Gitiles
Code Review Sign In
gerrit-public.fairphone.software / platform / external / libxml2 / dadd0873e0b036098137e6b1686260dd4a18e06a / . / doc / xml.html
blob: c9f4befdfc2873d7039553d6cb1d6bb2dcf741ab [file] [log] [blame]
Daniel Veillard09ab7e12001-07-10 15:49:44 +0000[diff] [blame]1<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"
2 "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
Daniel Veillardccb09631998-10-27 06:21:04 +0000[diff] [blame]3<html>
4<head>
Daniel Veillardec78c0f2000-08-25 10:25:23 +0000[diff] [blame]5 <title>The XML C library for Gnome</title>
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame]6 <meta name="GENERATOR" content="amaya V5.0">
Daniel Veillardb24054a1999-12-18 15:32:46 +0000[diff] [blame]7 <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html">
Daniel Veillardccb09631998-10-27 06:21:04 +0000[diff] [blame]8</head>
Daniel Veillardccb09631998-10-27 06:21:04 +0000[diff] [blame]9
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]10<body bgcolor="#ffffff">
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]11<p><a href="http://www.gnome.org/"><img src="smallfootonly.gif"
12alt="Gnome Logo"></a><a href="http://www.w3.org/Status"><img src="w3c.png"
Daniel Veillardb370a742001-06-09 16:58:47 +0000[diff] [blame]13alt="W3C Logo"></a><a href="http://www.redhat.com"><img src="redhat.gif"
14alt="Red Hat Logo"></a></p>
Daniel Veillardec303412000-03-24 13:41:54 +0000[diff] [blame]15
Daniel Veillardec78c0f2000-08-25 10:25:23 +0000[diff] [blame]16<h1 align="center">The XML C library for Gnome</h1>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]17
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]18<h2 style="text-align: center">libxml, a.k.a. gnome-xml</h2>
19
20<p></p>
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000[diff] [blame]21<ul>
22 <li><a href="#Introducti">Introduction</a></li>
23 <li><a href="#Documentat">Documentation</a></li>
Daniel Veillardd5f97f82000-09-17 16:38:14 +0000[diff] [blame]24 <li><a href="#Reporting">Reporting bugs and getting help</a></li>
25 <li><a href="#help">how to help</a></li>
Daniel Veillard10a2c651999-12-12 13:03:50 +0000[diff] [blame]26 <li><a href="#Downloads">Downloads</a></li>
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000[diff] [blame]27 <li><a href="#News">News</a></li>
28 <li><a href="#XML">XML</a></li>
Daniel Veillard82687162001-01-22 15:32:01 +0000[diff] [blame]29 <li><a href="#XSLT">XSLT</a></li>
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000[diff] [blame]30 <li><a href="#tree">The tree output</a></li>
31 <li><a href="#interface">The SAX interface</a></li>
32 <li><a href="#library">The XML library interfaces</a>
33 <ul>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000[diff] [blame]34 <li><a href="#Invoking">Invoking the parser: the pull way</a></li>
35 <li><a href="#Invoking">Invoking the parser: the push way</a></li>
36 <li><a href="#Invoking2">Invoking the parser: the SAX interface</a></li>
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000[diff] [blame]37 <li><a href="#Building">Building a tree from scratch</a></li>
38 <li><a href="#Traversing">Traversing the tree</a></li>
39 <li><a href="#Modifying">Modifying the tree</a></li>
40 <li><a href="#Saving">Saving the tree</a></li>
41 <li><a href="#Compressio">Compression</a></li>
42 </ul>
43 </li>
44 <li><a href="#Entities">Entities or no entities</a></li>
45 <li><a href="#Namespaces">Namespaces</a></li>
46 <li><a href="#Validation">Validation</a></li>
47 <li><a href="#Principles">DOM principles</a></li>
48 <li><a href="#real">A real example</a></li>
Daniel Veillard96984452000-08-31 13:50:12 +0000[diff] [blame]49 <li><a href="#Contributi">Contributions</a></li>
50</ul>
51
52<p>Separate documents:</p>
53<ul>
54 <li><a href="upgrade.html">upgrade instructions for migrating to
55 libxml2</a></li>
56 <li><a href="encoding.html">libxml Internationalization support</a></li>
57 <li><a href="xmlio.html">libxml Input/Output interfaces</a></li>
Daniel Veillard189446d2000-10-13 10:23:06 +0000[diff] [blame]58 <li><a href="xmlmem.html">libxml Memory interfaces</a></li>
Daniel Veillarde7ead2d2001-08-22 23:44:09 +0000[diff] [blame]59 <li><a href="catalog.html">libxml Catalog support</a></li>
Daniel Veillard300f7d62000-11-24 13:04:04 +0000[diff] [blame]60 <li><a href="xmldtd.html">a short introduction about DTDs and
61 libxml</a></li>
Daniel Veillard6e6a6cc2001-02-15 15:55:44 +0000[diff] [blame]62 <li><a href="http://xmlsoft.org/XSLT/">the libxslt page</a></li>
Daniel Veillard7b06bcb2001-06-22 16:03:51 +0000[diff] [blame]63 <li><a href="http://www.cs.unibo.it/~casarini/gdome2/">the gdome2 page: a
64 standard DOM interface for libxml2</a></li>
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000[diff] [blame]65</ul>
66
67<h2><a name="Introducti">Introduction</a></h2>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]68
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +0000[diff] [blame]69<p>This document describes libxml, the <a
Daniel Veillardec78c0f2000-08-25 10:25:23 +0000[diff] [blame]70href="http://www.w3.org/XML/">XML</a> C library developped for the <a
71href="http://www.gnome.org/">Gnome</a> project. <a
72href="http://www.w3.org/XML/">XML is a standard</a> for building tag-based
73structured documents/data.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]74
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000[diff] [blame]75<p>Here are some key points about libxml:</p>
76<ul>
Daniel Veillard189446d2000-10-13 10:23:06 +0000[diff] [blame]77 <li>Libxml exports Push and Pull type parser interfaces for both XML and
78 HTML.</li>
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000[diff] [blame]79 <li>Libxml can do DTD validation at parse time, using a parsed document
80 instance, or with an arbitrary DTD.</li>
81 <li>Libxml now includes nearly complete <a
Daniel Veillard8c2ecaf2001-07-10 17:53:07 +0000[diff] [blame]82 href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xpath">XPath</a>, <a
83 href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xptr">XPointer</a> and <a
84 href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xinclude">XInclude</a> implementations.</li>
Daniel Veillardec78c0f2000-08-25 10:25:23 +0000[diff] [blame]85 <li>It is written in plain C, making as few assumptions as possible, and
Daniel Veillard189446d2000-10-13 10:23:06 +0000[diff] [blame]86 sticking closely to ANSI C/POSIX for easy embedding. Works on
Daniel Veillardab8500d2000-10-15 21:06:19 +0000[diff] [blame]87 Linux/Unix/Windows, ported to a number of other platforms.</li>
Daniel Veillardec70e912001-02-26 20:10:45 +0000[diff] [blame]88 <li>Basic support for HTTP and FTP client allowing aplications to fetch
89 remote resources</li>
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000[diff] [blame]90 <li>The design is modular, most of the extensions can be compiled out.</li>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000[diff] [blame]91 <li>The internal document repesentation is as close as possible to the <a
92 href="http://www.w3.org/DOM/">DOM</a> interfaces.</li>
93 <li>Libxml also has a <a href="http://www.megginson.com/SAX/index.html">SAX
Daniel Veillard402e8c82000-02-29 22:57:47 +0000[diff] [blame]94 like interface</a>; the interface is designed to be compatible with <a
95 href="http://www.jclark.com/xml/expat.html">Expat</a>.</li>
Daniel Veillardec303412000-03-24 13:41:54 +0000[diff] [blame]96 <li>This library is released both under the <a
97 href="http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Legal/copyright-software-19980720.html">W3C
Daniel Veillard189446d2000-10-13 10:23:06 +0000[diff] [blame]98 IPR</a> and the <a href="http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/lesser.html">GNU
99 LGPL</a>. Use either at your convenience, basically this should make
100 everybody happy, if not, drop me a mail.</li>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000[diff] [blame]101</ul>
Daniel Veillardccb09631998-10-27 06:21:04 +0000[diff] [blame]102
Daniel Veillarde0c1d722001-03-21 10:28:36 +0000[diff] [blame]103<p>Warning: unless you are forced to because your application links with a
104Gnome library requiring it, <strong><span
105style="background-color: #FF0000">Do Not Use libxml1</span></strong>, use
106libxml2</p>
107
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000[diff] [blame]108<h2><a name="Documentat">Documentation</a></h2>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]109
Daniel Veillard402e8c82000-02-29 22:57:47 +0000[diff] [blame]110<p>There are some on-line resources about using libxml:</p>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000[diff] [blame]111<ol>
Daniel Veillard365e13b2000-07-02 07:56:37 +0000[diff] [blame]112 <li>Check the <a href="FAQ.html">FAQ</a></li>
Daniel Veillardc19fccc2000-07-03 11:52:01 +0000[diff] [blame]113 <li>Check the <a href="http://xmlsoft.org/html/libxml-lib.html">extensive
Daniel Veillard8c6d6af2000-08-25 17:14:13 +0000[diff] [blame]114 documentation</a> automatically extracted from code comments (using <a
115 href="http://cvs.gnome.org/bonsai/rview.cgi?cvsroot=/cvs/gnome&amp;dir=gtk-doc">gtk
116 doc</a>).</li>
Daniel Veillard8d869642000-07-14 12:12:59 +0000[diff] [blame]117 <li>Look at the documentation about <a href="encoding.html">libxml
118 internationalization support</a></li>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000[diff] [blame]119 <li>This page provides a global overview and <a href="#real">some
Daniel Veillard402e8c82000-02-29 22:57:47 +0000[diff] [blame]120 examples</a> on how to use libxml.</li>
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame]121 <li><a href="mailto:james@daa.com.au">James Henstridge</a>
122 wrote <a
Daniel Veillard402e8c82000-02-29 22:57:47 +0000[diff] [blame]123 href="http://www.daa.com.au/~james/gnome/xml-sax/xml-sax.html">some nice
124 documentation</a> explaining how to use the libxml SAX interface.</li>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000[diff] [blame]125 <li>George Lebl wrote <a
126 href="http://www-4.ibm.com/software/developer/library/gnome3/">an article
Daniel Veillard402e8c82000-02-29 22:57:47 +0000[diff] [blame]127 for IBM developerWorks</a> about using libxml.</li>
Daniel Veillardec303412000-03-24 13:41:54 +0000[diff] [blame]128 <li>Check <a href="http://cvs.gnome.org/lxr/source/gnome-xml/TODO">the TODO
129 file</a></li>
130 <li>Read the <a href="upgrade.html">1.x to 2.x upgrade path</a>. If you are
131 starting a new project using libxml you should really use the 2.x
132 version.</li>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000[diff] [blame]133 <li>And don't forget to look at the <a href="/messages/">mailing-list
Daniel Veillardc310d562000-06-23 18:32:15 +0000[diff] [blame]134 archive</a>.</li>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000[diff] [blame]135</ol>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]136
Daniel Veillardd5f97f82000-09-17 16:38:14 +0000[diff] [blame]137<h2><a name="Reporting">Reporting bugs and getting help</a></h2>
Daniel Veillard4c3a2031999-11-19 17:46:26 +0000[diff] [blame]138
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame]139<p>Well, bugs or missing features are always possible, and I will make a
140point of fixing them in a timely fashion. The best way to report a bug is to
141use the <a href="http://bugzilla.gnome.org/buglist.cgi?product=libxml">Gnome
142bug tracking database</a> (make sure to use the "libxml" module name). I look
143at reports there regularly and it's good to have a reminder when a bug is
144still open. Check the <a
145href="http://bugzilla.gnome.org/bugwritinghelp.html">instructions on
146reporting bugs</a> and be sure to specify that the bug is for the package
147libxml.</p>
Daniel Veillard4c3a2031999-11-19 17:46:26 +0000[diff] [blame]148
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000[diff] [blame]149<p>There is also a mailing-list <a
Daniel Veillard3197f162001-04-04 00:40:08 +0000[diff] [blame]150href="mailto:xml@gnome.org">xml@gnome.org</a> for libxml, with an <a
151href="http://mail.gnome.org/archives/xml/">on-line archive</a> (<a
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame]152href="http://xmlsoft.org/messages">old</a>). To subscribe to this list,
153please visit the <a
154href="http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/xml">associated Web</a> page and
155follow the instructions. <strong>Do not send code, I won't debug it</strong>
156(but patches are really appreciated!).</p>
Daniel Veillard234547b2001-07-05 09:46:10 +0000[diff] [blame]157
Daniel Veillard008186f2001-09-13 14:24:44 +0000[diff] [blame]158<p>Check the following <strong><span style="color: #FF0000">before
159posting</span></strong>:</p>
Daniel Veillard234547b2001-07-05 09:46:10 +0000[diff] [blame]160<ul>
Daniel Veillarddadd0872001-09-15 09:21:44 +0000[diff] [blame^]161 <li>read the <a href="FAQ.html">FAQ</a></li>
Daniel Veillard234547b2001-07-05 09:46:10 +0000[diff] [blame]162 <li>make sure you are <a href="ftp://xmlsoft.org/">using a recent
163 version</a>, and that the problem still shows up in those</li>
164 <li>check the <a href="http://mail.gnome.org/archives/xml/">list
165 archives</a> to see if the problem was reported already, in this case
Daniel Veillarde7ead2d2001-08-22 23:44:09 +0000[diff] [blame]166 there is probably a fix available, similary check the <a
167 href="http://bugzilla.gnome.org/buglist.cgi?product=libxml">registered
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame]168 open bugs</a></li>
Daniel Veillard234547b2001-07-05 09:46:10 +0000[diff] [blame]169 <li>make sure you can reproduce the bug with xmllint or one of the test
170 programs found in source in the distribution</li>
171 <li>Please send the command showing the error as well as the input (as an
172 attachement)</li>
173</ul>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000[diff] [blame]174
Daniel Veillarddadd0872001-09-15 09:21:44 +0000[diff] [blame^]175<p>Then send the bug with associated informations to reproduce it to the <a
Daniel Veillard33a67802001-03-07 09:44:02 +0000[diff] [blame]176href="mailto:xml@gnome.org">xml@gnome.org</a> list; if it's really libxml
Daniel Veillard008186f2001-09-13 14:24:44 +0000[diff] [blame]177related I will approve it.. Please do not send me mail directly, it makes
178things really harder to track and in some cases I'm not the best person to
179answer a given question, ask the list instead.</p>
Daniel Veillard4c3a2031999-11-19 17:46:26 +0000[diff] [blame]180
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000[diff] [blame]181<p>Of course, bugs reported with a suggested patch for fixing them will
Daniel Veillardec303412000-03-24 13:41:54 +0000[diff] [blame]182probably be processed faster.</p>
183
184<p>If you're looking for help, a quick look at <a
Daniel Veillardf7ed3362001-08-17 12:01:21 +0000[diff] [blame]185href="http://mail.gnome.org/archives/xml/">the list archive</a> may actually
Daniel Veillardec303412000-03-24 13:41:54 +0000[diff] [blame]186provide the answer, I usually send source samples when answering libxml usage
Daniel Veillard6f0adb52000-07-03 11:41:26 +0000[diff] [blame]187questions. The <a href="http://xmlsoft.org/html/book1.html">auto-generated
Daniel Veillardec303412000-03-24 13:41:54 +0000[diff] [blame]188documentantion</a> is not as polished as I would like (i need to learn more
189about Docbook), but it's a good starting point.</p>
190
Daniel Veillardd5f97f82000-09-17 16:38:14 +0000[diff] [blame]191<h2><a name="help">How to help</a></h2>
192
193<p>You can help the project in various ways, the best thing to do first is to
194subscribe to the mailing-list as explained before, check the <a
Daniel Veillardf7ed3362001-08-17 12:01:21 +0000[diff] [blame]195href="http://mail.gnome.org/archives/xml/">archives </a>and the <a
196href="http://bugzilla.gnome.org/buglist.cgi?product=libxml">Gnome bug
Daniel Veillardd5f97f82000-09-17 16:38:14 +0000[diff] [blame]197database:</a>:</p>
198<ol>
199 <li>provide patches when you find problems</li>
Daniel Veillard189446d2000-10-13 10:23:06 +0000[diff] [blame]200 <li>provide the diffs when you port libxml to a new platform. They may not
Daniel Veillardab8500d2000-10-15 21:06:19 +0000[diff] [blame]201 be integrated in all cases but help pinpointing portability problems
202 and</li>
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000[diff] [blame]203 <li>provide documentation fixes (either as patches to the code comments or
Daniel Veillardd5f97f82000-09-17 16:38:14 +0000[diff] [blame]204 as HTML diffs).</li>
205 <li>provide new documentations pieces (translations, examples, etc ...)</li>
206 <li>Check the TODO file and try to close one of the items</li>
207 <li>take one of the points raised in the archive or the bug database and
Daniel Veillarde7ead2d2001-08-22 23:44:09 +0000[diff] [blame]208 provide a fix. <a href="mailto:daniel@veillard.com">Get in touch with me
209 </a>before to avoid synchronization problems and check that the suggested
210 fix will fit in nicely :-)</li>
Daniel Veillardd5f97f82000-09-17 16:38:14 +0000[diff] [blame]211</ol>
212
Daniel Veillard10a2c651999-12-12 13:03:50 +0000[diff] [blame]213<h2><a name="Downloads">Downloads</a></h2>
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000[diff] [blame]214
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]215<p>The latest versions of libxml can be found on <a
Daniel Veillard20c8cf22001-06-26 22:47:36 +0000[diff] [blame]216href="ftp://xmlsoft.org/">xmlsoft.org</a> (<a
217href="ftp://speakeasy.rpmfind.net/pub/libxml/">Seattle</a>, <a
218href="ftp://fr.rpmfind.net/pub/libxml/">France</a>) or on the <a
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000[diff] [blame]219href="ftp://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/MIRRORS.html">Gnome FTP server</a> either
Daniel Veillard10a2c651999-12-12 13:03:50 +0000[diff] [blame]220as a <a href="ftp://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/stable/sources/libxml/">source
Daniel Veillard306be992000-07-03 12:38:45 +0000[diff] [blame]221archive</a> or <a
Daniel Veillarda41123c2001-04-22 19:31:20 +0000[diff] [blame]222href="ftp://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/stable/redhat/i386/libxml/">RPM
223packages</a>. (NOTE that you need both the <a
Daniel Veillardc19fccc2000-07-03 11:52:01 +0000[diff] [blame]224href="http://rpmfind.net/linux/RPM/libxml2.html">libxml(2)</a> and <a
225href="http://rpmfind.net/linux/RPM/libxml2-devel.html">libxml(2)-devel</a>
Daniel Veillard95189532001-07-26 18:30:26 +0000[diff] [blame]226packages installed to compile applications using libxml.) <a
227href="mailto:izlatkovic@daenet.de">Igor Zlatkovic</a> is now the maintainer
228of the Windows port, <a
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame]229href="http://www.fh-frankfurt.de/~igor/projects/libxml/index.html">he
230provides binaries</a></p>
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000[diff] [blame]231
Daniel Veillard6c8b1172000-03-01 00:40:41 +0000[diff] [blame]232<p><a name="Snapshot">Snapshot:</a></p>
233<ul>
234 <li>Code from the W3C cvs base libxml <a
Daniel Veillard33a67802001-03-07 09:44:02 +0000[diff] [blame]235 href="ftp://xmlsoft.org/cvs-snapshot.tar.gz">cvs-snapshot.tar.gz</a></li>
Daniel Veillard6c8b1172000-03-01 00:40:41 +0000[diff] [blame]236 <li>Docs, content of the web site, the list archive included <a
Daniel Veillard33a67802001-03-07 09:44:02 +0000[diff] [blame]237 href="ftp://xmlsoft.org/libxml-docs.tar.gz">libxml-docs.tar.gz</a></li>
Daniel Veillard6c8b1172000-03-01 00:40:41 +0000[diff] [blame]238</ul>
239
240<p><a name="Contribs">Contribs:</a></p>
241
242<p>I do accept external contributions, especially if compiling on another
243platform, get in touch with me to upload the package. I will keep them in the
Daniel Veillard33a67802001-03-07 09:44:02 +0000[diff] [blame]244<a href="ftp://xmlsoft.org/contribs/">contrib directory</a></p>
Daniel Veillard6c8b1172000-03-01 00:40:41 +0000[diff] [blame]245
Daniel Veillard82687162001-01-22 15:32:01 +0000[diff] [blame]246<p>Libxml is also available from CVS:</p>
Daniel Veillard10a2c651999-12-12 13:03:50 +0000[diff] [blame]247<ul>
Daniel Veillard10a2c651999-12-12 13:03:50 +0000[diff] [blame]248 <li><p>The <a
249 href="http://cvs.gnome.org/bonsai/rview.cgi?cvsroot=/cvs/gnome&amp;dir=gnome-xml">Gnome
Daniel Veillard402e8c82000-02-29 22:57:47 +0000[diff] [blame]250 CVS base</a>. Check the <a
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame]251 href="http://developer.gnome.org/tools/cvs.html">Gnome CVS Tools</a>
252 page; the CVS module is <b>gnome-xml</b>.</p>
Daniel Veillard10a2c651999-12-12 13:03:50 +0000[diff] [blame]253 </li>
Daniel Veillard82687162001-01-22 15:32:01 +0000[diff] [blame]254 <li>The <strong>libxslt</strong> module is also present there</li>
Daniel Veillard10a2c651999-12-12 13:03:50 +0000[diff] [blame]255</ul>
256
257<h2><a name="News">News</a></h2>
258
Daniel Veillard944b5ff1999-12-15 19:08:24 +0000[diff] [blame]259<h3>CVS only : check the <a
260href="http://cvs.gnome.org/lxr/source/gnome-xml/ChangeLog">Changelog</a> file
Daniel Veillard189446d2000-10-13 10:23:06 +0000[diff] [blame]261for a really accurate description</h3>
Daniel Veillardab8500d2000-10-15 21:06:19 +0000[diff] [blame]262
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000[diff] [blame]263<p>Items floating around but not actively worked on, get in touch with me if
Daniel Veillardab8500d2000-10-15 21:06:19 +0000[diff] [blame]264you want to test those</p>
265<ul>
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame]266 <li>Implementing <a href="http://xmlsoft.org/XSLT">XSLT</a>, this is done
267 as a separate C library on top of libxml called libxslt</li>
Daniel Veillard28929b22000-11-13 18:22:49 +0000[diff] [blame]268 <li>Finishing up <a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xptr">XPointer</a> and <a
269 href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xinclude">XInclude</a></li>
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame]270 <li>(seeems working but delayed from release) parsing/import of Docbook
271 SGML docs</li>
272</ul>
273
Daniel Veillarddadd0872001-09-15 09:21:44 +0000[diff] [blame^]274<h3>2.4.5: Sep 14 2001</h3>
275<ul>
276 <li>Remove a few annoying bugs in 2.4.4</li>
277 <li>forces the HTML serializer to output decimal charrefs since some
278 version of Netscape can't handle hexadecimal ones</li>
279</ul>
280
281<h3>1.8.16: Sep 14 2001</h3>
282<ul>
283 <li>maintenance release of the old libxml1 branch, couple of bug and
284 portability fixes</li>
285</ul>
286
Daniel Veillard04382ae2001-09-12 18:51:30 +0000[diff] [blame]287<h3>2.4.4: Sep 12 2001</h3>
288<ul>
289 <li>added --convert to xmlcatalog, bug fixes and cleanups of XML
290 Catalog</li>
291 <li>a few bug fixes and some portability changes</li>
292 <li>some documentation cleanups</li>
293</ul>
294
Daniel Veillard39936902001-08-24 00:49:01 +0000[diff] [blame]295<h3>2.4.3: Aug 23 2001</h3>
296<ul>
297 <li>XML Catalog support see the doc</li>
298 <li>New NaN/Infinity floating point code</li>
299 <li>A few bug fixes</li>
300</ul>
301
302<h3>2.4.2: Aug 15 2001</h3>
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame]303<ul>
304 <li>adds xmlLineNumbersDefault() to control line number generation</li>
305 <li>lot of bug fixes</li>
306 <li>the Microsoft MSC projects files shuld now be up to date</li>
307 <li>inheritance of namespaces from DTD defaulted attributes</li>
308 <li>fixes a serious potential security bug</li>
309 <li>added a --format option to xmllint</li>
310</ul>
311
312<h3>2.4.1: July 24 2001</h3>
313<ul>
314 <li>possibility to keep line numbers in the tree</li>
315 <li>some computation NaN fixes</li>
316 <li>extension of the XPath API</li>
317 <li>cleanup for alpha and ia64 targets</li>
318 <li>patch to allow saving through HTTP PUT or POST</li>
Daniel Veillard09ab7e12001-07-10 15:49:44 +0000[diff] [blame]319</ul>
320
321<h3>2.4.0: July 10 2001</h3>
322<ul>
323 <li>Fixed a few bugs in XPath, validation, and tree handling.</li>
324 <li>Fixed XML Base implementation, added a coupel of examples to the
325 regression tests</li>
326 <li>A bit of cleanup</li>
Daniel Veillardab8500d2000-10-15 21:06:19 +0000[diff] [blame]327</ul>
328
Daniel Veillard5b43fde2001-07-05 23:31:40 +0000[diff] [blame]329<h3>2.3.14: July 5 2001</h3>
330<ul>
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame]331 <li>fixed some entities problems and reduce mem requirement when
332 substituing them</li>
Daniel Veillard5b43fde2001-07-05 23:31:40 +0000[diff] [blame]333 <li>lots of improvements in the XPath queries interpreter can be
334 substancially faster</li>
335 <li>Makefiles and configure cleanups</li>
336 <li>Fixes to XPath variable eval, and compare on empty node set</li>
337 <li>HTML tag closing bug fixed</li>
338 <li>Fixed an URI reference computating problem when validating</li>
339</ul>
340
Daniel Veillard2adbb512001-06-28 16:20:36 +0000[diff] [blame]341<h3>2.3.13: June 28 2001</h3>
342<ul>
343 <li>2.3.12 configure.in was broken as well as the push mode XML parser</li>
344 <li>a few more fixes for compilation on Windows MSC by Yon Derek</li>
345</ul>
346
347<h3>1.8.14: June 28 2001</h3>
348<ul>
349 <li>Zbigniew Chyla gave a patch to use the old XML parser in push mode</li>
350 <li>Small Makefile fix</li>
351</ul>
352
Daniel Veillard11648102001-06-26 16:08:24 +0000[diff] [blame]353<h3>2.3.12: June 26 2001</h3>
354<ul>
355 <li>lots of cleanup</li>
356 <li>a couple of validation fix</li>
357 <li>fixed line number counting</li>
358 <li>fixed serious problems in the XInclude processing</li>
359 <li>added support for UTF8 BOM at beginning of entities</li>
360 <li>fixed a strange gcc optimizer bugs in xpath handling of float, gcc-3.0
361 miscompile uri.c (William), Thomas Leitner provided a fix for the
362 optimizer on Tru64</li>
363 <li>incorporated Yon Derek and Igor Zlatkovic fixes and improvements for
364 compilation on Windows MSC</li>
365 <li>update of libxml-doc.el (Felix Natter)</li>
366 <li>fixed 2 bugs in URI normalization code</li>
367</ul>
368
Daniel Veillarde3c81b52001-06-17 14:50:34 +0000[diff] [blame]369<h3>2.3.11: June 17 2001</h3>
370<ul>
371 <li>updates to trio, Makefiles and configure should fix some portability
372 problems (alpha)</li>
373 <li>fixed some HTML serialization problems (pre, script, and block/inline
374 handling), added encoding aware APIs, cleanup of this code</li>
375 <li>added xmlHasNsProp()</li>
376 <li>implemented a specific PI for encoding support in the DocBook SGML
377 parser</li>
378 <li>some XPath fixes (-Infinity, / as a function parameter and namespaces
379 node selection)</li>
380 <li>fixed a performance problem and an error in the validation code</li>
381 <li>fixed XInclude routine to implement the recursive behaviour</li>
382 <li>fixed xmlFreeNode problem when libxml is included statically twice</li>
383 <li>added --version to xmllint for bug reports</li>
384</ul>
385
Daniel Veillard2e4f1882001-06-01 10:11:57 +0000[diff] [blame]386<h3>2.3.10: June 1 2001</h3>
387<ul>
388 <li>fixed the SGML catalog support</li>
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame]389 <li>a number of reported bugs got fixed, in XPath, iconv detection,
390 XInclude processing</li>
Daniel Veillard2e4f1882001-06-01 10:11:57 +0000[diff] [blame]391 <li>XPath string function should now handle unicode correctly</li>
392</ul>
393
Daniel Veillard4623acd2001-05-19 15:13:15 +0000[diff] [blame]394<h3>2.3.9: May 19 2001</h3>
395
396<p>Lots of bugfixes, and added a basic SGML catalog support:</p>
397<ul>
398 <li>HTML push bugfix #54891 and another patch from Jonas Borgström</li>
399 <li>some serious speed optimisation again</li>
400 <li>some documentation cleanups</li>
401 <li>trying to get better linking on solaris (-R)</li>
402 <li>XPath API cleanup from Thomas Broyer</li>
403 <li>Validation bug fixed #54631, added a patch from Gary Pennington, fixed
404 xmlValidGetValidElements()</li>
405 <li>Added an INSTALL file</li>
406 <li>Attribute removal added to API: #54433</li>
407 <li>added a basic support for SGML catalogs</li>
408 <li>fixed xmlKeepBlanksDefault(0) API</li>
409 <li>bugfix in xmlNodeGetLang()</li>
410 <li>fixed a small configure portability problem</li>
411 <li>fixed an inversion of SYSTEM and PUBLIC identifier in HTML document</li>
412</ul>
413
Daniel Veillarda265af72001-05-14 11:13:58 +0000[diff] [blame]414<h3>1.8.13: May 14 2001</h3>
415<ul>
416 <li>bugfixes release of the old libxml1 branch used by Gnome</li>
417</ul>
418
Daniel Veillard3bbbe6f2001-05-03 11:15:37 +0000[diff] [blame]419<h3>2.3.8: May 3 2001</h3>
420<ul>
421 <li>Integrated an SGML DocBook parser for the Gnome project</li>
422 <li>Fixed a few things in the HTML parser</li>
423 <li>Fixed some XPath bugs raised by XSLT use, tried to fix the floating
424 point portability issue</li>
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame]425 <li>Speed improvement (8M/s for SAX, 3M/s for DOM, 1.5M/s for
426 DOM+validation using the XML REC as input and a 700MHz celeron).</li>
Daniel Veillard3bbbe6f2001-05-03 11:15:37 +0000[diff] [blame]427 <li>incorporated more Windows cleanup</li>
428 <li>added xmlSaveFormatFile()</li>
429 <li>fixed problems in copying nodes with entities references (gdome)</li>
430 <li>removed some troubles surrounding the new validation module</li>
431</ul>
432
Daniel Veillarda41123c2001-04-22 19:31:20 +0000[diff] [blame]433<h3>2.3.7: April 22 2001</h3>
434<ul>
435 <li>lots of small bug fixes, corrected XPointer</li>
436 <li>Non determinist content model validation support</li>
437 <li>added xmlDocCopyNode for gdome2</li>
438 <li>revamped the way the HTML parser handles end of tags</li>
439 <li>XPath: corrctions of namespacessupport and number formatting</li>
440 <li>Windows: Igor Zlatkovic patches for MSC compilation</li>
441 <li>HTML ouput fixes from P C Chow and William M. Brack</li>
442 <li>Improved validation speed sensible for DocBook</li>
443 <li>fixed a big bug with ID declared in external parsed entities</li>
444 <li>portability fixes, update of Trio from Bjorn Reese</li>
445</ul>
446
Daniel Veillardafc73112001-04-11 11:51:41 +0000[diff] [blame]447<h3>2.3.6: April 8 2001</h3>
448<ul>
449 <li>Code cleanup using extreme gcc compiler warning options, found and
450 cleared half a dozen potential problem</li>
451 <li>the Eazel team found an XML parser bug</li>
452 <li>cleaned up the user of some of the string formatting function. used the
453 trio library code to provide the one needed when the platform is missing
454 them</li>
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame]455 <li>xpath: removed a memory leak and fixed the predicate evaluation
456 problem, extended the testsuite and cleaned up the result. XPointer seems
457 broken ...</li>
Daniel Veillardafc73112001-04-11 11:51:41 +0000[diff] [blame]458</ul>
459
Daniel Veillard56a4cb82001-03-24 17:00:36 +0000[diff] [blame]460<h3>2.3.5: Mar 23 2001</h3>
461<ul>
462 <li>Biggest change is separate parsing and evaluation of XPath expressions,
463 there is some new APIs for this too</li>
464 <li>included a number of bug fixes(XML push parser, 51876, notations,
465 52299)</li>
466 <li>Fixed some portability issues</li>
467</ul>
468
Daniel Veillarde356c282001-03-10 12:32:04 +0000[diff] [blame]469<h3>2.3.4: Mar 10 2001</h3>
470<ul>
471 <li>Fixed bugs #51860 and #51861</li>
472 <li>Added a global variable xmlDefaultBufferSize to allow default buffer
473 size to be application tunable.</li>
474 <li>Some cleanup in the validation code, still a bug left and this part
475 should probably be rewritten to support ambiguous content model :-\</li>
476 <li>Fix a couple of serious bugs introduced or raised by changes in 2.3.3
477 parser</li>
478 <li>Fixed another bug in xmlNodeGetContent()</li>
479 <li>Bjorn fixed XPath node collection and Number formatting</li>
480 <li>Fixed a loop reported in the HTML parsing</li>
481 <li>blank space are reported even if the Dtd content model proves that they
482 are formatting spaces, this is for XmL conformance</li>
483</ul>
484
Daniel Veillardb402c072001-03-01 17:28:58 +0000[diff] [blame]485<h3>2.3.3: Mar 1 2001</h3>
486<ul>
487 <li>small change in XPath for XSLT</li>
488 <li>documentation cleanups</li>
489 <li>fix in validation by Gary Pennington</li>
490 <li>serious parsing performances improvements</li>
491</ul>
492
Daniel Veillardec70e912001-02-26 20:10:45 +0000[diff] [blame]493<h3>2.3.2: Feb 24 2001</h3>
Daniel Veillard71681102001-02-24 17:48:53 +0000[diff] [blame]494<ul>
495 <li>chasing XPath bugs, found a bunch, completed some TODO</li>
496 <li>fixed a Dtd parsing bug</li>
497 <li>fixed a bug in xmlNodeGetContent</li>
498 <li>ID/IDREF support partly rewritten by Gary Pennington</li>
499</ul>
500
Daniel Veillardec70e912001-02-26 20:10:45 +0000[diff] [blame]501<h3>2.3.1: Feb 15 2001</h3>
Daniel Veillard6e6a6cc2001-02-15 15:55:44 +0000[diff] [blame]502<ul>
503 <li>some XPath and HTML bug fixes for XSLT</li>
504 <li>small extension of the hash table interfaces for DOM gdome2
505 implementation</li>
506 <li>A few bug fixes</li>
507</ul>
508
Daniel Veillardec70e912001-02-26 20:10:45 +0000[diff] [blame]509<h3>2.3.0: Feb 8 2001 (2.2.12 was on 25 Jan but I didn't kept track)</h3>
Daniel Veillard6e6a6cc2001-02-15 15:55:44 +0000[diff] [blame]510<ul>
511 <li>Lots of XPath bug fixes</li>
512 <li>Add a mode with Dtd lookup but without validation error reporting for
513 XSLT</li>
514 <li>Add support for text node without escaping (XSLT)</li>
515 <li>bug fixes for xmlCheckFilename</li>
516 <li>validation code bug fixes from Gary Pennington</li>
517 <li>Patch from Paul D. Smith correcting URI path normalization</li>
518 <li>Patch to allow simultaneous install of libxml-devel and
519 libxml2-devel</li>
520 <li>the example Makefile is now fixed</li>
521 <li>added HTML to the RPM packages</li>
522 <li>tree copying bugfixes</li>
523 <li>updates to Windows makefiles</li>
524 <li>optimisation patch from Bjorn Reese</li>
525</ul>
526
Daniel Veillardec70e912001-02-26 20:10:45 +0000[diff] [blame]527<h3>2.2.11: Jan 4 2001</h3>
Daniel Veillard503b8932001-01-05 06:36:31 +0000[diff] [blame]528<ul>
529 <li>bunch of bug fixes (memory I/O, xpath, ftp/http, ...)</li>
530 <li>added htmlHandleOmittedElem()</li>
531 <li>Applied Bjorn Reese's IPV6 first patch</li>
532 <li>Applied Paul D. Smith patches for validation of XInclude results</li>
Daniel Veillard82687162001-01-22 15:32:01 +0000[diff] [blame]533 <li>added XPointer xmlns() new scheme support</li>
Daniel Veillard503b8932001-01-05 06:36:31 +0000[diff] [blame]534</ul>
535
Daniel Veillard2ddd23d2000-11-25 10:42:19 +0000[diff] [blame]536<h3>2.2.10: Nov 25 2000</h3>
Daniel Veillard9d343c42000-11-25 10:12:43 +0000[diff] [blame]537<ul>
538 <li>Fix the Windows problems of 2.2.8</li>
539 <li>integrate OpenVMS patches</li>
540 <li>better handling of some nasty HTML input</li>
541 <li>Improved the XPointer implementation</li>
542 <li>integrate a number of provided patches</li>
543</ul>
544
Daniel Veillard2ddd23d2000-11-25 10:42:19 +0000[diff] [blame]545<h3>2.2.9: Nov 25 2000</h3>
546<ul>
547 <li>erroneous release :-(</li>
548</ul>
549
Daniel Veillard28929b22000-11-13 18:22:49 +0000[diff] [blame]550<h3>2.2.8: Nov 13 2000</h3>
551<ul>
552 <li>First version of <a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xinclude">XInclude</a>
553 support</li>
554 <li>Patch in conditional section handling</li>
555 <li>updated MS compiler project</li>
556 <li>fixed some XPath problems</li>
557 <li>added an URI escaping function</li>
558 <li>some other bug fixes</li>
559</ul>
560
561<h3>2.2.7: Oct 31 2000</h3>
562<ul>
563 <li>added message redirection</li>
564 <li>XPath improvements (thanks TOM !)</li>
565 <li>xmlIOParseDTD() added</li>
566 <li>various small fixes in the HTML, URI, HTTP and XPointer support</li>
567 <li>some cleanup of the Makefile, autoconf and the distribution content</li>
568</ul>
569
Daniel Veillard29a11cc2000-10-25 13:32:39 +0000[diff] [blame]570<h3>2.2.6: Oct 25 2000:</h3>
571<ul>
572 <li>Added an hash table module, migrated a number of internal structure to
573 those</li>
574 <li>Fixed a posteriori validation problems</li>
575 <li>HTTP module cleanups</li>
576 <li>HTML parser improvements (tag errors, script/style handling, attribute
577 normalization)</li>
578 <li>coalescing of adjacent text nodes</li>
579 <li>couple of XPath bug fixes, exported the internal API</li>
580</ul>
581
Daniel Veillardab8500d2000-10-15 21:06:19 +0000[diff] [blame]582<h3>2.2.5: Oct 15 2000:</h3>
Daniel Veillard4c3a2031999-11-19 17:46:26 +0000[diff] [blame]583<ul>
Daniel Veillard189446d2000-10-13 10:23:06 +0000[diff] [blame]584 <li>XPointer implementation and testsuite</li>
585 <li>Lot of XPath fixes, added variable and functions registration, more
586 tests</li>
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame]587 <li>Portability fixes, lots of enhancements toward an easy Windows build
588 and release</li>
Daniel Veillard189446d2000-10-13 10:23:06 +0000[diff] [blame]589 <li>Late validation fixes</li>
590 <li>Integrated a lot of contributed patches</li>
591 <li>added memory management docs</li>
Daniel Veillardab8500d2000-10-15 21:06:19 +0000[diff] [blame]592 <li>a performance problem when using large buffer seems fixed</li>
Daniel Veillard189446d2000-10-13 10:23:06 +0000[diff] [blame]593</ul>
594
595<h3>2.2.4: Oct 1 2000:</h3>
596<ul>
597 <li>main XPath problem fixed</li>
598 <li>Integrated portability patches for Windows</li>
599 <li>Serious bug fixes on the URI and HTML code</li>
Daniel Veillard361d8452000-04-03 19:48:13 +0000[diff] [blame]600</ul>
601
Daniel Veillardd5f97f82000-09-17 16:38:14 +0000[diff] [blame]602<h3>2.2.3: Sep 17 2000</h3>
603<ul>
604 <li>bug fixes</li>
605 <li>cleanup of entity handling code</li>
606 <li>overall review of all loops in the parsers, all sprintf usage has been
607 checked too</li>
608 <li>Far better handling of larges Dtd. Validating against Docbook XML Dtd
609 works smoothly now.</li>
610</ul>
611
612<h3>1.8.10: Sep 6 2000</h3>
613<ul>
614 <li>bug fix release for some Gnome projects</li>
615</ul>
616
617<h3>2.2.2: August 12 2000</h3>
Daniel Veillard786d7c82000-08-12 23:38:57 +0000[diff] [blame]618<ul>
619 <li>mostly bug fixes</li>
Daniel Veillardec78c0f2000-08-25 10:25:23 +0000[diff] [blame]620 <li>started adding routines to access xml parser context options</li>
Daniel Veillard786d7c82000-08-12 23:38:57 +0000[diff] [blame]621</ul>
622
Daniel Veillardd5f97f82000-09-17 16:38:14 +0000[diff] [blame]623<h3>2.2.1: July 21 2000</h3>
Daniel Veillarda2679fa2000-07-22 02:38:15 +0000[diff] [blame]624<ul>
625 <li>a purely bug fixes release</li>
626 <li>fixed an encoding support problem when parsing from a memory block</li>
627 <li>fixed a DOCTYPE parsing problem</li>
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame]628 <li>removed a bug in the function allowing to override the memory
629 allocation routines</li>
Daniel Veillarda2679fa2000-07-22 02:38:15 +0000[diff] [blame]630</ul>
631
Daniel Veillardd5f97f82000-09-17 16:38:14 +0000[diff] [blame]632<h3>2.2.0: July 14 2000</h3>
Daniel Veillard94e90602000-07-17 14:38:19 +0000[diff] [blame]633<ul>
634 <li>applied a lot of portability fixes</li>
635 <li>better encoding support/cleanup and saving (content is now always
636 encoded in UTF-8)</li>
637 <li>the HTML parser now correctly handles encodings</li>
638 <li>added xmlHasProp()</li>
639 <li>fixed a serious problem with &amp;#38;</li>
640 <li>propagated the fix to FTP client</li>
641 <li>cleanup, bugfixes, etc ...</li>
642 <li>Added a page about <a href="encoding.html">libxml Internationalization
643 support</a></li>
644</ul>
645
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]646<h3>1.8.9: July 9 2000</h3>
647<ul>
648 <li>fixed the spec the RPMs should be better</li>
649 <li>fixed a serious bug in the FTP implementation, released 1.8.9 to solve
650 rpmfind users problem</li>
651</ul>
652
Daniel Veillard6388e172000-07-03 16:07:19 +0000[diff] [blame]653<h3>2.1.1: July 1 2000</h3>
654<ul>
655 <li>fixes a couple of bugs in the 2.1.0 packaging</li>
656 <li>improvements on the HTML parser</li>
657</ul>
658
Daniel Veillard3f6f7f62000-06-30 17:58:25 +0000[diff] [blame]659<h3>2.1.0 and 1.8.8: June 29 2000</h3>
660<ul>
661 <li>1.8.8 is mostly a comodity package for upgrading to libxml2 accoding to
662 <a href="upgrade.html">new instructions</a>. It fixes a nasty problem
663 about &amp;#38; charref parsing</li>
664 <li>2.1.0 also ease the upgrade from libxml v1 to the recent version. it
665 also contains numerous fixes and enhancements:
666 <ul>
667 <li>added xmlStopParser() to stop parsing</li>
668 <li>improved a lot parsing speed when there is large CDATA blocs</li>
669 <li>includes XPath patches provided by Picdar Technology</li>
670 <li>tried to fix as much as possible DtD validation and namespace
671 related problems</li>
672 <li>output to a given encoding has been added/tested</li>
673 <li>lot of various fixes</li>
674 </ul>
675 </li>
676</ul>
677
Daniel Veillarde0aed302000-04-16 08:52:20 +0000[diff] [blame]678<h3>2.0.0: Apr 12 2000</h3>
Daniel Veillard361d8452000-04-03 19:48:13 +0000[diff] [blame]679<ul>
680 <li>First public release of libxml2. If you are using libxml, it's a good
Daniel Veillarde0aed302000-04-16 08:52:20 +0000[diff] [blame]681 idea to check the 1.x to 2.x upgrade instructions. NOTE: while initally
682 scheduled for Apr 3 the relase occured only on Apr 12 due to massive
683 workload.</li>
Daniel Veillard361d8452000-04-03 19:48:13 +0000[diff] [blame]684 <li>The include are now located under $prefix/include/libxml (instead of
Daniel Veillarde0aed302000-04-16 08:52:20 +0000[diff] [blame]685 $prefix/include/gnome-xml), they also are referenced by
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]686 <pre>#include &lt;libxml/xxx.h&gt;</pre>
Daniel Veillarde0aed302000-04-16 08:52:20 +0000[diff] [blame]687 <p>instead of</p>
Daniel Veillard361d8452000-04-03 19:48:13 +0000[diff] [blame]688 <pre>#include "xxx.h"</pre>
689 </li>
Daniel Veillard8f621982000-03-20 13:07:15 +0000[diff] [blame]690 <li>a new URI module for parsing URIs and following strictly RFC 2396</li>
691 <li>the memory allocation routines used by libxml can now be overloaded
692 dynamically by using xmlMemSetup()</li>
Daniel Veillard361d8452000-04-03 19:48:13 +0000[diff] [blame]693 <li>The previously CVS only tool tester has been renamed
694 <strong>xmllint</strong> and is now installed as part of the libxml2
695 package</li>
Daniel Veillarde0aed302000-04-16 08:52:20 +0000[diff] [blame]696 <li>The I/O interface has been revamped. There is now ways to plug in
697 specific I/O modules, either at the URI scheme detection level using
698 xmlRegisterInputCallbacks() or by passing I/O functions when creating a
699 parser context using xmlCreateIOParserCtxt()</li>
700 <li>there is a C preprocessor macro LIBXML_VERSION providing the version
701 number of the libxml module in use</li>
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame]702 <li>a number of optional features of libxml can now be excluded at
703 configure time (FTP/HTTP/HTML/XPath/Debug)</li>
Daniel Veillardedfb29b2000-03-14 19:59:05 +0000[diff] [blame]704</ul>
705
706<h3>2.0.0beta: Mar 14 2000</h3>
707<ul>
708 <li>This is a first Beta release of libxml version 2</li>
Daniel Veillarde356c282001-03-10 12:32:04 +0000[diff] [blame]709 <li>It's available only from<a href="ftp://xmlsoft.org/">xmlsoft.org
710 FTP</a>, it's packaged as libxml2-2.0.0beta and available as tar and
711 RPMs</li>
Daniel Veillardedfb29b2000-03-14 19:59:05 +0000[diff] [blame]712 <li>This version is now the head in the Gnome CVS base, the old one is
713 available under the tag LIB_XML_1_X</li>
714 <li>This includes a very large set of changes. Froma programmatic point of
715 view applications should not have to be modified too much, check the <a
716 href="upgrade.html">upgrade page</a></li>
717 <li>Some interfaces may changes (especially a bit about encoding).</li>
718 <li>the updates includes:
Daniel Veillard6c8b1172000-03-01 00:40:41 +0000[diff] [blame]719 <ul>
Daniel Veillardedfb29b2000-03-14 19:59:05 +0000[diff] [blame]720 <li>fix I18N support. ISO-Latin-x/UTF-8/UTF-16 (nearly) seems correctly
721 handled now</li>
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame]722 <li>Better handling of entities, especially well formedness checking
723 and proper PEref extensions in external subsets</li>
Daniel Veillard6c8b1172000-03-01 00:40:41 +0000[diff] [blame]724 <li>DTD conditional sections</li>
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +0000[diff] [blame]725 <li>Validation now correcly handle entities content</li>
Daniel Veillard6c8b1172000-03-01 00:40:41 +0000[diff] [blame]726 <li><a href="http://rpmfind.net/tools/gdome/messages/0039.html">change
727 structures to accomodate DOM</a></li>
Daniel Veillard6c8b1172000-03-01 00:40:41 +0000[diff] [blame]728 </ul>
729 </li>
Daniel Veillardedfb29b2000-03-14 19:59:05 +0000[diff] [blame]730 <li>Serious progress were made toward compliance, <a
731 href="conf/result.html">here are the result of the test</a> against the
732 OASIS testsuite (except the japanese tests since I don't support that
733 encoding yet). This URL is rebuilt every couple of hours using the CVS
734 head version.</li>
Daniel Veillarde41f2b72000-01-30 20:00:07 +0000[diff] [blame]735</ul>
736
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +0000[diff] [blame]737<h3>1.8.7: Mar 6 2000</h3>
738<ul>
739 <li>This is a bug fix release:</li>
740 <li>It is possible to disable the ignorable blanks heuristic used by
741 libxml-1.x, a new function xmlKeepBlanksDefault(0) will allow this. Note
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame]742 that for adherence to XML spec, this behaviour will be disabled by
743 default in 2.x . The same function will allow to keep compatibility for
744 old code.</li>
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]745 <li>Blanks in &lt;a&gt; &lt;/a&gt; constructs are not ignored anymore,
746 avoiding heuristic is really the Right Way :-\</li>
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +0000[diff] [blame]747 <li>The unchecked use of snprintf which was breaking libxml-1.8.6
748 compilation on some platforms has been fixed</li>
749 <li>nanoftp.c nanohttp.c: Fixed '#' and '?' stripping when processing
750 URIs</li>
751</ul>
752
Daniel Veillarde41f2b72000-01-30 20:00:07 +0000[diff] [blame]753<h3>1.8.6: Jan 31 2000</h3>
754<ul>
755 <li>added a nanoFTP transport module, debugged until the new version of <a
756 href="http://rpmfind.net/linux/rpm2html/rpmfind.html">rpmfind</a> can use
757 it without troubles</li>
Daniel Veillardda07c342000-01-25 18:31:22 +0000[diff] [blame]758</ul>
759
760<h3>1.8.5: Jan 21 2000</h3>
761<ul>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000[diff] [blame]762 <li>adding APIs to parse a well balanced chunk of XML (production <a
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame]763 href="http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml#NT-content">[43] content</a> of the
764 XML spec)</li>
Daniel Veillard461a66c2000-01-18 18:01:01 +0000[diff] [blame]765 <li>fixed a hideous bug in xmlGetProp pointed by Rune.Djurhuus@fast.no</li>
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]766 <li>Jody Goldberg &lt;jgoldberg@home.com&gt; provided another patch trying
767 to solve the zlib checks problems</li>
Daniel Veillard461a66c2000-01-18 18:01:01 +0000[diff] [blame]768 <li>The current state in gnome CVS base is expected to ship as 1.8.5 with
769 gnumeric soon</li>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000[diff] [blame]770</ul>
771
772<h3>1.8.4: Jan 13 2000</h3>
773<ul>
774 <li>bug fixes, reintroduced xmlNewGlobalNs(), fixed xmlNewNs()</li>
775 <li>all exit() call should have been removed from libxml</li>
776 <li>fixed a problem with INCLUDE_WINSOCK on WIN32 platform</li>
777 <li>added newDocFragment()</li>
Daniel Veillardf84f71f2000-01-05 19:54:23 +0000[diff] [blame]778</ul>
779
780<h3>1.8.3: Jan 5 2000</h3>
781<ul>
782 <li>a Push interface for the XML and HTML parsers</li>
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +0000[diff] [blame]783 <li>a shell-like interface to the document tree (try tester --shell :-)</li>
Daniel Veillarddbfd6411999-12-28 16:35:14 +0000[diff] [blame]784 <li>lots of bug fixes and improvement added over XMas hollidays</li>
Daniel Veillard437b87b2000-01-03 17:30:46 +0000[diff] [blame]785 <li>fixed the DTD parsing code to work with the xhtml DTD</li>
Daniel Veillardf84f71f2000-01-05 19:54:23 +0000[diff] [blame]786 <li>added xmlRemoveProp(), xmlRemoveID() and xmlRemoveRef()</li>
787 <li>Fixed bugs in xmlNewNs()</li>
Daniel Veillard437b87b2000-01-03 17:30:46 +0000[diff] [blame]788 <li>External entity loading code has been revamped, now it uses
Daniel Veillardf84f71f2000-01-05 19:54:23 +0000[diff] [blame]789 xmlLoadExternalEntity(), some fix on entities processing were added</li>
Daniel Veillard437b87b2000-01-03 17:30:46 +0000[diff] [blame]790 <li>cleaned up WIN32 includes of socket stuff</li>
Daniel Veillard5cb5ab81999-12-21 15:35:29 +0000[diff] [blame]791</ul>
792
793<h3>1.8.2: Dec 21 1999</h3>
794<ul>
Daniel Veillardb24054a1999-12-18 15:32:46 +0000[diff] [blame]795 <li>I got another problem with includes and C++, I hope this issue is fixed
796 for good this time</li>
Daniel Veillard5cb5ab81999-12-21 15:35:29 +0000[diff] [blame]797 <li>Added a few tree modification functions: xmlReplaceNode,
798 xmlAddPrevSibling, xmlAddNextSibling, xmlNodeSetName and
799 xmlDocSetRootElement</li>
800 <li>Tried to improve the HTML output with help from <a
801 href="mailto:clahey@umich.edu">Chris Lahey</a></li>
Daniel Veillarde4e51311999-12-18 15:32:46 +0000[diff] [blame]802</ul>
Daniel Veillardb24054a1999-12-18 15:32:46 +0000[diff] [blame]803
Daniel Veillarde4e51311999-12-18 15:32:46 +0000[diff] [blame]804<h3>1.8.1: Dec 18 1999</h3>
805<ul>
806 <li>various patches to avoid troubles when using libxml with C++ compilers
807 the "namespace" keyword and C escaping in include files</li>
808 <li>a problem in one of the core macros IS_CHAR was corrected</li>
809 <li>fixed a bug introduced in 1.8.0 breaking default namespace processing,
810 and more specifically the Dia application</li>
Daniel Veillard944b5ff1999-12-15 19:08:24 +0000[diff] [blame]811 <li>fixed a posteriori validation (validation after parsing, or by using a
812 Dtd not specified in the original document)</li>
Daniel Veillardb24054a1999-12-18 15:32:46 +0000[diff] [blame]813 <li>fixed a bug in</li>
Daniel Veillard10a2c651999-12-12 13:03:50 +0000[diff] [blame]814</ul>
815
816<h3>1.8.0: Dec 12 1999</h3>
817<ul>
818 <li>cleanup, especially memory wise</li>
819 <li>the parser should be more reliable, especially the HTML one, it should
820 not crash, whatever the input !</li>
821 <li>Integrated various patches, especially a speedup improvement for large
822 dataset from <a href="mailto:cnygard@bellatlantic.net">Carl Nygard</a>,
823 configure with --with-buffers to enable them.</li>
824 <li>attribute normalization, oops should have been added long ago !</li>
825 <li>attributes defaulted from Dtds should be available, xmlSetProp() now
826 does entities escapting by default.</li>
Daniel Veillard4c3a2031999-11-19 17:46:26 +0000[diff] [blame]827</ul>
Daniel Veillard35008381999-10-25 13:15:52 +0000[diff] [blame]828
829<h3>1.7.4: Oct 25 1999</h3>
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000[diff] [blame]830<ul>
Daniel Veillard35008381999-10-25 13:15:52 +0000[diff] [blame]831 <li>Lots of HTML improvement</li>
832 <li>Fixed some errors when saving both XML and HTML</li>
833 <li>More examples, the regression tests should now look clean</li>
834 <li>Fixed a bug with contiguous charref</li>
835</ul>
836
837<h3>1.7.3: Sep 29 1999</h3>
838<ul>
839 <li>portability problems fixed</li>
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000[diff] [blame]840 <li>snprintf was used unconditionnally, leading to link problems on system
Daniel Veillard35008381999-10-25 13:15:52 +0000[diff] [blame]841 were it's not available, fixed</li>
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000[diff] [blame]842</ul>
843
844<h3>1.7.1: Sep 24 1999</h3>
845<ul>
846 <li>The basic type for strings manipulated by libxml has been renamed in
847 1.7.1 from <strong>CHAR</strong> to <strong>xmlChar</strong>. The reason
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame]848 is that CHAR was conflicting with a predefined type on Windows. However
849 on non WIN32 environment, compatibility is provided by the way of a
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000[diff] [blame]850 <strong>#define </strong>.</li>
851 <li>Changed another error : the use of a structure field called errno, and
852 leading to troubles on platforms where it's a macro</li>
853</ul>
854
855<h3>1.7.0: sep 23 1999</h3>
856<ul>
857 <li>Added the ability to fetch remote DTD or parsed entities, see the <a
Daniel Veillard9cb5ff42001-01-29 08:22:21 +0000[diff] [blame]858 href="html/libxml-nanohttp.html">nanohttp</a> module.</li>
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000[diff] [blame]859 <li>Added an errno to report errors by another mean than a simple printf
860 like callback</li>
861 <li>Finished ID/IDREF support and checking when validation</li>
862 <li>Serious memory leaks fixed (there is now a <a
Daniel Veillard9cb5ff42001-01-29 08:22:21 +0000[diff] [blame]863 href="html/libxml-xmlmemory.html">memory wrapper</a> module)</li>
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000[diff] [blame]864 <li>Improvement of <a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xpath">XPath</a>
865 implementation</li>
866 <li>Added an HTML parser front-end</li>
867</ul>
868
869<h2><a name="XML">XML</a></h2>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]870
Daniel Veillard402e8c82000-02-29 22:57:47 +0000[diff] [blame]871<p><a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml">XML is a standard</a> for
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +0000[diff] [blame]872markup-based structured documents. Here is <a name="example">an example XML
873document</a>:</p>
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]874<pre>&lt;?xml version="1.0"?&gt;
875&lt;EXAMPLE prop1="gnome is great" prop2="&amp;amp; linux too"&gt;
876 &lt;head&gt;
877 &lt;title&gt;Welcome to Gnome&lt;/title&gt;
878 &lt;/head&gt;
879 &lt;chapter&gt;
880 &lt;title&gt;The Linux adventure&lt;/title&gt;
881 &lt;p&gt;bla bla bla ...&lt;/p&gt;
882 &lt;image href="linus.gif"/&gt;
883 &lt;p&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;
884 &lt;/chapter&gt;
885&lt;/EXAMPLE&gt;</pre>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]886
Daniel Veillard402e8c82000-02-29 22:57:47 +0000[diff] [blame]887<p>The first line specifies that it's an XML document and gives useful
888information about its encoding. Then the document is a text format whose
889structure is specified by tags between brackets. <strong>Each tag opened has
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +0000[diff] [blame]890to be closed</strong>. XML is pedantic about this. However, if a tag is empty
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame]891(no content), a single tag can serve as both the opening and closing tag if
892it ends with <code>/&gt;</code> rather than with <code>&gt;</code>. Note
893that, for example, the image tag has no content (just an attribute) and is
894closed by ending the tag with <code>/&gt;</code>.</p>
Daniel Veillardccb09631998-10-27 06:21:04 +0000[diff] [blame]895
Daniel Veillard402e8c82000-02-29 22:57:47 +0000[diff] [blame]896<p>XML can be applied sucessfully to a wide range of uses, from long term
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame]897structured document maintenance (where it follows the steps of SGML) to
898simple data encoding mechanisms like configuration file formatting (glade),
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +0000[diff] [blame]899spreadsheets (gnumeric), or even shorter lived documents such as WebDAV where
900it is used to encode remote calls between a client and a server.</p>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]901
Daniel Veillard82687162001-01-22 15:32:01 +0000[diff] [blame]902<h2><a name="XSLT">XSLT</a></h2>
903
Daniel Veillard6e6a6cc2001-02-15 15:55:44 +0000[diff] [blame]904<p>Check <a href="http://xmlsoft.org/XSLT">the separate libxslt page</a></p>
905
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame]906<p><a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xslt">XSL Transformations</a>, is a
907language for transforming XML documents into other XML documents (or
908HTML/textual output).</p>
Daniel Veillard82687162001-01-22 15:32:01 +0000[diff] [blame]909
910<p>A separate library called libxslt is being built on top of libxml2. This
911module "libxslt" can be found in the Gnome CVS base too.</p>
912
Daniel Veillard383b1472001-01-23 11:39:52 +0000[diff] [blame]913<p>You can check the <a
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame]914href="http://cvs.gnome.org/lxr/source/libxslt/FEATURES">features</a>
915supported and the progresses on the <a
Daniel Veillard82687162001-01-22 15:32:01 +0000[diff] [blame]916href="http://cvs.gnome.org/lxr/source/libxslt/ChangeLog">Changelog</a></p>
917
Daniel Veillard4540be42000-08-19 16:40:28 +0000[diff] [blame]918<h2>An overview of libxml architecture</h2>
919
Daniel Veillardec70e912001-02-26 20:10:45 +0000[diff] [blame]920<p>Libxml is made of multiple components; some of them are optional, and most
921of the block interfaces are public. The main components are:</p>
Daniel Veillard4540be42000-08-19 16:40:28 +0000[diff] [blame]922<ul>
923 <li>an Input/Output layer</li>
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000[diff] [blame]924 <li>FTP and HTTP client layers (optional)</li>
Daniel Veillard4540be42000-08-19 16:40:28 +0000[diff] [blame]925 <li>an Internationalization layer managing the encodings support</li>
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000[diff] [blame]926 <li>a URI module</li>
Daniel Veillard4540be42000-08-19 16:40:28 +0000[diff] [blame]927 <li>the XML parser and its basic SAX interface</li>
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000[diff] [blame]928 <li>an HTML parser using the same SAX interface (optional)</li>
Daniel Veillard4540be42000-08-19 16:40:28 +0000[diff] [blame]929 <li>a SAX tree module to build an in-memory DOM representation</li>
930 <li>a tree module to manipulate the DOM representation</li>
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000[diff] [blame]931 <li>a validation module using the DOM representation (optional)</li>
Daniel Veillard4540be42000-08-19 16:40:28 +0000[diff] [blame]932 <li>an XPath module for global lookup in a DOM representation
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000[diff] [blame]933 (optional)</li>
934 <li>a debug module (optional)</li>
Daniel Veillard4540be42000-08-19 16:40:28 +0000[diff] [blame]935</ul>
936
937<p>Graphically this gives the following:</p>
938
939<p><img src="libxml.gif" alt="a graphical view of the various"></p>
940
941<p></p>
942
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000[diff] [blame]943<h2><a name="tree">The tree output</a></h2>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]944
945<p>The parser returns a tree built during the document analysis. The value
Daniel Veillard402e8c82000-02-29 22:57:47 +0000[diff] [blame]946returned is an <strong>xmlDocPtr</strong> (i.e., a pointer to an
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +0000[diff] [blame]947<strong>xmlDoc</strong> structure). This structure contains information such
Daniel Veillard306be992000-07-03 12:38:45 +0000[diff] [blame]948as the file name, the document type, and a <strong>children</strong> pointer
949which is the root of the document (or more exactly the first child under the
950root which is the document). The tree is made of <strong>xmlNode</strong>s,
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000[diff] [blame]951chained in double-linked lists of siblings and with a children&lt;-&gt;parent
Daniel Veillard306be992000-07-03 12:38:45 +0000[diff] [blame]952relationship. An xmlNode can also carry properties (a chain of xmlAttr
953structures). An attribute may have a value which is a list of TEXT or
954ENTITY_REF nodes.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]955
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]956<p>Here is an example (erroneous with respect to the XML spec since there
957should be only one ELEMENT under the root):</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]958
959<p><img src="structure.gif" alt=" structure.gif "></p>
960
961<p>In the source package there is a small program (not installed by default)
Daniel Veillard361d8452000-04-03 19:48:13 +0000[diff] [blame]962called <strong>xmllint</strong> which parses XML files given as argument and
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +0000[diff] [blame]963prints them back as parsed. This is useful for detecting errors both in XML
964code and in the XML parser itself. It has an option <strong>--debug</strong>
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000[diff] [blame]965which prints the actual in-memory structure of the document; here is the
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +0000[diff] [blame]966result with the <a href="#example">example</a> given before:</p>
Daniel Veillard10c6a8f1998-10-28 01:00:12 +0000[diff] [blame]967<pre>DOCUMENT
968version=1.0
969standalone=true
970 ELEMENT EXAMPLE
971 ATTRIBUTE prop1
972 TEXT
973 content=gnome is great
974 ATTRIBUTE prop2
975 ENTITY_REF
976 TEXT
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000[diff] [blame]977 content= linux too
Daniel Veillard402e8c82000-02-29 22:57:47 +0000[diff] [blame]978 ELEMENT head
Daniel Veillard10c6a8f1998-10-28 01:00:12 +0000[diff] [blame]979 ELEMENT title
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +0000[diff] [blame]980 TEXT
981 content=Welcome to Gnome
Daniel Veillard10c6a8f1998-10-28 01:00:12 +0000[diff] [blame]982 ELEMENT chapter
983 ELEMENT title
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +0000[diff] [blame]984 TEXT
985 content=The Linux adventure
Daniel Veillard10c6a8f1998-10-28 01:00:12 +0000[diff] [blame]986 ELEMENT p
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +0000[diff] [blame]987 TEXT
988 content=bla bla bla ...
Daniel Veillard10c6a8f1998-10-28 01:00:12 +0000[diff] [blame]989 ELEMENT image
990 ATTRIBUTE href
991 TEXT
992 content=linus.gif
993 ELEMENT p
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +0000[diff] [blame]994 TEXT
995 content=...</pre>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]996
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]997<p>This should be useful for learning the internal representation model.</p>
Daniel Veillardccb09631998-10-27 06:21:04 +0000[diff] [blame]998
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000[diff] [blame]999<h2><a name="interface">The SAX interface</a></h2>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]1000
Daniel Veillard402e8c82000-02-29 22:57:47 +0000[diff] [blame]1001<p>Sometimes the DOM tree output is just too large to fit reasonably into
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]1002memory. In that case (and if you don't expect to save back the XML document
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame]1003loaded using libxml), it's better to use the SAX interface of libxml. SAX is
1004a <strong>callback-based interface</strong> to the parser. Before parsing,
1005the application layer registers a customized set of callbacks which are
1006called by the library as it progresses through the XML input.</p>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]1007
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]1008<p>To get more detailed step-by-step guidance on using the SAX interface of
Daniel Veillard4540be42000-08-19 16:40:28 +0000[diff] [blame]1009libxml, see the <a
1010href="http://www.daa.com.au/~james/gnome/xml-sax/xml-sax.html">nice
1011documentation</a>.written by <a href="mailto:james@daa.com.au">James
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]1012Henstridge</a>.</p>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]1013
1014<p>You can debug the SAX behaviour by using the <strong>testSAX</strong>
1015program located in the gnome-xml module (it's usually not shipped in the
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]1016binary packages of libxml, but you can find it in the tar source
Daniel Veillard402e8c82000-02-29 22:57:47 +0000[diff] [blame]1017distribution). Here is the sequence of callbacks that would be reported by
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]1018testSAX when parsing the example XML document shown earlier:</p>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]1019<pre>SAX.setDocumentLocator()
1020SAX.startDocument()
1021SAX.getEntity(amp)
1022SAX.startElement(EXAMPLE, prop1='gnome is great', prop2='&amp;amp; linux too')
1023SAX.characters( , 3)
1024SAX.startElement(head)
1025SAX.characters( , 4)
1026SAX.startElement(title)
1027SAX.characters(Welcome to Gnome, 16)
1028SAX.endElement(title)
1029SAX.characters( , 3)
1030SAX.endElement(head)
1031SAX.characters( , 3)
1032SAX.startElement(chapter)
1033SAX.characters( , 4)
1034SAX.startElement(title)
1035SAX.characters(The Linux adventure, 19)
1036SAX.endElement(title)
1037SAX.characters( , 4)
1038SAX.startElement(p)
1039SAX.characters(bla bla bla ..., 15)
1040SAX.endElement(p)
1041SAX.characters( , 4)
1042SAX.startElement(image, href='linus.gif')
1043SAX.endElement(image)
1044SAX.characters( , 4)
1045SAX.startElement(p)
1046SAX.characters(..., 3)
1047SAX.endElement(p)
1048SAX.characters( , 3)
1049SAX.endElement(chapter)
1050SAX.characters( , 1)
1051SAX.endElement(EXAMPLE)
1052SAX.endDocument()</pre>
1053
Daniel Veillardec70e912001-02-26 20:10:45 +0000[diff] [blame]1054<p>Most of the other interfaces of libxml are based on the DOM tree-building
1055facility, so nearly everything up to the end of this document presupposes the
1056use of the standard DOM tree build. Note that the DOM tree itself is built by
1057a set of registered default callbacks, without internal specific
1058interface.</p>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]1059
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000[diff] [blame]1060<h2><a name="library">The XML library interfaces</a></h2>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1061
1062<p>This section is directly intended to help programmers getting bootstrapped
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame]1063using the XML library from the C language. It is not intended to be
1064extensive. I hope the automatically generated documents will provide the
1065completeness required, but as a separate set of documents. The interfaces of
1066the XML library are by principle low level, there is nearly zero abstraction.
1067Those interested in a higher level API should <a href="#DOM">look at
1068DOM</a>.</p>
Daniel Veillardccb09631998-10-27 06:21:04 +0000[diff] [blame]1069
Daniel Veillard9cb5ff42001-01-29 08:22:21 +0000[diff] [blame]1070<p>The <a href="html/libxml-parser.html">parser interfaces for XML</a> are
1071separated from the <a href="html/libxml-htmlparser.html">HTML parser
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]1072interfaces</a>. Let's have a look at how the XML parser can be called:</p>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000[diff] [blame]1073
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]1074<h3><a name="Invoking">Invoking the parser : the pull method</a></h3>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1075
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]1076<p>Usually, the first thing to do is to read an XML input. The parser accepts
1077documents either from in-memory strings or from files. The functions are
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1078defined in "parser.h":</p>
Daniel Veillard10c6a8f1998-10-28 01:00:12 +0000[diff] [blame]1079<dl>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1080 <dt><code>xmlDocPtr xmlParseMemory(char *buffer, int size);</code></dt>
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]1081 <dd><p>Parse a null-terminated string containing the document.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1082 </dd>
Daniel Veillard10c6a8f1998-10-28 01:00:12 +0000[diff] [blame]1083</dl>
1084<dl>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1085 <dt><code>xmlDocPtr xmlParseFile(const char *filename);</code></dt>
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +0000[diff] [blame]1086 <dd><p>Parse an XML document contained in a (possibly compressed)
1087 file.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1088 </dd>
Daniel Veillard10c6a8f1998-10-28 01:00:12 +0000[diff] [blame]1089</dl>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1090
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]1091<p>The parser returns a pointer to the document structure (or NULL in case of
Daniel Veillard10c6a8f1998-10-28 01:00:12 +0000[diff] [blame]1092failure).</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1093
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]1094<h3 id="Invoking1">Invoking the parser: the push method</h3>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000[diff] [blame]1095
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame]1096<p>In order for the application to keep the control when the document is
1097being fetched (which is common for GUI based programs) libxml provides a push
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]1098interface, too, as of version 1.8.3. Here are the interface functions:</p>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000[diff] [blame]1099<pre>xmlParserCtxtPtr xmlCreatePushParserCtxt(xmlSAXHandlerPtr sax,
1100 void *user_data,
1101 const char *chunk,
1102 int size,
1103 const char *filename);
1104int xmlParseChunk (xmlParserCtxtPtr ctxt,
1105 const char *chunk,
1106 int size,
1107 int terminate);</pre>
1108
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]1109<p>and here is a simple example showing how to use the interface:</p>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000[diff] [blame]1110<pre> FILE *f;
1111
1112 f = fopen(filename, "r");
1113 if (f != NULL) {
1114 int res, size = 1024;
1115 char chars[1024];
1116 xmlParserCtxtPtr ctxt;
1117
1118 res = fread(chars, 1, 4, f);
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]1119 if (res &gt; 0) {
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000[diff] [blame]1120 ctxt = xmlCreatePushParserCtxt(NULL, NULL,
1121 chars, res, filename);
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]1122 while ((res = fread(chars, 1, size, f)) &gt; 0) {
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000[diff] [blame]1123 xmlParseChunk(ctxt, chars, res, 0);
1124 }
1125 xmlParseChunk(ctxt, chars, 0, 1);
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]1126 doc = ctxt-&gt;myDoc;
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000[diff] [blame]1127 xmlFreeParserCtxt(ctxt);
1128 }
1129 }</pre>
1130
Daniel Veillardec70e912001-02-26 20:10:45 +0000[diff] [blame]1131<p>The HTML parser embedded into libxml also has a push interface; the
1132functions are just prefixed by "html" rather than "xml".</p>
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000[diff] [blame]1133
1134<h3 id="Invoking2">Invoking the parser: the SAX interface</h3>
1135
Daniel Veillardec70e912001-02-26 20:10:45 +0000[diff] [blame]1136<p>The tree-building interface makes the parser memory-hungry, first loading
1137the document in memory and then building the tree itself. Reading a document
1138without building the tree is possible using the SAX interfaces (see SAX.h and
1139<a href="http://www.daa.com.au/~james/gnome/xml-sax/xml-sax.html">James
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]1140Henstridge's documentation</a>). Note also that the push interface can be
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000[diff] [blame]1141limited to SAX: just use the two first arguments of
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000[diff] [blame]1142<code>xmlCreatePushParserCtxt()</code>.</p>
Daniel Veillardccb09631998-10-27 06:21:04 +0000[diff] [blame]1143
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000[diff] [blame]1144<h3><a name="Building">Building a tree from scratch</a></h3>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1145
1146<p>The other way to get an XML tree in memory is by building it. Basically
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +0000[diff] [blame]1147there is a set of functions dedicated to building new elements. (These are
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame]1148also described in &lt;libxml/tree.h&gt;.) For example, here is a piece of
1149code that produces the XML document used in the previous examples:</p>
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]1150<pre> #include &lt;libxml/tree.h&gt;
Daniel Veillard361d8452000-04-03 19:48:13 +0000[diff] [blame]1151 xmlDocPtr doc;
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +0000[diff] [blame]1152 xmlNodePtr tree, subtree;
1153
1154 doc = xmlNewDoc("1.0");
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]1155 doc-&gt;children = xmlNewDocNode(doc, NULL, "EXAMPLE", NULL);
1156 xmlSetProp(doc-&gt;children, "prop1", "gnome is great");
1157 xmlSetProp(doc-&gt;children, "prop2", "&amp; linux too");
1158 tree = xmlNewChild(doc-&gt;children, NULL, "head", NULL);
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +0000[diff] [blame]1159 subtree = xmlNewChild(tree, NULL, "title", "Welcome to Gnome");
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]1160 tree = xmlNewChild(doc-&gt;children, NULL, "chapter", NULL);
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +0000[diff] [blame]1161 subtree = xmlNewChild(tree, NULL, "title", "The Linux adventure");
1162 subtree = xmlNewChild(tree, NULL, "p", "bla bla bla ...");
1163 subtree = xmlNewChild(tree, NULL, "image", NULL);
1164 xmlSetProp(subtree, "href", "linus.gif");</pre>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1165
1166<p>Not really rocket science ...</p>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +0000[diff] [blame]1167
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000[diff] [blame]1168<h3><a name="Traversing">Traversing the tree</a></h3>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1169
Daniel Veillard9cb5ff42001-01-29 08:22:21 +0000[diff] [blame]1170<p>Basically by <a href="html/libxml-tree.html">including "tree.h"</a> your
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame]1171code has access to the internal structure of all the elements of the tree.
1172The names should be somewhat simple like <strong>parent</strong>,
Daniel Veillard306be992000-07-03 12:38:45 +0000[diff] [blame]1173<strong>children</strong>, <strong>next</strong>, <strong>prev</strong>,
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]1174<strong>properties</strong>, etc... For example, still with the previous
Daniel Veillard0142b842000-01-14 14:45:24 +0000[diff] [blame]1175example:</p>
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]1176<pre><code>doc-&gt;children-&gt;children-&gt;children</code></pre>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1177
1178<p>points to the title element,</p>
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000[diff] [blame]1179<pre>doc-&gt;children-&gt;children-&gt;next-&gt;children-&gt;children</pre>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1180
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +0000[diff] [blame]1181<p>points to the text node containing the chapter title "The Linux
1182adventure".</p>
Daniel Veillard10c6a8f1998-10-28 01:00:12 +0000[diff] [blame]1183
Daniel Veillardb24054a1999-12-18 15:32:46 +0000[diff] [blame]1184<p><strong>NOTE</strong>: XML allows <em>PI</em>s and <em>comments</em> to be
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]1185present before the document root, so <code>doc-&gt;children</code> may point
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000[diff] [blame]1186to an element which is not the document Root Element; a function
Daniel Veillard5cb5ab81999-12-21 15:35:29 +0000[diff] [blame]1187<code>xmlDocGetRootElement()</code> was added for this purpose.</p>
Daniel Veillardb24054a1999-12-18 15:32:46 +0000[diff] [blame]1188
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000[diff] [blame]1189<h3><a name="Modifying">Modifying the tree</a></h3>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1190
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]1191<p>Functions are provided for reading and writing the document content. Here
Daniel Veillard9cb5ff42001-01-29 08:22:21 +0000[diff] [blame]1192is an excerpt from the <a href="html/libxml-tree.html">tree API</a>:</p>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +0000[diff] [blame]1193<dl>
Daniel Veillarddd6b3671999-09-23 22:19:22 +0000[diff] [blame]1194 <dt><code>xmlAttrPtr xmlSetProp(xmlNodePtr node, const xmlChar *name, const
1195 xmlChar *value);</code></dt>
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame]1196 <dd><p>This sets (or changes) an attribute carried by an ELEMENT node.
1197 The value can be NULL.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1198 </dd>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +0000[diff] [blame]1199</dl>
1200<dl>
Daniel Veillarddd6b3671999-09-23 22:19:22 +0000[diff] [blame]1201 <dt><code>const xmlChar *xmlGetProp(xmlNodePtr node, const xmlChar
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1202 *name);</code></dt>
Daniel Veillardc92c3042000-09-29 02:42:04 +0000[diff] [blame]1203 <dd><p>This function returns a pointer to new copy of the property
1204 content. Note that the user must deallocate the result.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1205 </dd>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +0000[diff] [blame]1206</dl>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1207
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame]1208<p>Two functions are provided for reading and writing the text associated
1209with elements:</p>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +0000[diff] [blame]1210<dl>
Daniel Veillarddd6b3671999-09-23 22:19:22 +0000[diff] [blame]1211 <dt><code>xmlNodePtr xmlStringGetNodeList(xmlDocPtr doc, const xmlChar
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1212 *value);</code></dt>
Daniel Veillardec70e912001-02-26 20:10:45 +0000[diff] [blame]1213 <dd><p>This function takes an "external" string and converts it to one
1214 text node or possibly to a list of entity and text nodes. All
1215 non-predefined entity references like &amp;Gnome; will be stored
1216 internally as entity nodes, hence the result of the function may not be
1217 a single node.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1218 </dd>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +0000[diff] [blame]1219</dl>
1220<dl>
Daniel Veillarddd6b3671999-09-23 22:19:22 +0000[diff] [blame]1221 <dt><code>xmlChar *xmlNodeListGetString(xmlDocPtr doc, xmlNodePtr list, int
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1222 inLine);</code></dt>
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +0000[diff] [blame]1223 <dd><p>This function is the inverse of
1224 <code>xmlStringGetNodeList()</code>. It generates a new string
1225 containing the content of the text and entity nodes. Note the extra
1226 argument inLine. If this argument is set to 1, the function will expand
1227 entity references. For example, instead of returning the &amp;Gnome;
1228 XML encoding in the string, it will substitute it with its value (say,
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000[diff] [blame]1229 "GNU Network Object Model Environment").</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1230 </dd>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +0000[diff] [blame]1231</dl>
Daniel Veillard10c6a8f1998-10-28 01:00:12 +0000[diff] [blame]1232
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000[diff] [blame]1233<h3><a name="Saving">Saving a tree</a></h3>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1234
1235<p>Basically 3 options are possible:</p>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +0000[diff] [blame]1236<dl>
Daniel Veillarddd6b3671999-09-23 22:19:22 +0000[diff] [blame]1237 <dt><code>void xmlDocDumpMemory(xmlDocPtr cur, xmlChar**mem, int
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1238 *size);</code></dt>
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]1239 <dd><p>Returns a buffer into which the document has been saved.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1240 </dd>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +0000[diff] [blame]1241</dl>
1242<dl>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1243 <dt><code>extern void xmlDocDump(FILE *f, xmlDocPtr doc);</code></dt>
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]1244 <dd><p>Dumps a document to an open file descriptor.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1245 </dd>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +0000[diff] [blame]1246</dl>
1247<dl>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1248 <dt><code>int xmlSaveFile(const char *filename, xmlDocPtr cur);</code></dt>
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +0000[diff] [blame]1249 <dd><p>Saves the document to a file. In this case, the compression
1250 interface is triggered if it has been turned on.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1251 </dd>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +0000[diff] [blame]1252</dl>
Daniel Veillard10c6a8f1998-10-28 01:00:12 +0000[diff] [blame]1253
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000[diff] [blame]1254<h3><a name="Compressio">Compression</a></h3>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1255
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]1256<p>The library transparently handles compression when doing file-based
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +0000[diff] [blame]1257accesses. The level of compression on saves can be turned on either globally
1258or individually for one file:</p>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +0000[diff] [blame]1259<dl>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1260 <dt><code>int xmlGetDocCompressMode (xmlDocPtr doc);</code></dt>
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]1261 <dd><p>Gets the document compression ratio (0-9).</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1262 </dd>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +0000[diff] [blame]1263</dl>
1264<dl>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1265 <dt><code>void xmlSetDocCompressMode (xmlDocPtr doc, int mode);</code></dt>
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]1266 <dd><p>Sets the document compression ratio.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1267 </dd>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +0000[diff] [blame]1268</dl>
1269<dl>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1270 <dt><code>int xmlGetCompressMode(void);</code></dt>
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]1271 <dd><p>Gets the default compression ratio.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1272 </dd>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +0000[diff] [blame]1273</dl>
1274<dl>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1275 <dt><code>void xmlSetCompressMode(int mode);</code></dt>
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]1276 <dd><p>Sets the default compression ratio.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1277 </dd>
Daniel Veillard25940b71998-10-29 05:51:30 +0000[diff] [blame]1278</dl>
1279
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000[diff] [blame]1280<h2><a name="Entities">Entities or no entities</a></h2>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]1281
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]1282<p>Entities in principle are similar to simple C macros. An entity defines an
1283abbreviation for a given string that you can reuse many times throughout the
1284content of your document. Entities are especially useful when a given string
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +0000[diff] [blame]1285may occur frequently within a document, or to confine the change needed to a
1286document to a restricted area in the internal subset of the document (at the
1287beginning). Example:</p>
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]1288<pre>1 &lt;?xml version="1.0"?&gt;
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]12892 &lt;!DOCTYPE EXAMPLE SYSTEM "example.dtd" [
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]12903 &lt;!ENTITY xml "Extensible Markup Language"&gt;
12914 ]&gt;
12925 &lt;EXAMPLE&gt;
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]12936 &amp;xml;
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]12947 &lt;/EXAMPLE&gt;</pre>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]1295
1296<p>Line 3 declares the xml entity. Line 6 uses the xml entity, by prefixing
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000[diff] [blame]1297its name with '&amp;' and following it by ';' without any spaces added. There
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]1298are 5 predefined entities in libxml allowing you to escape charaters with
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]1299predefined meaning in some parts of the xml document content:
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]1300<strong>&amp;lt;</strong> for the character '&lt;', <strong>&amp;gt;</strong>
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]1301for the character '&gt;', <strong>&amp;apos;</strong> for the character ''',
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]1302<strong>&amp;quot;</strong> for the character '"', and
1303<strong>&amp;amp;</strong> for the character '&amp;'.</p>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]1304
1305<p>One of the problems related to entities is that you may want the parser to
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +0000[diff] [blame]1306substitute an entity's content so that you can see the replacement text in
1307your application. Or you may prefer to keep entity references as such in the
1308content to be able to save the document back without losing this usually
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame]1309precious information (if the user went through the pain of explicitly
1310defining entities, he may have a a rather negative attitude if you blindly
1311susbtitute them as saving time). The <a
Daniel Veillard9cb5ff42001-01-29 08:22:21 +0000[diff] [blame]1312href="html/libxml-parser.html#XMLSUBSTITUTEENTITIESDEFAULT">xmlSubstituteEntitiesDefault()</a>
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]1313function allows you to check and change the behaviour, which is to not
1314substitute entities by default.</p>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]1315
1316<p>Here is the DOM tree built by libxml for the previous document in the
1317default case:</p>
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]1318<pre>/gnome/src/gnome-xml -&gt; ./xmllint --debug test/ent1
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]1319DOCUMENT
1320version=1.0
1321 ELEMENT EXAMPLE
1322 TEXT
1323 content=
1324 ENTITY_REF
1325 INTERNAL_GENERAL_ENTITY xml
1326 content=Extensible Markup Language
1327 TEXT
1328 content=</pre>
1329
1330<p>And here is the result when substituting entities:</p>
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]1331<pre>/gnome/src/gnome-xml -&gt; ./tester --debug --noent test/ent1
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]1332DOCUMENT
1333version=1.0
1334 ELEMENT EXAMPLE
1335 TEXT
1336 content= Extensible Markup Language</pre>
1337
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]1338<p>So, entities or no entities? Basically, it depends on your use case. I
1339suggest that you keep the non-substituting default behaviour and avoid using
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]1340entities in your XML document or data if you are not willing to handle the
1341entity references elements in the DOM tree.</p>
1342
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000[diff] [blame]1343<p>Note that at save time libxml enforces the conversion of the predefined
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]1344entities where necessary to prevent well-formedness problems, and will also
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000[diff] [blame]1345transparently replace those with chars (i.e. it will not generate entity
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]1346reference elements in the DOM tree or call the reference() SAX callback when
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]1347finding them in the input).</p>
1348
Daniel Veillard7b9c4b72000-08-25 16:26:50 +0000[diff] [blame]1349<p><span style="background-color: #FF0000">WARNING</span>: handling entities
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000[diff] [blame]1350on top of the libxml SAX interface is difficult!!! If you plan to use
Daniel Veillard7b9c4b72000-08-25 16:26:50 +0000[diff] [blame]1351non-predefined entities in your documents, then the learning cuvre to handle
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000[diff] [blame]1352then using the SAX API may be long. If you plan to use complex documents, I
Daniel Veillard7b9c4b72000-08-25 16:26:50 +0000[diff] [blame]1353strongly suggest you consider using the DOM interface instead and let libxml
Daniel Veillard8c6d6af2000-08-25 17:14:13 +0000[diff] [blame]1354deal with the complexity rather than trying to do it yourself.</p>
Daniel Veillard7b9c4b72000-08-25 16:26:50 +0000[diff] [blame]1355
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000[diff] [blame]1356<h2><a name="Namespaces">Namespaces</a></h2>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]1357
Daniel Veillardec303412000-03-24 13:41:54 +0000[diff] [blame]1358<p>The libxml library implements <a
1359href="http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml-names/">XML namespaces</a> support by
1360recognizing namespace contructs in the input, and does namespace lookup
1361automatically when building the DOM tree. A namespace declaration is
1362associated with an in-memory structure and all elements or attributes within
1363that namespace point to it. Hence testing the namespace is a simple and fast
1364equality operation at the user level.</p>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]1365
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +0000[diff] [blame]1366<p>I suggest that people using libxml use a namespace, and declare it in the
1367root element of their document as the default namespace. Then they don't need
1368to use the prefix in the content but we will have a basis for future semantic
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000[diff] [blame]1369refinement and merging of data from different sources. This doesn't increase
Daniel Veillardec70e912001-02-26 20:10:45 +0000[diff] [blame]1370the size of the XML output significantly, but significantly increases its
1371value in the long-term. Example:</p>
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]1372<pre>&lt;mydoc xmlns="http://mydoc.example.org/schemas/"&gt;
1373 &lt;elem1&gt;...&lt;/elem1&gt;
1374 &lt;elem2&gt;...&lt;/elem2&gt;
1375&lt;/mydoc&gt;</pre>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]1376
Daniel Veillardec70e912001-02-26 20:10:45 +0000[diff] [blame]1377<p>The namespace value has to be an absolute URL, but the URL doesn't have to
1378point to any existing resource on the Web. It will bind all the element and
1379atributes with that URL. I suggest to use an URL within a domain you control,
1380and that the URL should contain some kind of version information if possible.
1381For example, <code>"http://www.gnome.org/gnumeric/1.0/"</code> is a good
1382namespace scheme.</p>
Daniel Veillardec303412000-03-24 13:41:54 +0000[diff] [blame]1383
1384<p>Then when you load a file, make sure that a namespace carrying the
Daniel Veillard88f00ae2000-03-02 00:15:55 +0000[diff] [blame]1385version-independent prefix is installed on the root element of your document,
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]1386and if the version information don't match something you know, warn the user
1387and be liberal in what you accept as the input. Also do *not* try to base
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]1388namespace checking on the prefix value. &lt;foo:text&gt; may be exactly the
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000[diff] [blame]1389same as &lt;bar:text&gt; in another document. What really matters is the URI
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]1390associated with the element or the attribute, not the prefix string (which is
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000[diff] [blame]1391just a shortcut for the full URI). In libxml, element and attributes have an
Daniel Veillardec303412000-03-24 13:41:54 +0000[diff] [blame]1392<code>ns</code> field pointing to an xmlNs structure detailing the namespace
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000[diff] [blame]1393prefix and its URI.</p>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]1394
1395<p>@@Interfaces@@</p>
1396
1397<p>@@Examples@@</p>
1398
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000[diff] [blame]1399<p>Usually people object to using namespaces together with validity checking.
1400I will try to make sure that using namespaces won't break validity checking,
1401so even if you plan to use or currently are using validation I strongly
Daniel Veillardf13e1ed2000-03-06 07:41:49 +0000[diff] [blame]1402suggest adding namespaces to your document. A default namespace scheme
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]1403<code>xmlns="http://...."</code> should not break validity even on less
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000[diff] [blame]1404flexible parsers. Using namespaces to mix and differentiate content coming
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame]1405from multiple DTDs will certainly break current validation schemes. I will
1406try to provide ways to do this, but this may not be portable or
1407standardized.</p>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]1408
Daniel Veillard2f4dfc41999-09-24 14:03:48 +0000[diff] [blame]1409<h2><a name="Validation">Validation, or are you afraid of DTDs ?</a></h2>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]1410
1411<p>Well what is validation and what is a DTD ?</p>
1412
1413<p>Validation is the process of checking a document against a set of
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000[diff] [blame]1414construction rules; a <strong>DTD</strong> (Document Type Definition) is such
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]1415a set of rules.</p>
1416
1417<p>The validation process and building DTDs are the two most difficult parts
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000[diff] [blame]1418of the XML life cycle. Briefly a DTD defines all the possibles element to be
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame]1419found within your document, what is the formal shape of your document tree
1420(by defining the allowed content of an element, either text, a regular
1421expression for the allowed list of children, or mixed content i.e. both text
1422and children). The DTD also defines the allowed attributes for all elements
1423and the types of the attributes. For more detailed information, I suggest
1424that you read the related parts of the XML specification, the examples found
1425under gnome-xml/test/valid/dtd and any of the large number of books available
1426on XML. The dia example in gnome-xml/test/valid should be both simple and
Daniel Veillardec70e912001-02-26 20:10:45 +0000[diff] [blame]1427complete enough to allow you to build your own.</p>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]1428
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000[diff] [blame]1429<p>A word of warning, building a good DTD which will fit the needs of your
1430application in the long-term is far from trivial; however, the extra level of
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame]1431quality it can ensure is well worth the price for some sets of applications
1432or if you already have already a DTD defined for your application field.</p>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]1433
1434<p>The validation is not completely finished but in a (very IMHO) usable
1435state. Until a real validation interface is defined the way to do it is to
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame]1436define and set the <strong>xmlDoValidityCheckingDefaultValue</strong>
1437external variable to 1, this will of course be changed at some point:</p>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]1438
1439<p>extern int xmlDoValidityCheckingDefaultValue;</p>
1440
1441<p>...</p>
1442
1443<p>xmlDoValidityCheckingDefaultValue = 1;</p>
1444
1445<p></p>
1446
1447<p>To handle external entities, use the function
1448<strong>xmlSetExternalEntityLoader</strong>(xmlExternalEntityLoader f); to
1449link in you HTTP/FTP/Entities database library to the standard libxml
1450core.</p>
1451
1452<p>@@interfaces@@</p>
1453
Daniel Veillard35008381999-10-25 13:15:52 +0000[diff] [blame]1454<h2><a name="DOM"></a><a name="Principles">DOM Principles</a></h2>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1455
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame]1456<p><a href="http://www.w3.org/DOM/">DOM</a> stands for the <em>Document
1457Object Model</em>; this is an API for accessing XML or HTML structured
1458documents. Native support for DOM in Gnome is on the way (module gnome-dom),
1459and will be based on gnome-xml. This will be a far cleaner interface to
1460manipulate XML files within Gnome since it won't expose the internal
1461structure.</p>
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +0000[diff] [blame]1462
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]1463<p>The current DOM implementation on top of libxml is the <a
Daniel Veillarda47fb3d2001-03-25 17:23:49 +0000[diff] [blame]1464href="http://cvs.gnome.org/lxr/source/gdome2/">gdome2 Gnome module</a>, this
1465is a full DOM interface, thanks to Paolo Casarini, check the <a
1466href="http://www.cs.unibo.it/~casarini/gdome2/">Gdome2 homepage</a> for more
1467informations.</p>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]1468
Daniel Veillard35008381999-10-25 13:15:52 +0000[diff] [blame]1469<h2><a name="Example"></a><a name="real">A real example</a></h2>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1470
1471<p>Here is a real size example, where the actual content of the application
1472data is not kept in the DOM tree but uses internal structures. It is based on
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +0000[diff] [blame]1473a proposal to keep a database of jobs related to Gnome, with an XML based
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1474storage structure. Here is an <a href="gjobs.xml">XML encoded jobs
1475base</a>:</p>
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]1476<pre>&lt;?xml version="1.0"?&gt;
1477&lt;gjob:Helping xmlns:gjob="http://www.gnome.org/some-location"&gt;
1478 &lt;gjob:Jobs&gt;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +0000[diff] [blame]1479
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]1480 &lt;gjob:Job&gt;
1481 &lt;gjob:Project ID="3"/&gt;
1482 &lt;gjob:Application&gt;GBackup&lt;/gjob:Application&gt;
1483 &lt;gjob:Category&gt;Development&lt;/gjob:Category&gt;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +0000[diff] [blame]1484
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]1485 &lt;gjob:Update&gt;
1486 &lt;gjob:Status&gt;Open&lt;/gjob:Status&gt;
1487 &lt;gjob:Modified&gt;Mon, 07 Jun 1999 20:27:45 -0400 MET DST&lt;/gjob:Modified&gt;
1488 &lt;gjob:Salary&gt;USD 0.00&lt;/gjob:Salary&gt;
1489 &lt;/gjob:Update&gt;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +0000[diff] [blame]1490
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]1491 &lt;gjob:Developers&gt;
1492 &lt;gjob:Developer&gt;
1493 &lt;/gjob:Developer&gt;
1494 &lt;/gjob:Developers&gt;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +0000[diff] [blame]1495
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]1496 &lt;gjob:Contact&gt;
1497 &lt;gjob:Person&gt;Nathan Clemons&lt;/gjob:Person&gt;
1498 &lt;gjob:Email&gt;nathan@windsofstorm.net&lt;/gjob:Email&gt;
1499 &lt;gjob:Company&gt;
1500 &lt;/gjob:Company&gt;
1501 &lt;gjob:Organisation&gt;
1502 &lt;/gjob:Organisation&gt;
1503 &lt;gjob:Webpage&gt;
1504 &lt;/gjob:Webpage&gt;
1505 &lt;gjob:Snailmail&gt;
1506 &lt;/gjob:Snailmail&gt;
1507 &lt;gjob:Phone&gt;
1508 &lt;/gjob:Phone&gt;
1509 &lt;/gjob:Contact&gt;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +0000[diff] [blame]1510
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]1511 &lt;gjob:Requirements&gt;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +0000[diff] [blame]1512 The program should be released as free software, under the GPL.
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]1513 &lt;/gjob:Requirements&gt;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +0000[diff] [blame]1514
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]1515 &lt;gjob:Skills&gt;
1516 &lt;/gjob:Skills&gt;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +0000[diff] [blame]1517
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]1518 &lt;gjob:Details&gt;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +0000[diff] [blame]1519 A GNOME based system that will allow a superuser to configure
1520 compressed and uncompressed files and/or file systems to be backed
1521 up with a supported media in the system. This should be able to
1522 perform via find commands generating a list of files that are passed
1523 to tar, dd, cpio, cp, gzip, etc., to be directed to the tape machine
1524 or via operations performed on the filesystem itself. Email
1525 notification and GUI status display very important.
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]1526 &lt;/gjob:Details&gt;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +0000[diff] [blame]1527
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]1528 &lt;/gjob:Job&gt;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +0000[diff] [blame]1529
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]1530 &lt;/gjob:Jobs&gt;
1531&lt;/gjob:Helping&gt;</pre>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1532
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame]1533<p>While loading the XML file into an internal DOM tree is a matter of
1534calling only a couple of functions, browsing the tree to gather the ata and
1535generate the internal structures is harder, and more error prone.</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1536
1537<p>The suggested principle is to be tolerant with respect to the input
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame]1538structure. For example, the ordering of the attributes is not significant,
1539the XML specification is clear about it. It's also usually a good idea not to
Daniel Veillardec70e912001-02-26 20:10:45 +0000[diff] [blame]1540depend on the order of the children of a given node, unless it really makes
1541things harder. Here is some code to parse the information for a person:</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1542<pre>/*
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +0000[diff] [blame]1543 * A person record
1544 */
1545typedef struct person {
1546 char *name;
1547 char *email;
1548 char *company;
1549 char *organisation;
1550 char *smail;
1551 char *webPage;
1552 char *phone;
1553} person, *personPtr;
1554
1555/*
1556 * And the code needed to parse it
1557 */
1558personPtr parsePerson(xmlDocPtr doc, xmlNsPtr ns, xmlNodePtr cur) {
1559 personPtr ret = NULL;
1560
1561DEBUG("parsePerson\n");
1562 /*
1563 * allocate the struct
1564 */
1565 ret = (personPtr) malloc(sizeof(person));
1566 if (ret == NULL) {
1567 fprintf(stderr,"out of memory\n");
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1568 return(NULL);
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +0000[diff] [blame]1569 }
1570 memset(ret, 0, sizeof(person));
1571
1572 /* We don't care what the top level element name is */
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]1573 cur = cur-&gt;xmlChildrenNode;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +0000[diff] [blame]1574 while (cur != NULL) {
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]1575 if ((!strcmp(cur-&gt;name, "Person")) &amp;&amp; (cur-&gt;ns == ns))
1576 ret-&gt;name = xmlNodeListGetString(doc, cur-&gt;xmlChildrenNode, 1);
1577 if ((!strcmp(cur-&gt;name, "Email")) &amp;&amp; (cur-&gt;ns == ns))
1578 ret-&gt;email = xmlNodeListGetString(doc, cur-&gt;xmlChildrenNode, 1);
1579 cur = cur-&gt;next;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +0000[diff] [blame]1580 }
1581
1582 return(ret);
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1583}</pre>
1584
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000[diff] [blame]1585<p>Here are a couple of things to notice:</p>
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +0000[diff] [blame]1586<ul>
Daniel Veillard91e9d582001-02-26 07:31:12 +0000[diff] [blame]1587 <li>Usually a recursive parsing style is the more convenient one: XML data
1588 is by nature subject to repetitive constructs and usually exibits highly
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1589 stuctured patterns.</li>
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame]1590 <li>The two arguments of type <em>xmlDocPtr</em> and <em>xmlNsPtr</em>,
1591 i.e. the pointer to the global XML document and the namespace reserved to
1592 the application. Document wide information are needed for example to
1593 decode entities and it's a good coding practice to define a namespace for
1594 your application set of data and test that the element and attributes
1595 you're analyzing actually pertains to your application space. This is
1596 done by a simple equality test (cur-&gt;ns == ns).</li>
Daniel Veillardec70e912001-02-26 20:10:45 +0000[diff] [blame]1597 <li>To retrieve text and attributes value, you can use the function
1598 <em>xmlNodeListGetString</em> to gather all the text and entity reference
1599 nodes generated by the DOM output and produce an single text string.</li>
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +0000[diff] [blame]1600</ul>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1601
1602<p>Here is another piece of code used to parse another level of the
1603structure:</p>
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]1604<pre>#include &lt;libxml/tree.h&gt;
Daniel Veillard361d8452000-04-03 19:48:13 +0000[diff] [blame]1605/*
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +0000[diff] [blame]1606 * a Description for a Job
1607 */
1608typedef struct job {
1609 char *projectID;
1610 char *application;
1611 char *category;
1612 personPtr contact;
1613 int nbDevelopers;
1614 personPtr developers[100]; /* using dynamic alloc is left as an exercise */
1615} job, *jobPtr;
1616
1617/*
1618 * And the code needed to parse it
1619 */
1620jobPtr parseJob(xmlDocPtr doc, xmlNsPtr ns, xmlNodePtr cur) {
1621 jobPtr ret = NULL;
1622
1623DEBUG("parseJob\n");
1624 /*
1625 * allocate the struct
1626 */
1627 ret = (jobPtr) malloc(sizeof(job));
1628 if (ret == NULL) {
1629 fprintf(stderr,"out of memory\n");
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1630 return(NULL);
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +0000[diff] [blame]1631 }
1632 memset(ret, 0, sizeof(job));
1633
1634 /* We don't care what the top level element name is */
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]1635 cur = cur-&gt;xmlChildrenNode;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +0000[diff] [blame]1636 while (cur != NULL) {
1637
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]1638 if ((!strcmp(cur-&gt;name, "Project")) &amp;&amp; (cur-&gt;ns == ns)) {
1639 ret-&gt;projectID = xmlGetProp(cur, "ID");
1640 if (ret-&gt;projectID == NULL) {
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1641 fprintf(stderr, "Project has no ID\n");
1642 }
1643 }
Daniel Veillard60979bd2000-07-10 12:17:33 +0000[diff] [blame]1644 if ((!strcmp(cur-&gt;name, "Application")) &amp;&amp; (cur-&gt;ns == ns))
1645 ret-&gt;application = xmlNodeListGetString(doc, cur-&gt;xmlChildrenNode, 1);
1646 if ((!strcmp(cur-&gt;name, "Category")) &amp;&amp; (cur-&gt;ns == ns))
1647 ret-&gt;category = xmlNodeListGetString(doc, cur-&gt;xmlChildrenNode, 1);
1648 if ((!strcmp(cur-&gt;name, "Contact")) &amp;&amp; (cur-&gt;ns == ns))
1649 ret-&gt;contact = parsePerson(doc, ns, cur);
1650 cur = cur-&gt;next;
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +0000[diff] [blame]1651 }
1652
1653 return(ret);
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1654}</pre>
Daniel Veillard14fff061999-06-22 21:49:07 +0000[diff] [blame]1655
Daniel Veillardec70e912001-02-26 20:10:45 +0000[diff] [blame]1656<p>Once you are used to it, writing this kind of code is quite simple, but
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame]1657boring. Ultimately, it could be possble to write stubbers taking either C
1658data structure definitions, a set of XML examples or an XML DTD and produce
1659the code needed to import and export the content between C data and XML
1660storage. This is left as an exercise to the reader :-)</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1661
Daniel Veillard6f0adb52000-07-03 11:41:26 +0000[diff] [blame]1662<p>Feel free to use <a href="example/gjobread.c">the code for the full C
1663parsing example</a> as a template, it is also available with Makefile in the
1664Gnome CVS base under gnome-xml/example</p>
Daniel Veillardb05deb71999-08-10 19:04:08 +0000[diff] [blame]1665
Daniel Veillardc310d562000-06-23 18:32:15 +0000[diff] [blame]1666<h2><a name="Contributi">Contributions</a></h2>
1667<ul>
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame]1668 <li><a href="mailto:ari@lusis.org">Ari Johnson</a>
1669 provides a C++ wrapper for libxml:
Daniel Veillardc310d562000-06-23 18:32:15 +0000[diff] [blame]1670 <p>Website: <a
1671 href="http://lusis.org/~ari/xml++/">http://lusis.org/~ari/xml++/</a></p>
1672 <p>Download: <a
1673 href="http://lusis.org/~ari/xml++/libxml++.tar.gz">http://lusis.org/~ari/xml++/libxml++.tar.gz</a></p>
1674 </li>
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame]1675 <li><a href="mailto:izlatkovic@daenet.de">Igor Zlatkovic</a>
1676 is now the maintainer of the Windows port, <a
Daniel Veillard95189532001-07-26 18:30:26 +0000[diff] [blame]1677 href="http://www.fh-frankfurt.de/~igor/projects/libxml/index.html">he
1678 provides binaries</a></li>
Daniel Veillarde356c282001-03-10 12:32:04 +0000[diff] [blame]1679 <li><a
1680 href="http://mail.gnome.org/archives/xml/2001-March/msg00014.html">Matt
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame]1681 Sergeant</a>
1682 developped <a href="http://axkit.org/download/">XML::LibXSLT</a>, a perl
1683 wrapper for libxml2/libxslt as part of the <a
1684 href="http://axkit.com/">AxKit XML application server</a></li>
1685 <li><a href="mailto:fnatter@gmx.net">Felix Natter</a>
1686 and <a href="mailto:geertk@ai.rug.nl">Geert Kloosterman</a> provide <a
Daniel Veillardca989762001-06-23 17:39:29 +0000[diff] [blame]1687 href="libxml-doc.el">an emacs module</a> to lookup libxml(2) functions
Daniel Veillard3f6f7f62000-06-30 17:58:25 +0000[diff] [blame]1688 documentation</li>
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame]1689 <li><a href="mailto:sherwin@nlm.nih.gov">Ziying Sherwin</a>
1690 provided <a href="http://xmlsoft.org/messages/0488.html">man
1691 pages</a></li>
Daniel Veillard5168dbf2001-07-07 00:18:23 +0000[diff] [blame]1692 <li>there is a module for <a
1693 href="http://acs-misc.sourceforge.net/nsxml.html">libxml/libxslt support
1694 in OpenNSD/AOLServer</a></li>
Daniel Veillard3d6ae1c2001-08-15 13:12:39 +0000[diff] [blame]1695 <li><a href="mailto:dkuhlman@cutter.rexx.com">Dave Kuhlman</a>
1696 provides libxml/libxslt <a href="http://www.rexx.com/~dkuhlman">wrappers
1697 for Python</a></li>
Daniel Veillardc310d562000-06-23 18:32:15 +0000[diff] [blame]1698</ul>
1699
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]1700<p></p>
1701
Daniel Veillardf7ed3362001-08-17 12:01:21 +0000[diff] [blame]1702<p><a href="mailto:daniel@veillard.com">Daniel Veillard</a></p>
Daniel Veillardc8eab3a1999-09-04 18:27:23 +0000[diff] [blame]1703
Daniel Veillarddadd0872001-09-15 09:21:44 +0000[diff] [blame^]1704<p>$Id: xml.html,v 1.110 2001/09/13 14:24:44 veillard Exp $</p>
Daniel Veillardccb09631998-10-27 06:21:04 +0000[diff] [blame]1705</body>
1706</html>