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11<p><a href="http://www.gnome.org/"><img src="smallfootonly.gif" alt="Gnome
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14
15<h1 align="center">The XML library for Gnome</h1>
16
17<h2 style="text-align: center">libxml, a.k.a. gnome-xml</h2>
18
19<p></p>
20<ul>
21  <li><a href="#Introducti">Introduction</a></li>
22  <li><a href="#Documentat">Documentation</a></li>
23  <li><a href="#Downloads">Downloads</a></li>
24  <li><a href="#News">News</a></li>
25  <li><a href="#XML">XML</a></li>
26  <li><a href="#tree">The tree output</a></li>
27  <li><a href="#interface">The SAX interface</a></li>
28  <li><a href="#library">The XML library interfaces</a>
29    <ul>
30      <li><a href="#Invoking">Invoking the parser: the pull way</a></li>
31      <li><a href="#Invoking">Invoking the parser: the push way</a></li>
32      <li><a href="#Invoking2">Invoking the parser: the SAX interface</a></li>
33      <li><a href="#Building">Building a tree from scratch</a></li>
34      <li><a href="#Traversing">Traversing the tree</a></li>
35      <li><a href="#Modifying">Modifying the tree</a></li>
36      <li><a href="#Saving">Saving the tree</a></li>
37      <li><a href="#Compressio">Compression</a></li>
38    </ul>
39  </li>
40  <li><a href="#Entities">Entities or no entities</a></li>
41  <li><a href="#Namespaces">Namespaces</a></li>
42  <li><a href="#Validation">Validation</a></li>
43  <li><a href="#Principles">DOM principles</a></li>
44  <li><a href="#real">A real example</a></li>
45  <li><a href="#Contributi">Contribution</a></li>
46</ul>
47
48<h2><a name="Introducti">Introduction</a></h2>
49
50<p>This document describes libxml, the <a
51href="http://www.w3.org/XML/">XML</a> library provided in the <a
52href="http://www.gnome.org/">Gnome</a> framework. XML is a standard for
53building tag-based structured documents/data.</p>
54
55<p>Here are some key points about libxml:</p>
56<ul>
57  <li>The internal document repesentation is as close as possible to the <a
58    href="http://www.w3.org/DOM/">DOM</a> interfaces.</li>
59  <li>Libxml also has a <a href="http://www.megginson.com/SAX/index.html">SAX
60    like interface</a>; the interface is designed to be compatible with <a
61    href="http://www.jclark.com/xml/expat.html">Expat</a>.</li>
62  <li>Libxml now includes a nearly complete <a
63    href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xpath">XPath</a> implementation.</li>
64  <li>Libxml exports Push and Pull type parser interfaces for both XML and
65    HTML.</li>
66  <li>This library is released both under the <a
67    href="http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Legal/copyright-software-19980720.html">W3C
68    IPR</a> and the GNU LGPL. Use either at your convenience, basically this
69    should make everybody happy, if not, drop me a mail.</li>
70  <li>There is <a href="upgrade.html">a first set of instructions</a>
71    concerning upgrade from libxml-1.x to libxml-2.x</li>
72</ul>
73
74<h2><a name="Documentat">Documentation</a></h2>
75
76<p>There are some on-line resources about using libxml:</p>
77<ol>
78  <li>Check the <a href="FAQ.html">FAQ</a></li>
79  <li>Check the <a href="http://xmlsoft.org/libxml.html">extensive
80    documentation</a> automatically extracted from code comments.</li>
81  <li>This page provides a global overview and <a href="#real">some
82    examples</a> on how to use libxml.</li>
83  <li><a href="mailto:james@daa.com.au">James Henstridge</a> wrote <a
84    href="http://www.daa.com.au/~james/gnome/xml-sax/xml-sax.html">some nice
85    documentation</a> explaining how to use the libxml SAX interface.</li>
86  <li>George Lebl wrote <a
87    href="http://www-4.ibm.com/software/developer/library/gnome3/">an article
88    for IBM developerWorks</a> about using libxml.</li>
89  <li>It is also a good idea to check to <a href="mailto:raph@levien.com">Raph
90    Levien</a> <a href="http://levien.com/gnome/">web site</a> since he is
91    building the <a href="http://levien.com/gnome/gdome.html">DOM interface
92    gdome</a> on top of libxml result tree and an implementation of <a
93    href="http://www.w3.org/Graphics/SVG/">SVG</a> called <a
94    href="http://www.levien.com/svg/">gill</a>. Check his <a
95    href="http://www.levien.com/gnome/domination.html">DOMination
96  paper</a>.</li>
97  <li>Check <a href="http://cvs.gnome.org/lxr/source/gnome-xml/TODO">the TODO
98    file</a></li>
99  <li>Read the <a href="upgrade.html">1.x to 2.x upgrade path</a>. If you are
100    starting a new project using libxml you should really use the 2.x
101  version.</li>
102  <li>And don't forget to look at the <a href="/messages/">mailing-list
103    archive</a>.</li>
104</ol>
105
106<h3>Reporting bugs and getting help</h3>
107
108<p>Well, bugs or missing features are always possible, and I will make a point
109of fixing them in a timely fashion. The best way to report a bug is to <a
110href="http://bugs.gnome.org/db/pa/lgnome-xml.html">use the Gnome bug tracking
111database</a>. I look at reports there regularly and it's good to have a
112reminder when a bug is still open. Check the <a
113href="http://bugs.gnome.org/Reporting.html">instructions on reporting bugs</a>
114and be sure to specify that the bug is for the package gnome-xml.</p>
115
116<p>There is also a mailing-list <a
117href="mailto:xml@rufus.w3.org">xml@rufus.w3.org</a> for libxml, with an <a
118href="http://xmlsoft.org/messages">on-line archive</a>. To subscribe to this
119majordomo based list, send a mail message to <a
120href="mailto:majordomo@rufus.w3.org">majordomo@rufus.w3.org</a> with
121"subscribe xml" in the <strong>content</strong> of the message.</p>
122
123<p>Alternatively, you can just send the bug to the <a
124href="mailto:xml@rufus.w3.org">xml@rufus.w3.org</a> list.</p>
125
126<p>Of course, bugs reports with a suggested patch for fixing them will
127probably be processed faster.</p>
128
129<p>If you're looking for help, a quick look at <a
130href="http://xmlsoft.org/messages/#407">the list archive</a> may actually
131provide the answer, I usually send source samples when answering libxml usage
132questions. The <a href="http://xmlsoft.org/book1.html">auto-generated
133documentantion</a> is not as polished as I would like (i need to learn more
134about Docbook), but it's a good starting point.</p>
135
136<h2><a name="Downloads">Downloads</a></h2>
137
138<p>The latest versions of libxml can be found on <a
139href="ftp://rpmfind.net/pub/libxml/">rpmfind.net</a> or on the <a
140href="ftp://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/MIRRORS.html">Gnome FTP server</a> either
141as a <a href="ftp://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/stable/sources/libxml/">source
142archive</a> or <a href="ftp://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/contrib/rpms/">RPM
143packages</a>. (NOTE that you need both the <a
144href="http://rpmfind.net/linux/RPM/libxml.html">libxml</a> and <a
145href="http://rpmfind.net/linux/RPM/libxml-devel.html">libxml-devel</a>
146packages installed to compile applications using libxml.)</p>
147
148<p><a name="Snapshot">Snapshot:</a></p>
149<ul>
150  <li>Code from the W3C cvs base libxml <a
151    href="ftp://rpmfind.net/pub/libxml/cvs-snapshot.tar.gz">cvs-snapshot.tar.gz</a></li>
152  <li>Docs, content of the web site, the list archive included <a
153    href="ftp://rpmfind.net/pub/libxml/libxml-docs.tar.gz">libxml-docs.tar.gz</a></li>
154</ul>
155
156<p><a name="Contribs">Contribs:</a></p>
157
158<p>I do accept external contributions, especially if compiling on another
159platform, get in touch with me to upload the package. I will keep them in the
160<a href="ftp://rpmfind.net/pub/libxml/contribs/">contrib directory</a></p>
161
162<p>Libxml is also available from 2 CVS bases:</p>
163<ul>
164  <li><p>The <a href="http://dev.w3.org/cvsweb/XML/">W3C CVS base</a>,
165    available read-only using the CVS pserver authentification (I tend to use
166    this base for my own development, so it's updated more regularly, but the
167    content may not be as stable):</p>
168    <pre>CVSROOT=:pserver:anonymous@dev.w3.org:/sources/public
169        password: anonymous
170        module: XML</pre>
171  </li>
172  <li><p>The <a
173    href="http://cvs.gnome.org/bonsai/rview.cgi?cvsroot=/cvs/gnome&dir=gnome-xml">Gnome
174    CVS base</a>. Check the <a
175    href="http://developer.gnome.org/tools/cvs.html">Gnome CVS Tools</a> page;
176    the CVS module is <b>gnome-xml</b>.</p>
177  </li>
178</ul>
179
180<h2><a name="News">News</a></h2>
181
182<h3>CVS only : check the <a
183href="http://cvs.gnome.org/lxr/source/gnome-xml/ChangeLog">Changelog</a> file
184for really accurate description</h3>
185<ul>
186  <li>working on HTML and XML links recognition layers, get in touch with me
187    if you want to test those.</li>
188</ul>
189
190<h3>2.1.0 and 1.8.8: June 29 2000</h3>
191<ul>
192  <li>1.8.8 is mostly a comodity package for upgrading to libxml2 accoding to
193    <a href="upgrade.html">new instructions</a>. It fixes a nasty problem
194    about &amp;#38; charref parsing</li>
195  <li>2.1.0 also ease the upgrade from libxml v1 to the recent version. it
196    also contains numerous fixes and enhancements:
197    <ul>
198      <li>added xmlStopParser() to stop parsing</li>
199      <li>improved a lot parsing speed when there is large CDATA blocs</li>
200      <li>includes XPath patches provided by Picdar Technology</li>
201      <li>tried to fix as much as possible DtD validation and namespace
202        related problems</li>
203      <li>output to a given encoding has been added/tested</li>
204      <li>lot of various fixes</li>
205    </ul>
206  </li>
207</ul>
208
209<h3>2.0.0: Apr 12 2000</h3>
210<ul>
211  <li>First public release of libxml2. If you are using libxml, it's a good
212    idea to check the 1.x to 2.x upgrade instructions. NOTE: while initally
213    scheduled for Apr 3 the relase occured only on Apr 12 due to massive
214    workload.</li>
215  <li>The include are now located under $prefix/include/libxml (instead of
216    $prefix/include/gnome-xml), they also are referenced by
217    <pre>#include &lt;libxml/xxx.h></pre>
218    <p>instead of</p>
219    <pre>#include "xxx.h"</pre>
220  </li>
221  <li>a new URI module for parsing URIs and following strictly RFC 2396</li>
222  <li>the memory allocation routines used by libxml can now be overloaded
223    dynamically by using xmlMemSetup()</li>
224  <li>The previously CVS only tool tester has been renamed
225    <strong>xmllint</strong> and is now installed as part of the libxml2
226    package</li>
227  <li>The I/O interface has been revamped. There is now ways to plug in
228    specific I/O modules, either at the URI scheme detection level using
229    xmlRegisterInputCallbacks()  or by passing I/O functions when creating a
230    parser context using xmlCreateIOParserCtxt()</li>
231  <li>there is a C preprocessor macro LIBXML_VERSION providing the version
232    number of the libxml module in use</li>
233  <li>a number of optional features of libxml can now be excluded at configure
234    time (FTP/HTTP/HTML/XPath/Debug)</li>
235</ul>
236
237<h3>2.0.0beta: Mar 14 2000</h3>
238<ul>
239  <li>This is a first Beta release of libxml version 2</li>
240  <li>It's available only from<a href="ftp://rpmfind.net/pub/libxml/">
241    rpmfind.net FTP</a>, it's packaged as libxml2-2.0.0beta and available as
242    tar and RPMs</li>
243  <li>This version is now the head in the Gnome CVS base, the old one is
244    available under the tag LIB_XML_1_X</li>
245  <li>This includes a very large set of changes. Froma  programmatic point of
246    view applications should not have to be modified too much, check the <a
247    href="upgrade.html">upgrade page</a></li>
248  <li>Some interfaces may changes (especially a bit about encoding).</li>
249  <li>the updates includes:
250    <ul>
251      <li>fix I18N support. ISO-Latin-x/UTF-8/UTF-16 (nearly) seems correctly
252        handled now</li>
253      <li>Better handling of entities, especially well formedness checking and
254        proper PEref extensions in external subsets</li>
255      <li>DTD conditional sections</li>
256      <li>Validation now correcly handle entities content</li>
257      <li><a href="http://rpmfind.net/tools/gdome/messages/0039.html">change
258        structures to accomodate DOM</a></li>
259    </ul>
260  </li>
261  <li>Serious progress were made toward compliance, <a
262    href="conf/result.html">here are the result of the test</a> against the
263    OASIS testsuite (except the japanese tests since I don't support that
264    encoding yet). This URL is rebuilt every couple of hours using the CVS
265    head version.</li>
266</ul>
267
268<h3>1.8.7: Mar 6 2000</h3>
269<ul>
270  <li>This is a bug fix release:</li>
271  <li>It is possible to disable the ignorable blanks heuristic used by
272    libxml-1.x, a new function  xmlKeepBlanksDefault(0) will allow this. Note
273    that for adherence to XML spec, this behaviour will be disabled by default
274    in 2.x . The same function will allow to keep compatibility for old
275  code.</li>
276  <li>Blanks in &lt;a>  &lt;/a> constructs are not ignored anymore, avoiding
277    heuristic is really the Right Way :-\</li>
278  <li>The unchecked use of snprintf which was breaking libxml-1.8.6
279    compilation on some platforms has been fixed</li>
280  <li>nanoftp.c nanohttp.c: Fixed '#' and '?' stripping when processing
281  URIs</li>
282</ul>
283
284<h3>1.8.6: Jan 31 2000</h3>
285<ul>
286  <li>added a nanoFTP transport module, debugged until the new version of <a
287    href="http://rpmfind.net/linux/rpm2html/rpmfind.html">rpmfind</a> can use
288    it without troubles</li>
289</ul>
290
291<h3>1.8.5: Jan 21 2000</h3>
292<ul>
293  <li>adding APIs to parse a well balanced chunk of XML (production <a
294    href="http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml#NT-content">[43] content</a> of the XML
295    spec)</li>
296  <li>fixed a hideous bug in xmlGetProp pointed by Rune.Djurhuus@fast.no</li>
297  <li>Jody Goldberg &lt;jgoldberg@home.com> provided another patch trying to
298    solve the zlib checks problems</li>
299  <li>The current state in gnome CVS base is expected to ship as 1.8.5 with
300    gnumeric soon</li>
301</ul>
302
303<h3>1.8.4: Jan 13 2000</h3>
304<ul>
305  <li>bug fixes, reintroduced xmlNewGlobalNs(), fixed xmlNewNs()</li>
306  <li>all exit() call should have been removed from libxml</li>
307  <li>fixed a problem with INCLUDE_WINSOCK on WIN32 platform</li>
308  <li>added newDocFragment()</li>
309</ul>
310
311<h3>1.8.3: Jan 5 2000</h3>
312<ul>
313  <li>a Push interface for the XML and HTML parsers</li>
314  <li>a shell-like interface to the document tree (try tester --shell :-)</li>
315  <li>lots of bug fixes and improvement added over XMas hollidays</li>
316  <li>fixed the DTD parsing code to work with the xhtml DTD</li>
317  <li>added xmlRemoveProp(), xmlRemoveID() and xmlRemoveRef()</li>
318  <li>Fixed bugs in xmlNewNs()</li>
319  <li>External entity loading code has been revamped, now it uses
320    xmlLoadExternalEntity(), some fix on entities processing were added</li>
321  <li>cleaned up WIN32 includes of socket stuff</li>
322</ul>
323
324<h3>1.8.2: Dec 21 1999</h3>
325<ul>
326  <li>I got another problem with includes and C++, I hope this issue is fixed
327    for good this time</li>
328  <li>Added a few tree modification functions: xmlReplaceNode,
329    xmlAddPrevSibling, xmlAddNextSibling, xmlNodeSetName and
330    xmlDocSetRootElement</li>
331  <li>Tried to improve the HTML output with help from <a
332    href="mailto:clahey@umich.edu">Chris Lahey</a></li>
333</ul>
334
335<h3>1.8.1: Dec 18 1999</h3>
336<ul>
337  <li>various patches to avoid troubles when using libxml with C++ compilers
338    the "namespace" keyword and C escaping in include files</li>
339  <li>a problem in one of the core macros IS_CHAR was corrected</li>
340  <li>fixed a bug introduced in 1.8.0 breaking default namespace processing,
341    and more specifically the Dia application</li>
342  <li>fixed a posteriori validation (validation after parsing, or by using a
343    Dtd not specified in the original document)</li>
344  <li>fixed a bug in</li>
345</ul>
346
347<h3>1.8.0: Dec 12 1999</h3>
348<ul>
349  <li>cleanup, especially memory wise</li>
350  <li>the parser should be more reliable, especially the HTML one, it should
351    not crash, whatever the input !</li>
352  <li>Integrated various patches, especially a speedup improvement for large
353    dataset from <a href="mailto:cnygard@bellatlantic.net">Carl Nygard</a>,
354    configure with --with-buffers to enable them.</li>
355  <li>attribute normalization, oops should have been added long ago !</li>
356  <li>attributes defaulted from Dtds should be available, xmlSetProp() now
357    does entities escapting by default.</li>
358</ul>
359
360<h3>1.7.4: Oct 25 1999</h3>
361<ul>
362  <li>Lots of HTML improvement</li>
363  <li>Fixed some errors when saving both XML and HTML</li>
364  <li>More examples, the regression tests should now look clean</li>
365  <li>Fixed a bug with contiguous charref</li>
366</ul>
367
368<h3>1.7.3: Sep 29 1999</h3>
369<ul>
370  <li>portability problems fixed</li>
371  <li>snprintf was used unconditionnally, leading to link problems on system
372    were it's not available, fixed</li>
373</ul>
374
375<h3>1.7.1: Sep 24 1999</h3>
376<ul>
377  <li>The basic type for strings manipulated by libxml has been renamed in
378    1.7.1 from <strong>CHAR</strong> to <strong>xmlChar</strong>. The reason
379    is that CHAR was conflicting with a predefined type on Windows. However on
380    non WIN32 environment, compatibility is provided by the way of  a
381    <strong>#define </strong>.</li>
382  <li>Changed another error : the use of a structure field called errno, and
383    leading to troubles on platforms where it's a macro</li>
384</ul>
385
386<h3>1.7.0: sep 23 1999</h3>
387<ul>
388  <li>Added the ability to fetch remote DTD or parsed entities, see the <a
389    href="gnome-xml-nanohttp.html">nanohttp</a> module.</li>
390  <li>Added an errno to report errors by another mean than a simple printf
391    like callback</li>
392  <li>Finished ID/IDREF support and checking when validation</li>
393  <li>Serious memory leaks fixed (there is now a <a
394    href="gnome-xml-xmlmemory.html">memory wrapper</a> module)</li>
395  <li>Improvement of <a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xpath">XPath</a>
396    implementation</li>
397  <li>Added an HTML parser front-end</li>
398</ul>
399
400<h2><a name="XML">XML</a></h2>
401
402<p><a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml">XML is a standard</a> for
403markup-based structured documents. Here is <a name="example">an example XML
404document</a>:</p>
405<pre>&lt;?xml version="1.0"?>
406&lt;EXAMPLE prop1="gnome is great" prop2="&amp;amp; linux too">
407  &lt;head>
408   &lt;title>Welcome to Gnome&lt;/title>
409  &lt;/head>
410  &lt;chapter>
411   &lt;title>The Linux adventure&lt;/title>
412   &lt;p>bla bla bla ...&lt;/p>
413   &lt;image href="linus.gif"/>
414   &lt;p>...&lt;/p>
415  &lt;/chapter>
416&lt;/EXAMPLE></pre>
417
418<p>The first line specifies that it's an XML document and gives useful
419information about its encoding. Then the document is a text format whose
420structure is specified by tags between brackets. <strong>Each tag opened has
421to be closed</strong>. XML is pedantic about this. However, if a tag is empty
422(no content), a single tag can serve as both the opening and closing tag if it
423ends with <code>/></code> rather than with <code>></code>. Note that, for
424example, the image tag has no content (just an attribute) and is closed by
425ending the tag with <code>/></code>.</p>
426
427<p>XML can be applied sucessfully to a wide range of uses, from long term
428structured document maintenance (where it follows the steps of SGML) to simple
429data encoding mechanisms like configuration file formatting (glade),
430spreadsheets (gnumeric), or even shorter lived documents such as WebDAV where
431it is used to encode remote calls between a client and a server.</p>
432
433<h2><a name="tree">The tree output</a></h2>
434
435<p>The parser returns a tree built during the document analysis. The value
436returned is an <strong>xmlDocPtr</strong> (i.e., a pointer to an
437<strong>xmlDoc</strong> structure). This structure contains information such
438as the file name, the document type, and a <strong>root</strong> pointer which
439is the root of the document (or more exactly the first child under the root
440which is the document). The tree is made of <strong>xmlNode</strong>s, chained
441in double-linked lists of siblings and with childs&lt;->parent relationship.
442An xmlNode can also carry properties (a chain of xmlAttr structures). An
443attribute may have a value which is a list of TEXT or ENTITY_REF nodes.</p>
444
445<p>Here is an example (erroneous with respect to the XML spec since there
446should be only one ELEMENT under the root):</p>
447
448<p><img src="structure.gif" alt=" structure.gif "></p>
449
450<p>In the source package there is a small program (not installed by default)
451called <strong>xmllint</strong> which parses XML files given as argument and
452prints them back as parsed. This is useful for detecting errors both in XML
453code and in the XML parser itself. It has an option <strong>--debug</strong>
454which prints the actual in-memory structure of the document, here is the
455result with the <a href="#example">example</a> given before:</p>
456<pre>DOCUMENT
457version=1.0
458standalone=true
459  ELEMENT EXAMPLE
460    ATTRIBUTE prop1
461      TEXT
462      content=gnome is great
463    ATTRIBUTE prop2
464      ENTITY_REF
465      TEXT
466      content= linux too 
467    ELEMENT head
468      ELEMENT title
469        TEXT
470        content=Welcome to Gnome
471    ELEMENT chapter
472      ELEMENT title
473        TEXT
474        content=The Linux adventure
475      ELEMENT p
476        TEXT
477        content=bla bla bla ...
478      ELEMENT image
479        ATTRIBUTE href
480          TEXT
481          content=linus.gif
482      ELEMENT p
483        TEXT
484        content=...</pre>
485
486<p>This should be useful for learning the internal representation model.</p>
487
488<h2><a name="interface">The SAX interface</a></h2>
489
490<p>Sometimes the DOM tree output is just too large to fit reasonably into
491memory. In that case (and if you don't expect to save back the XML document
492loaded using libxml), it's better to use the SAX interface of libxml. SAX is a
493<strong>callback-based interface</strong> to the parser. Before parsing, the
494application layer registers a customized set of callbacks which are called by
495the library as it progresses through the XML input.</p>
496
497<p>To get more detailed step-by-step guidance on using the SAX interface of
498libxml, see the
499href="http://www.daa.com.au/~james/gnome/xml-sax/xml-sax.html">nice
500documentation.written by <a href="mailto:james@daa.com.au">James
501Henstridge</a>.</p>
502
503<p>You can debug the SAX behaviour by using the <strong>testSAX</strong>
504program located in the gnome-xml module (it's usually not shipped in the
505binary packages of libxml, but you can find it in the tar source
506distribution). Here is the sequence of callbacks that would be reported by
507testSAX when parsing the example XML document shown earlier:</p>
508<pre>SAX.setDocumentLocator()
509SAX.startDocument()
510SAX.getEntity(amp)
511SAX.startElement(EXAMPLE, prop1='gnome is great', prop2='&amp;amp; linux too')
512SAX.characters(   , 3)
513SAX.startElement(head)
514SAX.characters(    , 4)
515SAX.startElement(title)
516SAX.characters(Welcome to Gnome, 16)
517SAX.endElement(title)
518SAX.characters(   , 3)
519SAX.endElement(head)
520SAX.characters(   , 3)
521SAX.startElement(chapter)
522SAX.characters(    , 4)
523SAX.startElement(title)
524SAX.characters(The Linux adventure, 19)
525SAX.endElement(title)
526SAX.characters(    , 4)
527SAX.startElement(p)
528SAX.characters(bla bla bla ..., 15)
529SAX.endElement(p)
530SAX.characters(    , 4)
531SAX.startElement(image, href='linus.gif')
532SAX.endElement(image)
533SAX.characters(    , 4)
534SAX.startElement(p)
535SAX.characters(..., 3)
536SAX.endElement(p)
537SAX.characters(   , 3)
538SAX.endElement(chapter)
539SAX.characters( , 1)
540SAX.endElement(EXAMPLE)
541SAX.endDocument()</pre>
542
543<p>Most of the other functionalities of libxml are based on the DOM
544tree-building facility, so nearly everything up to the end of this document
545presupposes the use of the standard DOM tree build. Note that the DOM tree
546itself is built by a set of registered default callbacks, without internal
547specific interface.</p>
548
549<h2><a name="library">The XML library interfaces</a></h2>
550
551<p>This section is directly intended to help programmers getting bootstrapped
552using the XML library from the C language. It is not intended to be extensive.
553I hope the automatically generated documents will provide the completeness
554required, but as a separate set of documents. The interfaces of the XML
555library are by principle low level, there is nearly zero abstraction. Those
556interested in a higher level API should <a href="#DOM">look at DOM</a>.</p>
557
558<p>The <a href="gnome-xml-parser.html">parser interfaces for XML</a> are
559separated from the <a href="gnome-xml-htmlparser.html">HTML parser
560interfaces</a>.  Let's have a look at how the XML parser can be called:</p>
561
562<h3><a name="Invoking">Invoking the parser : the pull method</a></h3>
563
564<p>Usually, the first thing to do is to read an XML input. The parser accepts
565documents either from in-memory strings or from files.  The functions are
566defined in "parser.h":</p>
567<dl>
568  <dt><code>xmlDocPtr xmlParseMemory(char *buffer, int size);</code></dt>
569    <dd><p>Parse a null-terminated string containing the document.</p>
570    </dd>
571</dl>
572<dl>
573  <dt><code>xmlDocPtr xmlParseFile(const char *filename);</code></dt>
574    <dd><p>Parse an XML document contained in a (possibly compressed)
575      file.</p>
576    </dd>
577</dl>
578
579<p>The parser returns a pointer to the document structure (or NULL in case of
580failure).</p>
581
582<h3 id="Invoking1">Invoking the parser: the push method</h3>
583
584<p>In order for the application to keep the control when the document is been
585fetched (which is common for GUI based programs) libxml provides a push
586interface, too, as of version 1.8.3. Here are the interface functions:</p>
587<pre>xmlParserCtxtPtr xmlCreatePushParserCtxt(xmlSAXHandlerPtr sax,
588                                         void *user_data,
589                                         const char *chunk,
590                                         int size,
591                                         const char *filename);
592int              xmlParseChunk          (xmlParserCtxtPtr ctxt,
593                                         const char *chunk,
594                                         int size,
595                                         int terminate);</pre>
596
597<p>and here is a simple example showing how to use the interface:</p>
598<pre>            FILE *f;
599
600            f = fopen(filename, "r");
601            if (f != NULL) {
602                int res, size = 1024;
603                char chars[1024];
604                xmlParserCtxtPtr ctxt;
605
606                res = fread(chars, 1, 4, f);
607                if (res > 0) {
608                    ctxt = xmlCreatePushParserCtxt(NULL, NULL,
609                                chars, res, filename);
610                    while ((res = fread(chars, 1, size, f)) > 0) {
611                        xmlParseChunk(ctxt, chars, res, 0);
612                    }
613                    xmlParseChunk(ctxt, chars, 0, 1);
614                    doc = ctxt->myDoc;
615                    xmlFreeParserCtxt(ctxt);
616                }
617            }</pre>
618
619<p>Also note that the HTML parser embedded into libxml also has a push
620interface; the functions are just prefixed by "html" rather than "xml"</p>
621
622<h3 id="Invoking2">Invoking the parser: the SAX interface</h3>
623
624<p>A couple of comments can be made, first this mean that the parser is
625memory-hungry, first to load the document in memory, second to build the tree.
626Reading a document without building the tree is possible using the SAX
627interfaces (see SAX.h and <a
628href="http://www.daa.com.au/~james/gnome/xml-sax/xml-sax.html">James
629Henstridge's documentation</a>). Note also that the push interface can be
630limited to SAX. Just use the two first arguments of
631<code>xmlCreatePushParserCtxt()</code>.</p>
632
633<h3><a name="Building">Building a tree from scratch</a></h3>
634
635<p>The other way to get an XML tree in memory is by building it. Basically
636there is a set of functions dedicated to building new elements. (These are
637also described in &lt;libxml/tree.h>.) For example, here is a piece of code
638that produces the XML document used in the previous examples:</p>
639<pre>    #include &lt;libxml/tree.h>
640    xmlDocPtr doc;
641    xmlNodePtr tree, subtree;
642
643    doc = xmlNewDoc("1.0");
644    doc->root = xmlNewDocNode(doc, NULL, "EXAMPLE", NULL);
645    xmlSetProp(doc->root, "prop1", "gnome is great");
646    xmlSetProp(doc->root, "prop2", "&amp; linux too");
647    tree = xmlNewChild(doc->root, NULL, "head", NULL);
648    subtree = xmlNewChild(tree, NULL, "title", "Welcome to Gnome");
649    tree = xmlNewChild(doc->root, NULL, "chapter", NULL);
650    subtree = xmlNewChild(tree, NULL, "title", "The Linux adventure");
651    subtree = xmlNewChild(tree, NULL, "p", "bla bla bla ...");
652    subtree = xmlNewChild(tree, NULL, "image", NULL);
653    xmlSetProp(subtree, "href", "linus.gif");</pre>
654
655<p>Not really rocket science ...</p>
656
657<h3><a name="Traversing">Traversing the tree</a></h3>
658
659<p>Basically by <a href="gnome-xml-tree.html">including "tree.h"</a> your code
660has access to the internal structure of all the elements of the tree. The
661names should be somewhat simple like <strong>parent</strong>,
662<strong>childs</strong>, <strong>next</strong>, <strong>prev</strong>,
663<strong>properties</strong>, etc... For example, still with the previous
664example:</p>
665<pre><code>doc->root->childs->childs</code></pre>
666
667<p>points to the title element,</p>
668<pre>doc->root->childs->next->child->child</pre>
669
670<p>points to the text node containing the chapter title "The Linux
671adventure".</p>
672
673<p><strong>NOTE</strong>: XML allows <em>PI</em>s and <em>comments</em> to be
674present before the document root, so <code>doc->root</code> may point to an
675element which is not the document Root Element, a function
676<code>xmlDocGetRootElement()</code> was added for this purpose.</p>
677
678<h3><a name="Modifying">Modifying the tree</a></h3>
679
680<p>Functions are provided for reading and writing the document content. Here
681is an excerpt from the <a href="gnome-xml-tree.html">tree API</a>:</p>
682<dl>
683  <dt><code>xmlAttrPtr xmlSetProp(xmlNodePtr node, const xmlChar *name, const
684  xmlChar *value);</code></dt>
685    <dd><p>This sets (or changes) an attribute carried by an ELEMENT node. The
686      value can be NULL.</p>
687    </dd>
688</dl>
689<dl>
690  <dt><code>const xmlChar *xmlGetProp(xmlNodePtr node, const xmlChar
691  *name);</code></dt>
692    <dd><p>This function returns a pointer to the property content. Note that
693      no extra copy is made.</p>
694    </dd>
695</dl>
696
697<p>Two functions are provided for reading and writing the text associated with
698elements:</p>
699<dl>
700  <dt><code>xmlNodePtr xmlStringGetNodeList(xmlDocPtr doc, const xmlChar
701  *value);</code></dt>
702    <dd><p>This function takes an "external" string and convert it to one text
703      node or possibly to a list of entity and text nodes. All non-predefined
704      entity references like &amp;Gnome; will be stored internally as entity
705      nodes, hence the result of the function may not be a single node.</p>
706    </dd>
707</dl>
708<dl>
709  <dt><code>xmlChar *xmlNodeListGetString(xmlDocPtr doc, xmlNodePtr list, int
710  inLine);</code></dt>
711    <dd><p>This function is the inverse of
712      <code>xmlStringGetNodeList()</code>. It generates a new string
713      containing the content of the text and entity nodes. Note the extra
714      argument inLine. If this argument is set to 1, the function will expand
715      entity references.  For example, instead of returning the &amp;Gnome;
716      XML encoding in the string, it will substitute it with its value (say,
717      "GNU Network Object Model Environment"). Set this argument if you want
718      to use the string for non-XML usage like User Interface.</p>
719    </dd>
720</dl>
721
722<h3><a name="Saving">Saving a tree</a></h3>
723
724<p>Basically 3 options are possible:</p>
725<dl>
726  <dt><code>void xmlDocDumpMemory(xmlDocPtr cur, xmlChar**mem, int
727  *size);</code></dt>
728    <dd><p>Returns a buffer into which the document has been saved.</p>
729    </dd>
730</dl>
731<dl>
732  <dt><code>extern void xmlDocDump(FILE *f, xmlDocPtr doc);</code></dt>
733    <dd><p>Dumps a document to an open file descriptor.</p>
734    </dd>
735</dl>
736<dl>
737  <dt><code>int xmlSaveFile(const char *filename, xmlDocPtr cur);</code></dt>
738    <dd><p>Saves the document to a file. In this case, the compression
739      interface is triggered if it has been turned on.</p>
740    </dd>
741</dl>
742
743<h3><a name="Compressio">Compression</a></h3>
744
745<p>The library transparently handles compression when doing file-based
746accesses. The level of compression on saves can be turned on either globally
747or individually for one file:</p>
748<dl>
749  <dt><code>int  xmlGetDocCompressMode (xmlDocPtr doc);</code></dt>
750    <dd><p>Gets the document compression ratio (0-9).</p>
751    </dd>
752</dl>
753<dl>
754  <dt><code>void xmlSetDocCompressMode (xmlDocPtr doc, int mode);</code></dt>
755    <dd><p>Sets the document compression ratio.</p>
756    </dd>
757</dl>
758<dl>
759  <dt><code>int  xmlGetCompressMode(void);</code></dt>
760    <dd><p>Gets the default compression ratio.</p>
761    </dd>
762</dl>
763<dl>
764  <dt><code>void xmlSetCompressMode(int mode);</code></dt>
765    <dd><p>Sets the default compression ratio.</p>
766    </dd>
767</dl>
768
769<h2><a name="Entities">Entities or no entities</a></h2>
770
771<p>Entities in principle are similar to simple C macros. An entity defines an
772abbreviation for a given string that you can reuse many times throughout the
773content of your document. Entities are especially useful when a given string
774may occur frequently within a document, or to confine the change needed to a
775document to a restricted area in the internal subset of the document (at the
776beginning). Example:</p>
777<pre>1 &lt;?xml version="1.0"?>
7782 &lt;!DOCTYPE EXAMPLE SYSTEM "example.dtd" [
7793 &lt;!ENTITY xml "Extensible Markup Language">
7804 ]>
7815 &lt;EXAMPLE>
7826    &amp;xml;
7837 &lt;/EXAMPLE></pre>
784
785<p>Line 3 declares the xml entity. Line 6 uses the xml entity, by prefixing
786it's name with '&amp;' and following it by ';' without any spaces added. There
787are 5 predefined entities in libxml allowing you to escape charaters with
788predefined meaning in some parts of the xml document content:
789<strong>&amp;lt;</strong> for the character '&lt;', <strong>&amp;gt;</strong>
790for the character '>',  <strong>&amp;apos;</strong> for the character ''',
791<strong>&amp;quot;</strong> for the character '"', and
792<strong>&amp;amp;</strong> for the character '&amp;'.</p>
793
794<p>One of the problems related to entities is that you may want the parser to
795substitute an entity's content so that you can see the replacement text in
796your application. Or you may prefer to keep entity references as such in the
797content to be able to save the document back without losing this usually
798precious information (if the user went through the pain of explicitly defining
799entities, he may have a a rather negative attitude if you blindly susbtitute
800them as saving time). The <a
801href="gnome-xml-parser.html#XMLSUBSTITUTEENTITIESDEFAULT">xmlSubstituteEntitiesDefault()</a>
802function allows you to check and change the behaviour, which is to not
803substitute entities by default.</p>
804
805<p>Here is the DOM tree built by libxml for the previous document in the
806default case:</p>
807<pre>/gnome/src/gnome-xml -> /xmllint --debug test/ent1
808DOCUMENT
809version=1.0
810   ELEMENT EXAMPLE
811     TEXT
812     content=
813     ENTITY_REF
814       INTERNAL_GENERAL_ENTITY xml
815       content=Extensible Markup Language
816     TEXT
817     content=</pre>
818
819<p>And here is the result when substituting entities:</p>
820<pre>/gnome/src/gnome-xml -> /tester --debug --noent test/ent1
821DOCUMENT
822version=1.0
823   ELEMENT EXAMPLE
824     TEXT
825     content=     Extensible Markup Language</pre>
826
827<p>So, entities or no entities? Basically, it depends on your use case. I
828suggest that you keep the non-substituting default behaviour and avoid using
829entities in your XML document or data if you are not willing to handle the
830entity references elements in the DOM tree.</p>
831
832<p>Note that at save time libxml enforce the conversion of the predefined
833entities where necessary to prevent well-formedness problems, and will also
834transparently replace those with chars (i.e., it will not generate entity
835reference elements in the DOM tree or call the reference() SAX callback when
836finding them in the input).</p>
837
838<h2><a name="Namespaces">Namespaces</a></h2>
839
840<p>The libxml library implements <a
841href="http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml-names/">XML namespaces</a> support by
842recognizing namespace contructs in the input, and does namespace lookup
843automatically when building the DOM tree. A namespace declaration is
844associated with an in-memory structure and all elements or attributes within
845that namespace point to it. Hence testing the namespace is a simple and fast
846equality operation at the user level.</p>
847
848<p>I suggest that people using libxml use a namespace, and declare it in the
849root element of their document as the default namespace. Then they don't need
850to use the prefix in the content but we will have a basis for future semantic
851refinement and  merging of data from different sources. This doesn't augment
852significantly the size of the XML output, but significantly increase its value
853in the long-term. Example:</p>
854<pre>&lt;mydoc xmlns="http://mydoc.example.org/schemas/">
855   &lt;elem1>...&lt;/elem1>
856   &lt;elem2>...&lt;/elem2>
857&lt;/mydoc></pre>
858
859<p>Concerning the namespace value, this has to be an URL, but the URL doesn't
860have to point to any existing resource on the Web. It will bind all the
861element and atributes with that URL. I suggest to use an URL within a domain
862you control, and that the URL should contain some kind of version information
863if possible. For example, <code>"http://www.gnome.org/gnumeric/1.0/"</code> is
864a good namespace scheme.</p>
865
866<p>Then when you load a file, make sure that a namespace carrying the
867version-independent prefix is installed on the root element of your document,
868and if the version information don't match something you know, warn the user
869and be liberal in what you accept as the input. Also do *not* try to base
870namespace checking on the prefix value. &lt;foo:text> may be exactly the same
871as &lt;bar:text> in another document. What really matter is the URI associated
872with the element or the attribute, not the prefix string (which is just a
873shortcut for the full URI). In libxml element and attributes have a
874<code>ns</code> field pointing to an xmlNs structure detailing the namespace
875prefix and it's URI.</p>
876
877<p>@@Interfaces@@</p>
878
879<p>@@Examples@@</p>
880
881<p>Usually people object using namespace in the case of validation, I object
882this and will make sure that using namespaces won't break validity checking,
883so even is you plan to use or currently are using validation I strongly
884suggest adding namespaces to your document. A default namespace scheme
885<code>xmlns="http://...."</code> should not break validity even on less
886flexible parsers. Now using namespace to mix and differentiate content coming
887from multiple DTDs will certainly break current validation schemes. I will try
888to provide ways to do this, but this may not be portable or standardized.</p>
889
890<h2><a name="Validation">Validation, or are you afraid of DTDs ?</a></h2>
891
892<p>Well what is validation and what is a DTD ?</p>
893
894<p>Validation is the process of checking a document against a set of
895construction rules, a <strong>DTD</strong> (Document Type Definition) is such
896a set of rules.</p>
897
898<p>The validation process and building DTDs are the two most difficult parts
899of  XML life cycle. Briefly a DTD defines all the possibles element to be
900found within your document, what is the formal shape of your document tree (by
901defining the allowed content of an element, either text, a regular expression
902for the allowed list of children, or mixed content i.e. both text and childs).
903The DTD also defines the allowed attributes for all elements and the types of
904the attributes. For more detailed informations, I suggest to read the related
905parts of the XML specification, the examples found under
906gnome-xml/test/valid/dtd and the large amount of books available on XML. The
907dia example in gnome-xml/test/valid should be both simple and complete enough
908to allow you to build your own.</p>
909
910<p>A word of warning, building a good DTD which will fit your needs of your
911application in the long-term is far from trivial, however the extra level of
912quality it can insure is well worth the price for some sets of applications or
913if you already have already a DTD defined for your application field.</p>
914
915<p>The validation is not completely finished but in a (very IMHO) usable
916state. Until a real validation interface is defined the way to do it is to
917define and set the <strong>xmlDoValidityCheckingDefaultValue</strong> external
918variable to 1, this will of course be changed at some point:</p>
919
920<p>extern int xmlDoValidityCheckingDefaultValue;</p>
921
922<p>...</p>
923
924<p>xmlDoValidityCheckingDefaultValue = 1;</p>
925
926<p></p>
927
928<p>To handle external entities, use the function
929<strong>xmlSetExternalEntityLoader</strong>(xmlExternalEntityLoader f); to
930link in you HTTP/FTP/Entities database library to the standard libxml
931core.</p>
932
933<p>@@interfaces@@</p>
934
935<h2><a name="DOM"></a><a name="Principles">DOM Principles</a></h2>
936
937<p><a href="http://www.w3.org/DOM/">DOM</a> stands for the <em>Document Object
938Model</em> this is an API for accessing XML or HTML structured documents.
939Native support for DOM in Gnome is on the way (module gnome-dom), and it will
940be based on gnome-xml. This will be a far cleaner interface to manipulate XML
941files within Gnome since it won't expose the internal structure. DOM defines a
942set of IDL (or Java) interfaces allowing to traverse and manipulate a
943document. The DOM library will allow accessing and modifying "live" documents
944presents on other programs like this:</p>
945
946<p><img src="DOM.gif" alt=" DOM.gif "></p>
947
948<p>This should help greatly doing things like modifying a gnumeric spreadsheet
949embedded in a GWP document for example.</p>
950
951<p>The current DOM implementation on top of libxml is the <a
952href="http://cvs.gnome.org/lxr/source/gdome/">gdome Gnome module</a>, this is
953a full DOM interface, thanks to <a href="mailto:raph@levien.com">Raph
954Levien</a>.</p>
955
956<p>The gnome-dom module in the Gnome CVS base is obsolete</p>
957
958<h2><a name="Example"></a><a name="real">A real example</a></h2>
959
960<p>Here is a real size example, where the actual content of the application
961data is not kept in the DOM tree but uses internal structures. It is based on
962a proposal to keep a database of jobs related to Gnome, with an XML based
963storage structure. Here is an <a href="gjobs.xml">XML encoded jobs
964base</a>:</p>
965<pre>&lt;?xml version="1.0"?>
966&lt;gjob:Helping xmlns:gjob="http://www.gnome.org/some-location">
967  &lt;gjob:Jobs>
968
969    &lt;gjob:Job>
970      &lt;gjob:Project ID="3"/>
971      &lt;gjob:Application>GBackup&lt;/gjob:Application>
972      &lt;gjob:Category>Development&lt;/gjob:Category>
973
974      &lt;gjob:Update>
975        &lt;gjob:Status>Open&lt;/gjob:Status>
976        &lt;gjob:Modified>Mon, 07 Jun 1999 20:27:45 -0400 MET DST&lt;/gjob:Modified>
977        &lt;gjob:Salary>USD 0.00&lt;/gjob:Salary>
978      &lt;/gjob:Update>
979
980      &lt;gjob:Developers>
981        &lt;gjob:Developer>
982        &lt;/gjob:Developer>
983      &lt;/gjob:Developers>
984
985      &lt;gjob:Contact>
986        &lt;gjob:Person>Nathan Clemons&lt;/gjob:Person>
987        &lt;gjob:Email>nathan@windsofstorm.net&lt;/gjob:Email>
988        &lt;gjob:Company>
989        &lt;/gjob:Company>
990        &lt;gjob:Organisation>
991        &lt;/gjob:Organisation>
992        &lt;gjob:Webpage>
993        &lt;/gjob:Webpage>
994        &lt;gjob:Snailmail>
995        &lt;/gjob:Snailmail>
996        &lt;gjob:Phone>
997        &lt;/gjob:Phone>
998      &lt;/gjob:Contact>
999
1000      &lt;gjob:Requirements>
1001      The program should be released as free software, under the GPL.
1002      &lt;/gjob:Requirements>
1003
1004      &lt;gjob:Skills>
1005      &lt;/gjob:Skills>
1006
1007      &lt;gjob:Details>
1008      A GNOME based system that will allow a superuser to configure 
1009      compressed and uncompressed files and/or file systems to be backed 
1010      up with a supported media in the system.  This should be able to 
1011      perform via find commands generating a list of files that are passed 
1012      to tar, dd, cpio, cp, gzip, etc., to be directed to the tape machine 
1013      or via operations performed on the filesystem itself. Email 
1014      notification and GUI status display very important.
1015      &lt;/gjob:Details>
1016
1017    &lt;/gjob:Job>
1018
1019  &lt;/gjob:Jobs>
1020&lt;/gjob:Helping></pre>
1021
1022<p>While loading the XML file into an internal DOM tree is a matter of calling
1023only a couple of functions, browsing the tree to gather the informations and
1024generate the internals structures is harder, and more error prone.</p>
1025
1026<p>The suggested principle is to be tolerant with respect to the input
1027structure. For example, the ordering of the attributes is not significant,
1028Cthe XML specification is clear about it. It's also usually a good idea to not
1029be dependent of the orders of the childs of a given node, unless it really
1030makes things harder. Here is some code to parse the informations for a
1031person:</p>
1032<pre>/*
1033 * A person record
1034 */
1035typedef struct person {
1036    char *name;
1037    char *email;
1038    char *company;
1039    char *organisation;
1040    char *smail;
1041    char *webPage;
1042    char *phone;
1043} person, *personPtr;
1044
1045/*
1046 * And the code needed to parse it
1047 */
1048personPtr parsePerson(xmlDocPtr doc, xmlNsPtr ns, xmlNodePtr cur) {
1049    personPtr ret = NULL;
1050
1051DEBUG("parsePerson\n");
1052    /*
1053     * allocate the struct
1054     */
1055    ret = (personPtr) malloc(sizeof(person));
1056    if (ret == NULL) {
1057        fprintf(stderr,"out of memory\n");
1058        return(NULL);
1059    }
1060    memset(ret, 0, sizeof(person));
1061
1062    /* We don't care what the top level element name is */
1063    cur = cur->childs;
1064    while (cur != NULL) {
1065        if ((!strcmp(cur->name, "Person")) &amp;&amp; (cur->ns == ns))
1066            ret->name = xmlNodeListGetString(doc, cur->childs, 1);
1067        if ((!strcmp(cur->name, "Email")) &amp;&amp; (cur->ns == ns))
1068            ret->email = xmlNodeListGetString(doc, cur->childs, 1);
1069        cur = cur->next;
1070    }
1071
1072    return(ret);
1073}</pre>
1074
1075<p>Here is a couple of things to notice:</p>
1076<ul>
1077  <li>Usually a recursive parsing style is the more convenient one, XML data
1078    being by nature subject to repetitive constructs and usualy exibit highly
1079    stuctured patterns.</li>
1080  <li>The two arguments of type <em>xmlDocPtr</em> and <em>xmlNsPtr</em>, i.e.
1081    the pointer to the global XML document and the namespace reserved to the
1082    application. Document wide information are needed for example to decode
1083    entities and it's a good coding practice to define a namespace for your
1084    application set of data and test that the element and attributes you're
1085    analyzing actually pertains to your application space. This is done by a
1086    simple equality test (cur->ns == ns).</li>
1087  <li>To retrieve text and attributes value, it is suggested to use the
1088    function <em>xmlNodeListGetString</em> to gather all the text and entity
1089    reference nodes generated by the DOM output and produce an single text
1090    string.</li>
1091</ul>
1092
1093<p>Here is another piece of code used to parse another level of the
1094structure:</p>
1095<pre>#include &lt;libxml/tree.h>
1096/*
1097 * a Description for a Job
1098 */
1099typedef struct job {
1100    char *projectID;
1101    char *application;
1102    char *category;
1103    personPtr contact;
1104    int nbDevelopers;
1105    personPtr developers[100]; /* using dynamic alloc is left as an exercise */
1106} job, *jobPtr;
1107
1108/*
1109 * And the code needed to parse it
1110 */
1111jobPtr parseJob(xmlDocPtr doc, xmlNsPtr ns, xmlNodePtr cur) {
1112    jobPtr ret = NULL;
1113
1114DEBUG("parseJob\n");
1115    /*
1116     * allocate the struct
1117     */
1118    ret = (jobPtr) malloc(sizeof(job));
1119    if (ret == NULL) {
1120        fprintf(stderr,"out of memory\n");
1121        return(NULL);
1122    }
1123    memset(ret, 0, sizeof(job));
1124
1125    /* We don't care what the top level element name is */
1126    cur = cur->childs;
1127    while (cur != NULL) {
1128        
1129        if ((!strcmp(cur->name, "Project")) &amp;&amp; (cur->ns == ns)) {
1130            ret->projectID = xmlGetProp(cur, "ID");
1131            if (ret->projectID == NULL) {
1132                fprintf(stderr, "Project has no ID\n");
1133            }
1134        }
1135        if ((!strcmp(cur->name, "Application")) &amp;&amp; (cur->ns == ns))
1136            ret->application = xmlNodeListGetString(doc, cur->childs, 1);
1137        if ((!strcmp(cur->name, "Category")) &amp;&amp; (cur->ns == ns))
1138            ret->category = xmlNodeListGetString(doc, cur->childs, 1);
1139        if ((!strcmp(cur->name, "Contact")) &amp;&amp; (cur->ns == ns))
1140            ret->contact = parsePerson(doc, ns, cur);
1141        cur = cur->next;
1142    }
1143
1144    return(ret);
1145}</pre>
1146
1147<p>One can notice that once used to it, writing this kind of code is quite
1148simple, but boring. Ultimately, it could be possble to write stubbers taking
1149either C data structure definitions, a set of XML examples or an XML DTD and
1150produce the code needed to import and export the content between C data and
1151XML storage. This is left as an exercise to the reader :-)</p>
1152
1153<p>Feel free to use <a href="gjobread.c">the code for the full C parsing
1154example</a> as a template, it is also available with Makefile in the Gnome CVS
1155base under gnome-xml/example</p>
1156
1157<h2><a name="Contributi">Contributions</a></h2>
1158<ul>
1159  <li><a href="mailto:ari@btigate.com">Ari Johnson</a> provides a  C++ wrapper
1160    for libxml:
1161    <p>Website: <a
1162    href="http://lusis.org/~ari/xml++/">http://lusis.org/~ari/xml++/</a></p>
1163    <p>Download: <a
1164    href="http://lusis.org/~ari/xml++/libxml++.tar.gz">http://lusis.org/~ari/xml++/libxml++.tar.gz</a></p>
1165  </li>
1166  <li><a href="mailto:doolin@cs.utk.edu">David Doolin</a> provides a
1167    precompiled Windows version
1168    <p><a
1169    href="http://www.ce.berkeley.edu/~doolin/code/libxmlwin32/">http://www.ce.berkeley.edu/~doolin/code/libxmlwin32/</a></p>
1170  </li>
1171  <li><a href="mailto:fnatter@gmx.net">Felix Natter</a> provided <a
1172    href="libxml-doc.el">an emacs module</a> to lookup libxml functions
1173    documentation</li>
1174  <li><a href="mailto:sherwin@nlm.nih.gov">Ziying Sherwin</a> provided <a
1175    href="http://xmlsoft.org/messages/0488.html">man pages</a> (not yet
1176    integrated in the distribution)</li>
1177</ul>
1178
1179<p></p>
1180
1181<p><a href="mailto:Daniel.Veillard@w3.org">Daniel Veillard</a></p>
1182
1183<p>$Id: xml.html,v 1.35 2000/06/30 17:58:22 veillard Exp $</p>
1184</body>
1185</html>
1186