities
3337 associated to public identifiers or remote resources, this is a really
3338 important feature for any significant deployment of XML or SGML since it
3339 allows to avoid the aleas and delays associated to fetching remote
3340 resources.</li>
3341</ul>
3342
3343<h3><a name="definition">The definitions</a></h3>
3344
3345<p>Libxml, as of 2.4.3 implements 2 kind of catalogs:</p>
3346<ul>
3347 <li>the older SGML catalogs, the official spec is SGML Open Technical
3348 Resolution TR9401:1997, but is better understood by reading <a
3349 href="http://www.jclark.com/sp/catalog.htm">the SP Catalog page</a> from
3350 James Clark. This is relatively old and not the preferred mode of
3351 operation of libxml.</li>
3352 <li><a href="http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/entity/spec.html">XML
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +00003353 Catalogs</a> is far more flexible, more recent, uses an XML syntax and
3354 should scale quite better. This is the default option of libxml.</li>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00003355</ul>
3356
3357<p></p>
3358
3359<h3><a name="Simple">Using catalog</a></h3>
3360
Daniel Veillard8a469172003-06-12 16:05:07 +00003361<p>In a normal environment libxml2 will by default check the presence of a
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00003362catalog in /etc/xml/catalog, and assuming it has been correctly populated,
3363the processing is completely transparent to the document user. To take a
3364concrete example, suppose you are authoring a DocBook document, this one
3365starts with the following DOCTYPE definition:</p>
3366<pre>&lt;?xml version='1.0'?&gt;
3367&lt;!DOCTYPE book PUBLIC "-//Norman Walsh//DTD DocBk XML V3.1.4//EN"
3368 "http://nwalsh.com/docbook/xml/3.1.4/db3xml.dtd"&gt;</pre>
3369
3370<p>When validating the document with libxml, the catalog will be
3371automatically consulted to lookup the public identifier "-//Norman Walsh//DTD
3372DocBk XML V3.1.4//EN" and the system identifier
3373"http://nwalsh.com/docbook/xml/3.1.4/db3xml.dtd", and if these entities have
3374been installed on your system and the catalogs actually point to them, libxml
3375will fetch them from the local disk.</p>
3376
3377<p style="font-size: 10pt"><strong>Note</strong>: Really don't use this
3378DOCTYPE example it's a really old version, but is fine as an example.</p>
3379
Daniel Veillard8a469172003-06-12 16:05:07 +00003380<p>Libxml2 will check the catalog each time that it is requested to load an
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00003381entity, this includes DTD, external parsed entities, stylesheets, etc ... If
3382your system is correctly configured all the authoring phase and processing
3383should use only local files, even if your document stays portable because it
3384uses the canonical public and system ID, referencing the remote document.</p>
3385
3386<h3><a name="Some">Some examples:</a></h3>
3387
Daniel Veillard8a469172003-06-12 16:05:07 +00003388<p>Here is a couple of fragments from XML Catalogs used in libxml2 early
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00003389regression tests in <code>test/catalogs</code> :</p>
3390<pre>&lt;?xml version="1.0"?&gt;
3391&lt;!DOCTYPE catalog PUBLIC
3392 "-//OASIS//DTD Entity Resolution XML Catalog V1.0//EN"
3393 "http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/entity/release/1.0/catalog.dtd"&gt;
3394&lt;catalog xmlns="urn:oasis:names:tc:entity:xmlns:xml:catalog"&gt;
3395 &lt;public publicId="-//OASIS//DTD DocBook XML V4.1.2//EN"
3396 uri="http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/xml/4.1.2/docbookx.dtd"/&gt;
3397...</pre>
3398
3399<p>This is the beginning of a catalog for DocBook 4.1.2, XML Catalogs are
3400written in XML, there is a specific namespace for catalog elements
3401"urn:oasis:names:tc:entity:xmlns:xml:catalog". The first entry in this
3402catalog is a <code>public</code> mapping it allows to associate a Public
3403Identifier with an URI.</p>
3404<pre>...
3405 &lt;rewriteSystem systemIdStartString="http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/"
3406 rewritePrefix="file:///usr/share/xml/docbook/"/&gt;
3407...</pre>
3408
3409<p>A <code>rewriteSystem</code> is a very powerful instruction, it says that
3410any URI starting with a given prefix should be looked at another URI
3411constructed by replacing the prefix with an new one. In effect this acts like
3412a cache system for a full area of the Web. In practice it is extremely useful
3413with a file prefix if you have installed a copy of those resources on your
3414local system.</p>
3415<pre>...
3416&lt;delegatePublic publicIdStartString="-//OASIS//DTD XML Catalog //"
3417 catalog="file:///usr/share/xml/docbook.xml"/&gt;
3418&lt;delegatePublic publicIdStartString="-//OASIS//ENTITIES DocBook XML"
3419 catalog="file:///usr/share/xml/docbook.xml"/&gt;
3420&lt;delegatePublic publicIdStartString="-//OASIS//DTD DocBook XML"
3421 catalog="file:///usr/share/xml/docbook.xml"/&gt;
3422&lt;delegateSystem systemIdStartString="http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/"
3423 catalog="file:///usr/share/xml/docbook.xml"/&gt;
3424&lt;delegateURI uriStartString="http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/"
3425 catalog="file:///usr/share/xml/docbook.xml"/&gt;
3426...</pre>
3427
3428<p>Delegation is the core features which allows to build a tree of catalogs,
3429easier to maintain than a single catalog, based on Public Identifier, System
3430Identifier or URI prefixes it instructs the catalog software to look up
3431entries in another resource. This feature allow to build hierarchies of
3432catalogs, the set of entries presented should be sufficient to redirect the
3433resolution of all DocBook references to the specific catalog in
3434<code>/usr/share/xml/docbook.xml</code> this one in turn could delegate all
3435references for DocBook 4.2.1 to a specific catalog installed at the same time
3436as the DocBook resources on the local machine.</p>
3437
3438<h3><a name="reference">How to tune catalog usage:</a></h3>
3439
3440<p>The user can change the default catalog behaviour by redirecting queries
3441to its own set of catalogs, this can be done by setting the
3442<code>XML_CATALOG_FILES</code> environment variable to a list of catalogs, an
3443empty one should deactivate loading the default <code>/etc/xml/catalog</code>
3444default catalog</p>
3445
3446<h3><a name="validate">How to debug catalog processing:</a></h3>
3447
3448<p>Setting up the <code>XML_DEBUG_CATALOG</code> environment variable will
Daniel Veillard8a469172003-06-12 16:05:07 +00003449make libxml2 output debugging informations for each catalog operations, for
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00003450example:</p>
3451<pre>orchis:~/XML -&gt; xmllint --memory --noout test/ent2
3452warning: failed to load external entity "title.xml"
3453orchis:~/XML -&gt; export XML_DEBUG_CATALOG=
3454orchis:~/XML -&gt; xmllint --memory --noout test/ent2
3455Failed to parse catalog /etc/xml/catalog
3456Failed to parse catalog /etc/xml/catalog
3457warning: failed to load external entity "title.xml"
3458Catalogs cleanup
3459orchis:~/XML -&gt; </pre>
3460
3461<p>The test/ent2 references an entity, running the parser from memory makes
3462the base URI unavailable and the the "title.xml" entity cannot be loaded.
3463Setting up the debug environment variable allows to detect that an attempt is
3464made to load the <code>/etc/xml/catalog</code> but since it's not present the
3465resolution fails.</p>
3466
3467<p>But the most advanced way to debug XML catalog processing is to use the
3468<strong>xmlcatalog</strong> command shipped with libxml2, it allows to load
3469catalogs and make resolution queries to see what is going on. This is also
3470used for the regression tests:</p>
3471<pre>orchis:~/XML -&gt; ./xmlcatalog test/catalogs/docbook.xml \
3472 "-//OASIS//DTD DocBook XML V4.1.2//EN"
3473http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/xml/4.1.2/docbookx.dtd
3474orchis:~/XML -&gt; </pre>
3475
3476<p>For debugging what is going on, adding one -v flags increase the verbosity
3477level to indicate the processing done (adding a second flag also indicate
3478what elements are recognized at parsing):</p>
3479<pre>orchis:~/XML -&gt; ./xmlcatalog -v test/catalogs/docbook.xml \
3480 "-//OASIS//DTD DocBook XML V4.1.2//EN"
3481Parsing catalog test/catalogs/docbook.xml's content
3482Found public match -//OASIS//DTD DocBook XML V4.1.2//EN
3483http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/xml/4.1.2/docbookx.dtd
3484Catalogs cleanup
3485orchis:~/XML -&gt; </pre>
3486
3487<p>A shell interface is also available to debug and process multiple queries
3488(and for regression tests):</p>
3489<pre>orchis:~/XML -&gt; ./xmlcatalog -shell test/catalogs/docbook.xml \
3490 "-//OASIS//DTD DocBook XML V4.1.2//EN"
3491&gt; help
3492Commands available:
3493public PublicID: make a PUBLIC identifier lookup
3494system SystemID: make a SYSTEM identifier lookup
3495resolve PublicID SystemID: do a full resolver lookup
3496add 'type' 'orig' 'replace' : add an entry
3497del 'values' : remove values
3498dump: print the current catalog state
3499debug: increase the verbosity level
3500quiet: decrease the verbosity level
3501exit: quit the shell
3502&gt; public "-//OASIS//DTD DocBook XML V4.1.2//EN"
3503http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/xml/4.1.2/docbookx.dtd
3504&gt; quit
3505orchis:~/XML -&gt; </pre>
3506
3507<p>This should be sufficient for most debugging purpose, this was actually
3508used heavily to debug the XML Catalog implementation itself.</p>
3509
3510<h3><a name="Declaring">How to create and maintain</a> catalogs:</h3>
3511
3512<p>Basically XML Catalogs are XML files, you can either use XML tools to
3513manage them or use <strong>xmlcatalog</strong> for this. The basic step is
3514to create a catalog the -create option provide this facility:</p>
3515<pre>orchis:~/XML -&gt; ./xmlcatalog --create tst.xml
3516&lt;?xml version="1.0"?&gt;
3517&lt;!DOCTYPE catalog PUBLIC "-//OASIS//DTD Entity Resolution XML Catalog V1.0//EN"
3518 "http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/entity/release/1.0/catalog.dtd"&gt;
3519&lt;catalog xmlns="urn:oasis:names:tc:entity:xmlns:xml:catalog"/&gt;
3520orchis:~/XML -&gt; </pre>
3521
3522<p>By default xmlcatalog does not overwrite the original catalog and save the
3523result on the standard output, this can be overridden using the -noout
3524option. The <code>-add</code> command allows to add entries in the
3525catalog:</p>
3526<pre>orchis:~/XML -&gt; ./xmlcatalog --noout --create --add "public" \
3527 "-//OASIS//DTD DocBook XML V4.1.2//EN" \
3528 http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/xml/4.1.2/docbookx.dtd tst.xml
3529orchis:~/XML -&gt; cat tst.xml
3530&lt;?xml version="1.0"?&gt;
3531&lt;!DOCTYPE catalog PUBLIC "-//OASIS//DTD Entity Resolution XML Catalog V1.0//EN" \
3532 "http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/entity/release/1.0/catalog.dtd"&gt;
3533&lt;catalog xmlns="urn:oasis:names:tc:entity:xmlns:xml:catalog"&gt;
3534&lt;public publicId="-//OASIS//DTD DocBook XML V4.1.2//EN"
3535 uri="http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/xml/4.1.2/docbookx.dtd"/&gt;
3536&lt;/catalog&gt;
3537orchis:~/XML -&gt; </pre>
3538
3539<p>The <code>-add</code> option will always take 3 parameters even if some of
3540the XML Catalog constructs (like nextCatalog) will have only a single
3541argument, just pass a third empty string, it will be ignored.</p>
3542
3543<p>Similarly the <code>-del</code> option remove matching entries from the
3544catalog:</p>
3545<pre>orchis:~/XML -&gt; ./xmlcatalog --del \
3546 "http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/xml/4.1.2/docbookx.dtd" tst.xml
3547&lt;?xml version="1.0"?&gt;
3548&lt;!DOCTYPE catalog PUBLIC "-//OASIS//DTD Entity Resolution XML Catalog V1.0//EN"
3549 "http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/entity/release/1.0/catalog.dtd"&gt;
3550&lt;catalog xmlns="urn:oasis:names:tc:entity:xmlns:xml:catalog"/&gt;
3551orchis:~/XML -&gt; </pre>
3552
3553<p>The catalog is now empty. Note that the matching of <code>-del</code> is
3554exact and would have worked in a similar fashion with the Public ID
3555string.</p>
3556
3557<p>This is rudimentary but should be sufficient to manage a not too complex
3558catalog tree of resources.</p>
3559
3560<h3><a name="implemento">The implementor corner quick review of the
3561API:</a></h3>
3562
3563<p>First, and like for every other module of libxml, there is an
3564automatically generated <a href="html/libxml-catalog.html">API page for
3565catalog support</a>.</p>
3566
3567<p>The header for the catalog interfaces should be included as:</p>
3568<pre>#include &lt;libxml/catalog.h&gt;</pre>
3569
3570<p>The API is voluntarily kept very simple. First it is not obvious that
3571applications really need access to it since it is the default behaviour of
Daniel Veillard560c2a42003-07-06 21:13:49 +00003572libxml2 (Note: it is possible to completely override libxml2 default catalog
3573by using <a href="html/libxml-parser.html">xmlSetExternalEntityLoader</a> to
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00003574plug an application specific resolver).</p>
3575
Daniel Veillard8a469172003-06-12 16:05:07 +00003576<p>Basically libxml2 support 2 catalog lists:</p>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00003577<ul>
3578 <li>the default one, global shared by all the application</li>
3579 <li>a per-document catalog, this one is built if the document uses the
3580 <code>oasis-xml-catalog</code> PIs to specify its own catalog list, it is
3581 associated to the parser context and destroyed when the parsing context
3582 is destroyed.</li>
3583</ul>
3584
3585<p>the document one will be used first if it exists.</p>
3586
3587<h4>Initialization routines:</h4>
3588
3589<p>xmlInitializeCatalog(), xmlLoadCatalog() and xmlLoadCatalogs() should be
3590used at startup to initialize the catalog, if the catalog should be
3591initialized with specific values xmlLoadCatalog() or xmlLoadCatalogs()
3592should be called before xmlInitializeCatalog() which would otherwise do a
3593default initialization first.</p>
3594
3595<p>The xmlCatalogAddLocal() call is used by the parser to grow the document
3596own catalog list if needed.</p>
3597
3598<h4>Preferences setup:</h4>
3599
3600<p>The XML Catalog spec requires the possibility to select default
3601preferences between public and system delegation,
3602xmlCatalogSetDefaultPrefer() allows this, xmlCatalogSetDefaults() and
3603xmlCatalogGetDefaults() allow to control if XML Catalogs resolution should
3604be forbidden, allowed for global catalog, for document catalog or both, the
3605default is to allow both.</p>
3606
3607<p>And of course xmlCatalogSetDebug() allows to generate debug messages
3608(through the xmlGenericError() mechanism).</p>
3609
3610<h4>Querying routines:</h4>
3611
3612<p>xmlCatalogResolve(), xmlCatalogResolveSystem(), xmlCatalogResolvePublic()
3613and xmlCatalogResolveURI() are relatively explicit if you read the XML
3614Catalog specification they correspond to section 7 algorithms, they should
3615also work if you have loaded an SGML catalog with a simplified semantic.</p>
3616
3617<p>xmlCatalogLocalResolve() and xmlCatalogLocalResolveURI() are the same but
3618operate on the document catalog list</p>
3619
3620<h4>Cleanup and Miscellaneous:</h4>
3621
3622<p>xmlCatalogCleanup() free-up the global catalog, xmlCatalogFreeLocal() is
3623the per-document equivalent.</p>
3624
3625<p>xmlCatalogAdd() and xmlCatalogRemove() are used to dynamically modify the
3626first catalog in the global list, and xmlCatalogDump() allows to dump a
3627catalog state, those routines are primarily designed for xmlcatalog, I'm not
3628sure that exposing more complex interfaces (like navigation ones) would be
3629really useful.</p>
3630
3631<p>The xmlParseCatalogFile() is a function used to load XML Catalog files,
3632it's similar as xmlParseFile() except it bypass all catalog lookups, it's
3633provided because this functionality may be useful for client tools.</p>
3634
3635<h4>threaded environments:</h4>
3636
3637<p>Since the catalog tree is built progressively, some care has been taken to
3638try to avoid troubles in multithreaded environments. The code is now thread
Daniel Veillard8a469172003-06-12 16:05:07 +00003639safe assuming that the libxml2 library has been compiled with threads
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00003640support.</p>
3641
3642<p></p>
3643
3644<h3><a name="Other">Other resources</a></h3>
3645
3646<p>The XML Catalog specification is relatively recent so there isn't much
3647literature to point at:</p>
3648<ul>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00003649 <li>You can find a good rant from Norm Walsh about <a
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00003650 href="http://www.arbortext.com/Think_Tank/XML_Resources/Issue_Three/issue_three.html">the
3651 need for catalogs</a>, it provides a lot of context informations even if
Daniel Veillard93d3a472002-04-26 14:04:55 +00003652 I don't agree with everything presented. Norm also wrote a more recent
3653 article <a
3654 href="http://wwws.sun.com/software/xml/developers/resolver/article/">XML
3655 entities and URI resolvers</a> describing them.</li>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00003656 <li>An <a href="http://home.ccil.org/~cowan/XML/XCatalog.html">old XML
3657 catalog proposal</a> from John Cowan</li>
3658 <li>The <a href="http://www.rddl.org/">Resource Directory Description
3659 Language</a> (RDDL) another catalog system but more oriented toward
3660 providing metadata for XML namespaces.</li>
3661 <li>the page from the OASIS Technical <a
3662 href="http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/entity/">Committee on Entity
3663 Resolution</a> who maintains XML Catalog, you will find pointers to the
3664 specification update, some background and pointers to others tools
3665 providing XML Catalog support</li>
Daniel Veillardabfca612004-01-07 23:38:02 +00003666 <li>There is a <a href="buildDocBookCatalog">shell script</a> to generate
Daniel Veillard35e937a2002-01-19 22:21:54 +00003667 XML Catalogs for DocBook 4.1.2 . If it can write to the /etc/xml/
3668 directory, it will set-up /etc/xml/catalog and /etc/xml/docbook based on
3669 the resources found on the system. Otherwise it will just create
3670 ~/xmlcatalog and ~/dbkxmlcatalog and doing:
Daniel Veillard8594de92003-04-25 10:08:44 +00003671 <p><code>export XML_CATALOG_FILES=$HOME/xmlcatalog</code></p>
Daniel Veillard35e937a2002-01-19 22:21:54 +00003672 <p>should allow to process DocBook documentations without requiring
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00003673 network accesses for the DTD or stylesheets</p>
Daniel Veillard35e937a2002-01-19 22:21:54 +00003674 </li>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00003675 <li>I have uploaded <a href="ftp://xmlsoft.org/test/dbk412catalog.tar.gz">a
Daniel Veillard35e937a2002-01-19 22:21:54 +00003676 small tarball</a> containing XML Catalogs for DocBook 4.1.2 which seems
3677 to work fine for me too</li>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00003678 <li>The <a href="http://www.xmlsoft.org/xmlcatalog_man.html">xmlcatalog
3679 manual page</a></li>
3680</ul>
3681
3682<p>If you have suggestions for corrections or additions, simply contact
3683me:</p>
3684
3685<h2><a name="library">The parser interfaces</a></h2>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003686
3687<p>This section is directly intended to help programmers getting bootstrapped
Daniel Veillard8a469172003-06-12 16:05:07 +00003688using the XML tollkit from the C language. It is not intended to be
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +00003689extensive. I hope the automatically generated documents will provide the
3690completeness required, but as a separate set of documents. The interfaces of
Daniel Veillard560c2a42003-07-06 21:13:49 +00003691the XML parser are by principle low level, Those interested in a higher level
3692API should <a href="#DOM">look at DOM</a>.</p>
Daniel Veillardccb09631998-10-27 06:21:04 +00003693
Daniel Veillard9cb5ff42001-01-29 08:22:21 +00003694<p>The <a href="html/libxml-parser.html">parser interfaces for XML</a> are
3695separated from the <a href="html/libxml-htmlparser.html">HTML parser
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00003696interfaces</a>. Let's have a look at how the XML parser can be called:</p>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +00003697
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00003698<h3><a name="Invoking">Invoking the parser : the pull method</a></h3>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003699
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00003700<p>Usually, the first thing to do is to read an XML input. The parser accepts
3701documents either from in-memory strings or from files. The functions are
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003702defined in "parser.h":</p>
Daniel Veillard10c6a8f1998-10-28 01:00:12 +00003703<dl>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003704 <dt><code>xmlDocPtr xmlParseMemory(char *buffer, int size);</code></dt>
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00003705 <dd><p>Parse a null-terminated string containing the document.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003706 </dd>
Daniel Veillard10c6a8f1998-10-28 01:00:12 +00003707</dl>
3708<dl>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003709 <dt><code>xmlDocPtr xmlParseFile(const char *filename);</code></dt>
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +00003710 <dd><p>Parse an XML document contained in a (possibly compressed)
3711 file.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003712 </dd>
Daniel Veillard10c6a8f1998-10-28 01:00:12 +00003713</dl>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003714
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00003715<p>The parser returns a pointer to the document structure (or NULL in case of
Daniel Veillard10c6a8f1998-10-28 01:00:12 +00003716failure).</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003717
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00003718<h3 id="Invoking1">Invoking the parser: the push method</h3>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +00003719
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +00003720<p>In order for the application to keep the control when the document is
Daniel Veillard560c2a42003-07-06 21:13:49 +00003721being fetched (which is common for GUI based programs) libxml2 provides a
3722push interface, too, as of version 1.8.3. Here are the interface
3723functions:</p>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +00003724<pre>xmlParserCtxtPtr xmlCreatePushParserCtxt(xmlSAXHandlerPtr sax,
3725 void *user_data,
3726 const char *chunk,
3727 int size,
3728 const char *filename);
3729int xmlParseChunk (xmlParserCtxtPtr ctxt,
3730 const char *chunk,
3731 int size,
3732 int terminate);</pre>
3733
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00003734<p>and here is a simple example showing how to use the interface:</p>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +00003735<pre> FILE *f;
3736
3737 f = fopen(filename, "r");
3738 if (f != NULL) {
3739 int res, size = 1024;
3740 char chars[1024];
3741 xmlParserCtxtPtr ctxt;
3742
3743 res = fread(chars, 1, 4, f);
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00003744 if (res &gt; 0) {
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +00003745 ctxt = xmlCreatePushParserCtxt(NULL, NULL,
3746 chars, res, filename);
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00003747 while ((res = fread(chars, 1, size, f)) &gt; 0) {
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +00003748 xmlParseChunk(ctxt, chars, res, 0);
3749 }
3750 xmlParseChunk(ctxt, chars, 0, 1);
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00003751 doc = ctxt-&gt;myDoc;
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +00003752 xmlFreeParserCtxt(ctxt);
3753 }
3754 }</pre>
3755
Daniel Veillard8a469172003-06-12 16:05:07 +00003756<p>The HTML parser embedded into libxml2 also has a push interface; the
Daniel Veillardec70e912001-02-26 20:10:45 +00003757functions are just prefixed by "html" rather than "xml".</p>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +00003758
3759<h3 id="Invoking2">Invoking the parser: the SAX interface</h3>
3760
Daniel Veillardec70e912001-02-26 20:10:45 +00003761<p>The tree-building interface makes the parser memory-hungry, first loading
3762the document in memory and then building the tree itself. Reading a document
3763without building the tree is possible using the SAX interfaces (see SAX.h and
3764<a href="http://www.daa.com.au/~james/gnome/xml-sax/xml-sax.html">James
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00003765Henstridge's documentation</a>). Note also that the push interface can be
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +00003766limited to SAX: just use the two first arguments of
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +00003767<code>xmlCreatePushParserCtxt()</code>.</p>
Daniel Veillardccb09631998-10-27 06:21:04 +00003768
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +00003769<h3><a name="Building">Building a tree from scratch</a></h3>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003770
3771<p>The other way to get an XML tree in memory is by building it. Basically
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +00003772there is a set of functions dedicated to building new elements. (These are
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +00003773also described in &lt;libxml/tree.h&gt;.) For example, here is a piece of
3774code that produces the XML document used in the previous examples:</p>
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00003775<pre> #include &lt;libxml/tree.h&gt;
Daniel Veillard361d8452000-04-03 19:48:13 +00003776 xmlDocPtr doc;
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +00003777 xmlNodePtr tree, subtree;
3778
3779 doc = xmlNewDoc("1.0");
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00003780 doc-&gt;children = xmlNewDocNode(doc, NULL, "EXAMPLE", NULL);
3781 xmlSetProp(doc-&gt;children, "prop1", "gnome is great");
3782 xmlSetProp(doc-&gt;children, "prop2", "&amp; linux too");
3783 tree = xmlNewChild(doc-&gt;children, NULL, "head", NULL);
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +00003784 subtree = xmlNewChild(tree, NULL, "title", "Welcome to Gnome");
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00003785 tree = xmlNewChild(doc-&gt;children, NULL, "chapter", NULL);
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +00003786 subtree = xmlNewChild(tree, NULL, "title", "The Linux adventure");
3787 subtree = xmlNewChild(tree, NULL, "p", "bla bla bla ...");
3788 subtree = xmlNewChild(tree, NULL, "image", NULL);
3789 xmlSetProp(subtree, "href", "linus.gif");</pre>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003790
3791<p>Not really rocket science ...</p>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +00003792
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +00003793<h3><a name="Traversing">Traversing the tree</a></h3>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003794
Daniel Veillard9cb5ff42001-01-29 08:22:21 +00003795<p>Basically by <a href="html/libxml-tree.html">including "tree.h"</a> your
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +00003796code has access to the internal structure of all the elements of the tree.
3797The names should be somewhat simple like <strong>parent</strong>,
Daniel Veillard306be992000-07-03 12:38:45 +00003798<strong>children</strong>, <strong>next</strong>, <strong>prev</strong>,
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00003799<strong>properties</strong>, etc... For example, still with the previous
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +00003800example:</p>
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00003801<pre><code>doc-&gt;children-&gt;children-&gt;children</code></pre>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003802
3803<p>points to the title element,</p>
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +00003804<pre>doc-&gt;children-&gt;children-&gt;next-&gt;children-&gt;children</pre>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003805
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +00003806<p>points to the text node containing the chapter title "The Linux
3807adventure".</p>
Daniel Veillard10c6a8f1998-10-28 01:00:12 +00003808
Daniel Veillardb24054a1999-12-18 15:32:46 +00003809<p><strong>NOTE</strong>: XML allows <em>PI</em>s and <em>comments</em> to be
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00003810present before the document root, so <code>doc-&gt;children</code> may point
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +00003811to an element which is not the document Root Element; a function
Daniel Veillard5cb5ab81999-12-21 15:35:29 +00003812<code>xmlDocGetRootElement()</code> was added for this purpose.</p>
Daniel Veillardb24054a1999-12-18 15:32:46 +00003813
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +00003814<h3><a name="Modifying">Modifying the tree</a></h3>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003815
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00003816<p>Functions are provided for reading and writing the document content. Here
Daniel Veillard9cb5ff42001-01-29 08:22:21 +00003817is an excerpt from the <a href="html/libxml-tree.html">tree API</a>:</p>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +00003818<dl>
Daniel Veillarddd6b3671999-09-23 22:19:22 +00003819 <dt><code>xmlAttrPtr xmlSetProp(xmlNodePtr node, const xmlChar *name, const
3820 xmlChar *value);</code></dt>
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +00003821 <dd><p>This sets (or changes) an attribute carried by an ELEMENT node.
3822 The value can be NULL.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003823 </dd>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +00003824</dl>
3825<dl>
Daniel Veillarddd6b3671999-09-23 22:19:22 +00003826 <dt><code>const xmlChar *xmlGetProp(xmlNodePtr node, const xmlChar
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003827 *name);</code></dt>
Daniel Veillardc92c3042000-09-29 02:42:04 +00003828 <dd><p>This function returns a pointer to new copy of the property
3829 content. Note that the user must deallocate the result.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003830 </dd>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +00003831</dl>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003832
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +00003833<p>Two functions are provided for reading and writing the text associated
3834with elements:</p>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +00003835<dl>
Daniel Veillarddd6b3671999-09-23 22:19:22 +00003836 <dt><code>xmlNodePtr xmlStringGetNodeList(xmlDocPtr doc, const xmlChar
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003837 *value);</code></dt>
Daniel Veillardec70e912001-02-26 20:10:45 +00003838 <dd><p>This function takes an "external" string and converts it to one
3839 text node or possibly to a list of entity and text nodes. All
3840 non-predefined entity references like &amp;Gnome; will be stored
3841 internally as entity nodes, hence the result of the function may not be
3842 a single node.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003843 </dd>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +00003844</dl>
3845<dl>
Daniel Veillarddd6b3671999-09-23 22:19:22 +00003846 <dt><code>xmlChar *xmlNodeListGetString(xmlDocPtr doc, xmlNodePtr list, int
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003847 inLine);</code></dt>
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +00003848 <dd><p>This function is the inverse of
3849 <code>xmlStringGetNodeList()</code>. It generates a new string
3850 containing the content of the text and entity nodes. Note the extra
3851 argument inLine. If this argument is set to 1, the function will expand
3852 entity references. For example, instead of returning the &amp;Gnome;
3853 XML encoding in the string, it will substitute it with its value (say,
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +00003854 "GNU Network Object Model Environment").</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003855 </dd>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +00003856</dl>
Daniel Veillard10c6a8f1998-10-28 01:00:12 +00003857
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +00003858<h3><a name="Saving">Saving a tree</a></h3>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003859
3860<p>Basically 3 options are possible:</p>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +00003861<dl>
Daniel Veillarddd6b3671999-09-23 22:19:22 +00003862 <dt><code>void xmlDocDumpMemory(xmlDocPtr cur, xmlChar**mem, int
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003863 *size);</code></dt>
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00003864 <dd><p>Returns a buffer into which the document has been saved.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003865 </dd>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +00003866</dl>
3867<dl>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003868 <dt><code>extern void xmlDocDump(FILE *f, xmlDocPtr doc);</code></dt>
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00003869 <dd><p>Dumps a document to an open file descriptor.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003870 </dd>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +00003871</dl>
3872<dl>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003873 <dt><code>int xmlSaveFile(const char *filename, xmlDocPtr cur);</code></dt>
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +00003874 <dd><p>Saves the document to a file. In this case, the compression
3875 interface is triggered if it has been turned on.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003876 </dd>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +00003877</dl>
Daniel Veillard10c6a8f1998-10-28 01:00:12 +00003878
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +00003879<h3><a name="Compressio">Compression</a></h3>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003880
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00003881<p>The library transparently handles compression when doing file-based
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +00003882accesses. The level of compression on saves can be turned on either globally
3883or individually for one file:</p>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +00003884<dl>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003885 <dt><code>int xmlGetDocCompressMode (xmlDocPtr doc);</code></dt>
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00003886 <dd><p>Gets the document compression ratio (0-9).</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003887 </dd>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +00003888</dl>
3889<dl>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003890 <dt><code>void xmlSetDocCompressMode (xmlDocPtr doc, int mode);</code></dt>
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00003891 <dd><p>Sets the document compression ratio.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003892 </dd>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +00003893</dl>
3894<dl>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003895 <dt><code>int xmlGetCompressMode(void);</code></dt>
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00003896 <dd><p>Gets the default compression ratio.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003897 </dd>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +00003898</dl>
3899<dl>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003900 <dt><code>void xmlSetCompressMode(int mode);</code></dt>
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00003901 <dd><p>Sets the default compression ratio.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00003902 </dd>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +00003903</dl>
3904
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +00003905<h2><a name="Entities">Entities or no entities</a></h2>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00003906
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00003907<p>Entities in principle are similar to simple C macros. An entity defines an
3908abbreviation for a given string that you can reuse many times throughout the
3909content of your document. Entities are especially useful when a given string
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +00003910may occur frequently within a document, or to confine the change needed to a
3911document to a restricted area in the internal subset of the document (at the
3912beginning). Example:</p>
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00003913<pre>1 &lt;?xml version="1.0"?&gt;
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +000039142 &lt;!DOCTYPE EXAMPLE SYSTEM "example.dtd" [
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +000039153 &lt;!ENTITY xml "Extensible Markup Language"&gt;
39164 ]&gt;
39175 &lt;EXAMPLE&gt;
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +000039186 &amp;xml;
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +000039197 &lt;/EXAMPLE&gt;</pre>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00003920
3921<p>Line 3 declares the xml entity. Line 6 uses the xml entity, by prefixing
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +00003922its name with '&amp;' and following it by ';' without any spaces added. There
Daniel Veillard8a469172003-06-12 16:05:07 +00003923are 5 predefined entities in libxml2 allowing you to escape characters with
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00003924predefined meaning in some parts of the xml document content:
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00003925<strong>&amp;lt;</strong> for the character '&lt;', <strong>&amp;gt;</strong>
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00003926for the character '&gt;', <strong>&amp;apos;</strong> for the character ''',
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00003927<strong>&amp;quot;</strong> for the character '"', and
3928<strong>&amp;amp;</strong> for the character '&amp;'.</p>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00003929
3930<p>One of the problems related to entities is that you may want the parser to
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +00003931substitute an entity's content so that you can see the replacement text in
3932your application. Or you may prefer to keep entity references as such in the
3933content to be able to save the document back without losing this usually
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +00003934precious information (if the user went through the pain of explicitly
3935defining entities, he may have a a rather negative attitude if you blindly
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00003936substitute them as saving time). The <a
Daniel Veillard5373ea12003-07-24 13:09:13 +00003937href="html/libxml-parser.html#xmlSubstituteEntitiesDefault">xmlSubstituteEntitiesDefault()</a>
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00003938function allows you to check and change the behaviour, which is to not
3939substitute entities by default.</p>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00003940
Daniel Veillard8a469172003-06-12 16:05:07 +00003941<p>Here is the DOM tree built by libxml2 for the previous document in the
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00003942default case:</p>
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00003943<pre>/gnome/src/gnome-xml -&gt; ./xmllint --debug test/ent1
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00003944DOCUMENT
3945version=1.0
3946 ELEMENT EXAMPLE
3947 TEXT
3948 content=
3949 ENTITY_REF
3950 INTERNAL_GENERAL_ENTITY xml
3951 content=Extensible Markup Language
3952 TEXT
3953 content=</pre>
3954
3955<p>And here is the result when substituting entities:</p>
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00003956<pre>/gnome/src/gnome-xml -&gt; ./tester --debug --noent test/ent1
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00003957DOCUMENT
3958version=1.0
3959 ELEMENT EXAMPLE
3960 TEXT
3961 content= Extensible Markup Language</pre>
3962
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00003963<p>So, entities or no entities? Basically, it depends on your use case. I
3964suggest that you keep the non-substituting default behaviour and avoid using
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00003965entities in your XML document or data if you are not willing to handle the
3966entity references elements in the DOM tree.</p>
3967
Daniel Veillard8a469172003-06-12 16:05:07 +00003968<p>Note that at save time libxml2 enforces the conversion of the predefined
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00003969entities where necessary to prevent well-formedness problems, and will also
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +00003970transparently replace those with chars (i.e. it will not generate entity
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00003971reference elements in the DOM tree or call the reference() SAX callback when
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00003972finding them in the input).</p>
3973
Daniel Veillard7b9c4b72000-08-25 16:26:50 +00003974<p><span style="background-color: #FF0000">WARNING</span>: handling entities
Daniel Veillard8a469172003-06-12 16:05:07 +00003975on top of the libxml2 SAX interface is difficult!!! If you plan to use
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00003976non-predefined entities in your documents, then the learning curve to handle
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +00003977then using the SAX API may be long. If you plan to use complex documents, I
Daniel Veillard7b9c4b72000-08-25 16:26:50 +00003978strongly suggest you consider using the DOM interface instead and let libxml
Daniel Veillard8c6d6af2000-08-25 17:14:13 +00003979deal with the complexity rather than trying to do it yourself.</p>
Daniel Veillard7b9c4b72000-08-25 16:26:50 +00003980
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +00003981<h2><a name="Namespaces">Namespaces</a></h2>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00003982
Daniel Veillard8a469172003-06-12 16:05:07 +00003983<p>The libxml2 library implements <a
Daniel Veillardec303412000-03-24 13:41:54 +00003984href="http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml-names/">XML namespaces</a> support by
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00003985recognizing namespace constructs in the input, and does namespace lookup
Daniel Veillardec303412000-03-24 13:41:54 +00003986automatically when building the DOM tree. A namespace declaration is
3987associated with an in-memory structure and all elements or attributes within
3988that namespace point to it. Hence testing the namespace is a simple and fast
3989equality operation at the user level.</p>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00003990
Daniel Veillard8a469172003-06-12 16:05:07 +00003991<p>I suggest that people using libxml2 use a namespace, and declare it in the
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +00003992root element of their document as the default namespace. Then they don't need
3993to use the prefix in the content but we will have a basis for future semantic
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +00003994refinement and merging of data from different sources. This doesn't increase
Daniel Veillardec70e912001-02-26 20:10:45 +00003995the size of the XML output significantly, but significantly increases its
3996value in the long-term. Example:</p>
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00003997<pre>&lt;mydoc xmlns="http://mydoc.example.org/schemas/"&gt;
3998 &lt;elem1&gt;...&lt;/elem1&gt;
3999 &lt;elem2&gt;...&lt;/elem2&gt;
4000&lt;/mydoc&gt;</pre>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00004001
Daniel Veillardec70e912001-02-26 20:10:45 +00004002<p>The namespace value has to be an absolute URL, but the URL doesn't have to
4003point to any existing resource on the Web. It will bind all the element and
Daniel Veillardc0801af2002-05-28 16:28:42 +00004004attributes with that URL. I suggest to use an URL within a domain you
4005control, and that the URL should contain some kind of version information if
4006possible. For example, <code>"http://www.gnome.org/gnumeric/1.0/"</code> is a
4007good namespace scheme.</p>
Daniel Veillardec303412000-03-24 13:41:54 +00004008
4009<p>Then when you load a file, make sure that a namespace carrying the
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +00004010version-independent prefix is installed on the root element of your document,
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00004011and if the version information don't match something you know, warn the user
4012and be liberal in what you accept as the input. Also do *not* try to base
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00004013namespace checking on the prefix value. &lt;foo:text&gt; may be exactly the
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +00004014same as &lt;bar:text&gt; in another document. What really matters is the URI
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00004015associated with the element or the attribute, not the prefix string (which is
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +00004016just a shortcut for the full URI). In libxml, element and attributes have an
Daniel Veillardec303412000-03-24 13:41:54 +00004017<code>ns</code> field pointing to an xmlNs structure detailing the namespace
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +00004018prefix and its URI.</p>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00004019
4020<p>@@Interfaces@@</p>
Daniel Veillard3e35f8e2003-10-21 00:05:38 +00004021<pre>xmlNodePtr node;
Daniel Veillardfc8dc352003-10-18 09:07:46 +00004022if(!strncmp(node-&gt;name,"mytag",5)
4023 &amp;&amp; node-&gt;ns
4024 &amp;&amp; !strcmp(node-&gt;ns-&gt;href,"http://www.mysite.com/myns/1.0")) {
4025 ...
Daniel Veillard3e35f8e2003-10-21 00:05:38 +00004026}</pre>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00004027
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +00004028<p>Usually people object to using namespaces together with validity checking.
4029I will try to make sure that using namespaces won't break validity checking,
4030so even if you plan to use or currently are using validation I strongly
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +00004031suggest adding namespaces to your document. A default namespace scheme
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00004032<code>xmlns="http://...."</code> should not break validity even on less
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +00004033flexible parsers. Using namespaces to mix and differentiate content coming
Daniel Veillard3e35f8e2003-10-21 00:05:38 +00004034from multiple DTDs will certainly break current validation schemes. To check
4035such documents one needs to use schema-validation, which is supported in
4036libxml2 as well. See <a href="http://www.relaxng.org/">relagx-ng</a> and <a
4037href="http://www.w3c.org/XML/Schema">w3c-schema</a>.</p>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00004038
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00004039<h2><a name="Upgrading">Upgrading 1.x code</a></h2>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00004040
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00004041<p>Incompatible changes:</p>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00004042
Daniel Veillard8a469172003-06-12 16:05:07 +00004043<p>Version 2 of libxml2 is the first version introducing serious backward
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00004044incompatible changes. The main goals were:</p>
4045<ul>
4046 <li>a general cleanup. A number of mistakes inherited from the very early
4047 versions couldn't be changed due to compatibility constraints. Example
4048 the "childs" element in the nodes.</li>
4049 <li>Uniformization of the various nodes, at least for their header and link
4050 parts (doc, parent, children, prev, next), the goal is a simpler
4051 programming model and simplifying the task of the DOM implementors.</li>
4052 <li>better conformances to the XML specification, for example version 1.x
4053 had an heuristic to try to detect ignorable white spaces. As a result the
4054 SAX event generated were ignorableWhitespace() while the spec requires
4055 character() in that case. This also mean that a number of DOM node
4056 containing blank text may populate the DOM tree which were not present
4057 before.</li>
4058</ul>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00004059
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00004060<h3>How to fix libxml-1.x code:</h3>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00004061
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00004062<p>So client code of libxml designed to run with version 1.x may have to be
4063changed to compile against version 2.x of libxml. Here is a list of changes
4064that I have collected, they may not be sufficient, so in case you find other
Daniel Veillardfc8dc352003-10-18 09:07:46 +00004065change which are required, <a href="mailto:Daniel.Veillard@w3.org">drop me a
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00004066mail</a>:</p>
4067<ol>
4068 <li>The package name have changed from libxml to libxml2, the library name
4069 is now -lxml2 . There is a new xml2-config script which should be used to
4070 select the right parameters libxml2</li>
4071 <li>Node <strong>childs</strong> field has been renamed
4072 <strong>children</strong> so s/childs/children/g should be applied
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00004073 (probability of having "childs" anywhere else is close to 0+</li>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00004074 <li>The document don't have anymore a <strong>root</strong> element it has
4075 been replaced by <strong>children</strong> and usually you will get a
4076 list of element here. For example a Dtd element for the internal subset
4077 and it's declaration may be found in that list, as well as processing
4078 instructions or comments found before or after the document root element.
4079 Use <strong>xmlDocGetRootElement(doc)</strong> to get the root element of
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00004080 a document. Alternatively if you are sure to not reference DTDs nor have
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00004081 PIs or comments before or after the root element
4082 s/-&gt;root/-&gt;children/g will probably do it.</li>
4083 <li>The white space issue, this one is more complex, unless special case of
4084 validating parsing, the line breaks and spaces usually used for indenting
4085 and formatting the document content becomes significant. So they are
4086 reported by SAX and if your using the DOM tree, corresponding nodes are
4087 generated. Too approach can be taken:
4088 <ol>
4089 <li>lazy one, use the compatibility call
4090 <strong>xmlKeepBlanksDefault(0)</strong> but be aware that you are
4091 relying on a special (and possibly broken) set of heuristics of
4092 libxml to detect ignorable blanks. Don't complain if it breaks or
4093 make your application not 100% clean w.r.t. to it's input.</li>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00004094 <li>the Right Way: change you code to accept possibly insignificant
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00004095 blanks characters, or have your tree populated with weird blank text
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00004096 nodes. You can spot them using the commodity function
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00004097 <strong>xmlIsBlankNode(node)</strong> returning 1 for such blank
4098 nodes.</li>
4099 </ol>
4100 <p>Note also that with the new default the output functions don't add any
4101 extra indentation when saving a tree in order to be able to round trip
4102 (read and save) without inflating the document with extra formatting
4103 chars.</p>
4104 </li>
4105 <li>The include path has changed to $prefix/libxml/ and the includes
4106 themselves uses this new prefix in includes instructions... If you are
4107 using (as expected) the
4108 <pre>xml2-config --cflags</pre>
4109 <p>output to generate you compile commands this will probably work out of
4110 the box</p>
4111 </li>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00004112 <li>xmlDetectCharEncoding takes an extra argument indicating the length in
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00004113 byte of the head of the document available for character detection.</li>
4114</ol>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00004115
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00004116<h3>Ensuring both libxml-1.x and libxml-2.x compatibility</h3>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00004117
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00004118<p>Two new version of libxml (1.8.11) and libxml2 (2.3.4) have been released
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00004119to allow smooth upgrade of existing libxml v1code while retaining
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00004120compatibility. They offers the following:</p>
4121<ol>
4122 <li>similar include naming, one should use
4123 <strong>#include&lt;libxml/...&gt;</strong> in both cases.</li>
4124 <li>similar identifiers defined via macros for the child and root fields:
4125 respectively <strong>xmlChildrenNode</strong> and
4126 <strong>xmlRootNode</strong></li>
4127 <li>a new macro <strong>LIBXML_TEST_VERSION</strong> which should be
4128 inserted once in the client code</li>
4129</ol>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00004130
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00004131<p>So the roadmap to upgrade your existing libxml applications is the
4132following:</p>
4133<ol>
4134 <li>install the libxml-1.8.8 (and libxml-devel-1.8.8) packages</li>
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00004135 <li>find all occurrences where the xmlDoc <strong>root</strong> field is
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00004136 used and change it to <strong>xmlRootNode</strong></li>
Daniel Veillardc0801af2002-05-28 16:28:42 +00004137 <li>similarly find all occurrences where the xmlNode
4138 <strong>childs</strong> field is used and change it to
4139 <strong>xmlChildrenNode</strong></li>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00004140 <li>add a <strong>LIBXML_TEST_VERSION</strong> macro somewhere in your
4141 <strong>main()</strong> or in the library init entry point</li>
4142 <li>Recompile, check compatibility, it should still work</li>
Daniel Veillardc0801af2002-05-28 16:28:42 +00004143 <li>Change your configure script to look first for xml2-config and fall
4144 back using xml-config . Use the --cflags and --libs output of the command
4145 as the Include and Linking parameters needed to use libxml.</li>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00004146 <li>install libxml2-2.3.x and libxml2-devel-2.3.x (libxml-1.8.y and
4147 libxml-devel-1.8.y can be kept simultaneously)</li>
4148 <li>remove your config.cache, relaunch your configuration mechanism, and
4149 recompile, if steps 2 and 3 were done right it should compile as-is</li>
4150 <li>Test that your application is still running correctly, if not this may
4151 be due to extra empty nodes due to formating spaces being kept in libxml2
4152 contrary to libxml1, in that case insert xmlKeepBlanksDefault(1) in your
4153 code before calling the parser (next to
4154 <strong>LIBXML_TEST_VERSION</strong> is a fine place).</li>
4155</ol>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00004156
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00004157<p>Following those steps should work. It worked for some of my own code.</p>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00004158
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00004159<p>Let me put some emphasis on the fact that there is far more changes from
4160libxml 1.x to 2.x than the ones you may have to patch for. The overall code
4161has been considerably cleaned up and the conformance to the XML specification
4162has been drastically improved too. Don't take those changes as an excuse to
4163not upgrade, it may cost a lot on the long term ...</p>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00004164
Daniel Veillard52dcab32001-10-30 12:51:17 +00004165<h2><a name="Thread">Thread safety</a></h2>
4166
Daniel Veillard8a469172003-06-12 16:05:07 +00004167<p>Starting with 2.4.7, libxml2 makes provisions to ensure that concurrent
Daniel Veillard52dcab32001-10-30 12:51:17 +00004168threads can safely work in parallel parsing different documents. There is
4169however a couple of things to do to ensure it:</p>
4170<ul>
4171 <li>configure the library accordingly using the --with-threads options</li>
4172 <li>call xmlInitParser() in the "main" thread before using any of the
Daniel Veillard8a469172003-06-12 16:05:07 +00004173 libxml2 API (except possibly selecting a different memory allocator)</li>
Daniel Veillard52dcab32001-10-30 12:51:17 +00004174</ul>
4175
4176<p>Note that the thread safety cannot be ensured for multiple threads sharing
4177the same document, the locking must be done at the application level, libxml
4178exports a basic mutex and reentrant mutexes API in &lt;libxml/threads.h&gt;.
4179The parts of the library checked for thread safety are:</p>
4180<ul>
4181 <li>concurrent loading</li>
4182 <li>file access resolution</li>
4183 <li>catalog access</li>
4184 <li>catalog building</li>
4185 <li>entities lookup/accesses</li>
4186 <li>validation</li>
4187 <li>global variables per-thread override</li>
4188 <li>memory handling</li>
4189</ul>
4190
4191<p>XPath is supposed to be thread safe now, but this wasn't tested
4192seriously.</p>
4193
Daniel Veillard35008381999-10-25 13:15:52 +00004194<h2><a name="DOM"></a><a name="Principles">DOM Principles</a></h2>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00004195
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +00004196<p><a href="http://www.w3.org/DOM/">DOM</a> stands for the <em>Document
4197Object Model</em>; this is an API for accessing XML or HTML structured
4198documents. Native support for DOM in Gnome is on the way (module gnome-dom),
4199and will be based on gnome-xml. This will be a far cleaner interface to
4200manipulate XML files within Gnome since it won't expose the internal
4201structure.</p>
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +00004202
Daniel Veillard8a469172003-06-12 16:05:07 +00004203<p>The current DOM implementation on top of libxml2 is the <a
Daniel Veillarda47fb3d2001-03-25 17:23:49 +00004204href="http://cvs.gnome.org/lxr/source/gdome2/">gdome2 Gnome module</a>, this
4205is a full DOM interface, thanks to Paolo Casarini, check the <a
4206href="http://www.cs.unibo.it/~casarini/gdome2/">Gdome2 homepage</a> for more
4207informations.</p>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00004208
Daniel Veillard35008381999-10-25 13:15:52 +00004209<h2><a name="Example"></a><a name="real">A real example</a></h2>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00004210
4211<p>Here is a real size example, where the actual content of the application
4212data is not kept in the DOM tree but uses internal structures. It is based on
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +00004213a proposal to keep a database of jobs related to Gnome, with an XML based
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00004214storage structure. Here is an <a href="gjobs.xml">XML encoded jobs
4215base</a>:</p>
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00004216<pre>&lt;?xml version="1.0"?&gt;
4217&lt;gjob:Helping xmlns:gjob="http://www.gnome.org/some-location"&gt;
4218 &lt;gjob:Jobs&gt;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +00004219
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00004220 &lt;gjob:Job&gt;
4221 &lt;gjob:Project ID="3"/&gt;
4222 &lt;gjob:Application&gt;GBackup&lt;/gjob:Application&gt;
4223 &lt;gjob:Category&gt;Development&lt;/gjob:Category&gt;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +00004224
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00004225 &lt;gjob:Update&gt;
4226 &lt;gjob:Status&gt;Open&lt;/gjob:Status&gt;
4227 &lt;gjob:Modified&gt;Mon, 07 Jun 1999 20:27:45 -0400 MET DST&lt;/gjob:Modified&gt;
4228 &lt;gjob:Salary&gt;USD 0.00&lt;/gjob:Salary&gt;
4229 &lt;/gjob:Update&gt;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +00004230
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00004231 &lt;gjob:Developers&gt;
4232 &lt;gjob:Developer&gt;
4233 &lt;/gjob:Developer&gt;
4234 &lt;/gjob:Developers&gt;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +00004235
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00004236 &lt;gjob:Contact&gt;
4237 &lt;gjob:Person&gt;Nathan Clemons&lt;/gjob:Person&gt;
4238 &lt;gjob:Email&gt;nathan@windsofstorm.net&lt;/gjob:Email&gt;
4239 &lt;gjob:Company&gt;
4240 &lt;/gjob:Company&gt;
4241 &lt;gjob:Organisation&gt;
4242 &lt;/gjob:Organisation&gt;
4243 &lt;gjob:Webpage&gt;
4244 &lt;/gjob:Webpage&gt;
4245 &lt;gjob:Snailmail&gt;
4246 &lt;/gjob:Snailmail&gt;
4247 &lt;gjob:Phone&gt;
4248 &lt;/gjob:Phone&gt;
4249 &lt;/gjob:Contact&gt;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +00004250
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00004251 &lt;gjob:Requirements&gt;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +00004252 The program should be released as free software, under the GPL.
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00004253 &lt;/gjob:Requirements&gt;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +00004254
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00004255 &lt;gjob:Skills&gt;
4256 &lt;/gjob:Skills&gt;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +00004257
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00004258 &lt;gjob:Details&gt;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +00004259 A GNOME based system that will allow a superuser to configure
4260 compressed and uncompressed files and/or file systems to be backed
4261 up with a supported media in the system. This should be able to
4262 perform via find commands generating a list of files that are passed
4263 to tar, dd, cpio, cp, gzip, etc., to be directed to the tape machine
4264 or via operations performed on the filesystem itself. Email
4265 notification and GUI status display very important.
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00004266 &lt;/gjob:Details&gt;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +00004267
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00004268 &lt;/gjob:Job&gt;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +00004269
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00004270 &lt;/gjob:Jobs&gt;
4271&lt;/gjob:Helping&gt;</pre>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00004272
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +00004273<p>While loading the XML file into an internal DOM tree is a matter of
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00004274calling only a couple of functions, browsing the tree to gather the data and
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +00004275generate the internal structures is harder, and more error prone.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00004276
4277<p>The suggested principle is to be tolerant with respect to the input
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +00004278structure. For example, the ordering of the attributes is not significant,
4279the XML specification is clear about it. It's also usually a good idea not to
Daniel Veillardec70e912001-02-26 20:10:45 +00004280depend on the order of the children of a given node, unless it really makes
4281things harder. Here is some code to parse the information for a person:</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00004282<pre>/*
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +00004283 * A person record
4284 */
4285typedef struct person {
4286 char *name;
4287 char *email;
4288 char *company;
4289 char *organisation;
4290 char *smail;
4291 char *webPage;
4292 char *phone;
4293} person, *personPtr;
4294
4295/*
4296 * And the code needed to parse it
4297 */
4298personPtr parsePerson(xmlDocPtr doc, xmlNsPtr ns, xmlNodePtr cur) {
4299 personPtr ret = NULL;
4300
4301DEBUG("parsePerson\n");
4302 /*
4303 * allocate the struct
4304 */
4305 ret = (personPtr) malloc(sizeof(person));
4306 if (ret == NULL) {
4307 fprintf(stderr,"out of memory\n");
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00004308 return(NULL);
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +00004309 }
4310 memset(ret, 0, sizeof(person));
4311
4312 /* We don't care what the top level element name is */
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00004313 cur = cur-&gt;xmlChildrenNode;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +00004314 while (cur != NULL) {
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00004315 if ((!strcmp(cur-&gt;name, "Person")) &amp;&amp; (cur-&gt;ns == ns))
4316 ret-&gt;name = xmlNodeListGetString(doc, cur-&gt;xmlChildrenNode, 1);
4317 if ((!strcmp(cur-&gt;name, "Email")) &amp;&amp; (cur-&gt;ns == ns))
4318 ret-&gt;email = xmlNodeListGetString(doc, cur-&gt;xmlChildrenNode, 1);
4319 cur = cur-&gt;next;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +00004320 }
4321
4322 return(ret);
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00004323}</pre>
4324
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +00004325<p>Here are a couple of things to notice:</p>
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +00004326<ul>
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +00004327 <li>Usually a recursive parsing style is the more convenient one: XML data
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00004328 is by nature subject to repetitive constructs and usually exhibits highly
4329 structured patterns.</li>
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +00004330 <li>The two arguments of type <em>xmlDocPtr</em> and <em>xmlNsPtr</em>,
4331 i.e. the pointer to the global XML document and the namespace reserved to
4332 the application. Document wide information are needed for example to
4333 decode entities and it's a good coding practice to define a namespace for
4334 your application set of data and test that the element and attributes
4335 you're analyzing actually pertains to your application space. This is
4336 done by a simple equality test (cur-&gt;ns == ns).</li>
Daniel Veillardec70e912001-02-26 20:10:45 +00004337 <li>To retrieve text and attributes value, you can use the function
4338 <em>xmlNodeListGetString</em> to gather all the text and entity reference
4339 nodes generated by the DOM output and produce an single text string.</li>
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +00004340</ul>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00004341
4342<p>Here is another piece of code used to parse another level of the
4343structure:</p>
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00004344<pre>#include &lt;libxml/tree.h&gt;
Daniel Veillard361d8452000-04-03 19:48:13 +00004345/*
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +00004346 * a Description for a Job
4347 */
4348typedef struct job {
4349 char *projectID;
4350 char *application;
4351 char *category;
4352 personPtr contact;
4353 int nbDevelopers;
4354 personPtr developers[100]; /* using dynamic alloc is left as an exercise */
4355} job, *jobPtr;
4356
4357/*
4358 * And the code needed to parse it
4359 */
4360jobPtr parseJob(xmlDocPtr doc, xmlNsPtr ns, xmlNodePtr cur) {
4361 jobPtr ret = NULL;
4362
4363DEBUG("parseJob\n");
4364 /*
4365 * allocate the struct
4366 */
4367 ret = (jobPtr) malloc(sizeof(job));
4368 if (ret == NULL) {
4369 fprintf(stderr,"out of memory\n");
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00004370 return(NULL);
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +00004371 }
4372 memset(ret, 0, sizeof(job));
4373
4374 /* We don't care what the top level element name is */
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00004375 cur = cur-&gt;xmlChildrenNode;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +00004376 while (cur != NULL) {
4377
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00004378 if ((!strcmp(cur-&gt;name, "Project")) &amp;&amp; (cur-&gt;ns == ns)) {
4379 ret-&gt;projectID = xmlGetProp(cur, "ID");
4380 if (ret-&gt;projectID == NULL) {
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00004381 fprintf(stderr, "Project has no ID\n");
4382 }
4383 }
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +00004384 if ((!strcmp(cur-&gt;name, "Application")) &amp;&amp; (cur-&gt;ns == ns))
4385 ret-&gt;application = xmlNodeListGetString(doc, cur-&gt;xmlChildrenNode, 1);
4386 if ((!strcmp(cur-&gt;name, "Category")) &amp;&amp; (cur-&gt;ns == ns))
4387 ret-&gt;category = xmlNodeListGetString(doc, cur-&gt;xmlChildrenNode, 1);
4388 if ((!strcmp(cur-&gt;name, "Contact")) &amp;&amp; (cur-&gt;ns == ns))
4389 ret-&gt;contact = parsePerson(doc, ns, cur);
4390 cur = cur-&gt;next;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +00004391 }
4392
4393 return(ret);
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00004394}</pre>
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +00004395
Daniel Veillardec70e912001-02-26 20:10:45 +00004396<p>Once you are used to it, writing this kind of code is quite simple, but
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00004397boring. Ultimately, it could be possible to write stubbers taking either C
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +00004398data structure definitions, a set of XML examples or an XML DTD and produce
4399the code needed to import and export the content between C data and XML
4400storage. This is left as an exercise to the reader :-)</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00004401
Daniel Veillard6f0adb52000-07-03 11:41:26 +00004402<p>Feel free to use <a href="example/gjobread.c">the code for the full C
4403parsing example</a> as a template, it is also available with Makefile in the
4404Gnome CVS base under gnome-xml/example</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +00004405
Daniel Veillardc310d562000-06-23 18:32:15 +00004406<h2><a name="Contributi">Contributions</a></h2>
4407<ul>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +00004408 <li>Bjorn Reese, William Brack and Thomas Broyer have provided a number of
4409 patches, Gary Pennington worked on the validation API, threading support
4410 and Solaris port.</li>
4411 <li>John Fleck helps maintaining the documentation and man pages.</li>
Daniel Veillard7b4b2f92003-01-06 13:11:20 +00004412 <li><a href="mailto:igor@zlatkovic.com">Igor Zlatkovic</a> is now the
4413 maintainer of the Windows port, <a
4414 href="http://www.zlatkovic.com/projects/libxml/index.html">he provides
4415 binaries</a></li>
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +00004416 <li><a href="mailto:Gary.Pennington@sun.com">Gary Pennington</a> provides
4417 <a href="http://garypennington.net/libxml2/">Solaris binaries</a></li>
Daniel Veillarde356c282001-03-10 12:32:04 +00004418 <li><a
4419 href="http://mail.gnome.org/archives/xml/2001-March/msg00014.html">Matt
Daniel Veillard63d83142002-05-20 06:51:05 +00004420 Sergeant</a> developed <a
4421 href="http://axkit.org/download/">XML::LibXSLT</a>, a Perl wrapper for
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +00004422 libxml2/libxslt as part of the <a href="http://axkit.com/">AxKit XML
4423 application server</a></li>
4424 <li><a href="mailto:fnatter@gmx.net">Felix Natter</a> and <a
4425 href="mailto:geertk@ai.rug.nl">Geert Kloosterman</a> provide <a
Daniel Veillardca989762001-06-23 17:39:29 +00004426 href="libxml-doc.el">an emacs module</a> to lookup libxml(2) functions
Daniel Veillard3f6f7f62000-06-30 17:58:25 +00004427 documentation</li>
Daniel Veillardaf43f632002-03-08 15:05:20 +00004428 <li><a href="mailto:sherwin@nlm.nih.gov">Ziying Sherwin</a> provided <a
4429 href="http://xmlsoft.org/messages/0488.html">man pages</a></li>
Daniel Veillard5168dbf2001-07-07 00:18:23 +00004430 <li>there is a module for <a
4431 href="http://acs-misc.sourceforge.net/nsxml.html">libxml/libxslt support
4432 in OpenNSD/AOLServer</a></li>
Daniel Veillard2d347fa2002-03-17 10:34:11 +00004433 <li><a href="mailto:dkuhlman@cutter.rexx.com">Dave Kuhlman</a> provided the
4434 first version of libxml/libxslt <a
4435 href="http://www.rexx.com/~dkuhlman">wrappers for Python</a></li>
Daniel Veillard1aadc442001-11-28 13:10:32 +00004436 <li>Petr Kozelka provides <a
4437 href="http://sourceforge.net/projects/libxml2-pas">Pascal units to glue
4438 libxml2</a> with Kylix and Delphi and other Pascal compilers</li>
Daniel Veillard2d347fa2002-03-17 10:34:11 +00004439 <li><a href="mailto:aleksey@aleksey.com">Aleksey Sanin</a> implemented the
4440 <a href="http://www.w3.org/Signature/">XML Canonicalization and XML
4441 Digital Signature</a> <a
4442 href="http://www.aleksey.com/xmlsec/">implementations for libxml2</a></li>
Daniel Veillard17bed982003-02-24 20:11:43 +00004443 <li><a href="mailto:Steve.Ball@zveno.com">Steve Ball</a>, <a
4444 href="http://www.zveno.com/">Zveno</a> and contributors maintain <a
4445 href="http://tclxml.sourceforge.net/">tcl bindings for libxml2 and
4446 libxslt</a>, as well as <a
4447 href="http://tclxml.sf.net/tkxmllint.html">tkxmllint</a> a GUI for
4448 xmllint and <a href="http://tclxml.sf.net/tkxsltproc.html">tkxsltproc</a>
4449 a GUI for xsltproc.</li>
Daniel Veillardc310d562000-06-23 18:32:15 +00004450</ul>
4451
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +00004452<p></p>
Daniel Veillardccb09631998-10-27 06:21:04 +00004453</body>
4454</html>