1
2                        Expat, Release 2.1.0
3
4This is Expat, a C library for parsing XML, written by James Clark.
5Expat is a stream-oriented XML parser.  This means that you register
6handlers with the parser before starting the parse.  These handlers
7are called when the parser discovers the associated structures in the
8document being parsed.  A start tag is an example of the kind of
9structures for which you may register handlers.
10
11Windows users should use the expat_win32bin package, which includes
12both precompiled libraries and executables, and source code for
13developers.
14
15Expat is free software.  You may copy, distribute, and modify it under
16the terms of the License contained in the file COPYING distributed
17with this package.  This license is the same as the MIT/X Consortium
18license.
19
20Versions of Expat that have an odd minor version (the middle number in
21the release above), are development releases and should be considered
22as beta software.  Releases with even minor version numbers are
23intended to be production grade software.
24
25If you are building Expat from a check-out from the CVS repository,
26you need to run a script that generates the configure script using the
27GNU autoconf and libtool tools.  To do this, you need to have
28autoconf 2.58 or newer. Run the script like this:
29
30        ./buildconf.sh
31
32Once this has been done, follow the same instructions as for building
33from a source distribution.
34
35To build Expat from a source distribution, you first run the
36configuration shell script in the top level distribution directory:
37
38        ./configure
39
40There are many options which you may provide to configure (which you
41can discover by running configure with the --help option).  But the
42one of most interest is the one that sets the installation directory.
43By default, the configure script will set things up to install
44libexpat into /usr/local/lib, expat.h into /usr/local/include, and
45xmlwf into /usr/local/bin.  If, for example, you'd prefer to install
46into /home/me/mystuff/lib, /home/me/mystuff/include, and
47/home/me/mystuff/bin, you can tell configure about that with:
48
49        ./configure --prefix=/home/me/mystuff
50        
51Another interesting option is to enable 64-bit integer support for
52line and column numbers and the over-all byte index:
53
54        ./configure CPPFLAGS=-DXML_LARGE_SIZE
55        
56However, such a modification would be a breaking change to the ABI
57and is therefore not recommended for general use - e.g. as part of
58a Linux distribution - but rather for builds with special requirements.
59
60After running the configure script, the "make" command will build
61things and "make install" will install things into their proper
62location.  Have a look at the "Makefile" to learn about additional
63"make" options.  Note that you need to have write permission into
64the directories into which things will be installed.
65
66If you are interested in building Expat to provide document
67information in UTF-16 encoding rather than the default UTF-8, follow
68these instructions (after having run "make distclean"):
69
70        1. For UTF-16 output as unsigned short (and version/error
71           strings as char), run:
72
73               ./configure CPPFLAGS=-DXML_UNICODE
74
75           For UTF-16 output as wchar_t (incl. version/error strings),
76           run:
77
78               ./configure CFLAGS="-g -O2 -fshort-wchar" \
79                           CPPFLAGS=-DXML_UNICODE_WCHAR_T
80
81        2. Edit the MakeFile, changing:
82
83               LIBRARY = libexpat.la
84
85           to:
86
87               LIBRARY = libexpatw.la
88
89           (Note the additional "w" in the library name.)
90
91        3. Run "make buildlib" (which builds the library only).
92           Or, to save step 2, run "make buildlib LIBRARY=libexpatw.la".
93
94        4. Run "make installlib" (which installs the library only).
95           Or, if step 2 was omitted, run "make installlib LIBRARY=libexpatw.la".
96           
97Using DESTDIR or INSTALL_ROOT is enabled, with INSTALL_ROOT being the default
98value for DESTDIR, and the rest of the make file using only DESTDIR.
99It works as follows:
100   $ make install DESTDIR=/path/to/image
101overrides the in-makefile set DESTDIR, while both
102   $ INSTALL_ROOT=/path/to/image make install
103   $ make install INSTALL_ROOT=/path/to/image
104use DESTDIR=$(INSTALL_ROOT), even if DESTDIR eventually is defined in the
105environment, because variable-setting priority is
1061) commandline
1072) in-makefile
1083) environment  
109
110Note: This only applies to the Expat library itself, building UTF-16 versions
111of xmlwf and the tests is currently not supported.         
112
113Note for Solaris users:  The "ar" command is usually located in
114"/usr/ccs/bin", which is not in the default PATH.  You will need to
115add this to your path for the "make" command, and probably also switch
116to GNU make (the "make" found in /usr/ccs/bin does not seem to work
117properly -- appearantly it does not understand .PHONY directives).  If
118you're using ksh or bash, use this command to build:
119
120        PATH=/usr/ccs/bin:$PATH make
121
122When using Expat with a project using autoconf for configuration, you
123can use the probing macro in conftools/expat.m4 to determine how to
124include Expat.  See the comments at the top of that file for more
125information.
126
127A reference manual is available in the file doc/reference.html in this
128distribution.
129
130The homepage for this project is http://www.libexpat.org/.  There
131are links there to connect you to the bug reports page.  If you need
132to report a bug when you don't have access to a browser, you may also
133send a bug report by email to expat-bugs@mail.libexpat.org.
134
135Discussion related to the direction of future expat development takes
136place on expat-discuss@mail.libexpat.org.  Archives of this list and
137other Expat-related lists may be found at:
138
139        http://mail.libexpat.org/mailman/listinfo/
140