File:  [ELWIX - Embedded LightWeight unIX -] / embedaddon / libxml2 / doc / library.html
Revision 1.1.1.2 (vendor branch): download - view: text, annotated - select for diffs - revision graph
Mon Jul 22 01:22:22 2013 UTC (10 years, 11 months ago) by misho
Branches: libxml2, MAIN
CVS tags: v2_9_1p0, v2_9_1, v2_8_0p0, v2_8_0, HEAD
2.8.0

    1: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
    2: <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
    3: <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"><head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" /><link rel="SHORTCUT ICON" href="/favicon.ico" /><style type="text/css">
    4: TD {font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica}
    5: BODY {font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica; margin-top: 2em; margin-left: 0em; margin-right: 0em}
    6: H1 {font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica}
    7: H2 {font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica}
    8: H3 {font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica}
    9: A:link, A:visited, A:active { text-decoration: underline }
   10: </style><title>The parser interfaces</title></head><body bgcolor="#8b7765" text="#000000" link="#a06060" vlink="#000000"><table border="0" width="100%" cellpadding="5" cellspacing="0" align="center"><tr><td width="120"><a href="http://swpat.ffii.org/"><img src="epatents.png" alt="Action against software patents" /></a></td><td width="180"><a href="http://www.gnome.org/"><img src="gnome2.png" alt="Gnome2 Logo" /></a><a href="http://www.w3.org/Status"><img src="w3c.png" alt="W3C Logo" /></a><a href="http://www.redhat.com/"><img src="redhat.gif" alt="Red Hat Logo" /></a><div align="left"><a href="http://xmlsoft.org/"><img src="Libxml2-Logo-180x168.gif" alt="Made with Libxml2 Logo" /></a></div></td><td><table border="0" width="90%" cellpadding="2" cellspacing="0" align="center" bgcolor="#000000"><tr><td><table width="100%" border="0" cellspacing="1" cellpadding="3" bgcolor="#fffacd"><tr><td align="center"><h1>The XML C parser and toolkit of Gnome</h1><h2>The parser interfaces</h2></td></tr></table></td></tr></table></td></tr></table><table border="0" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="0" width="100%" align="center"><tr><td bgcolor="#8b7765"><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="2" width="100%"><tr><td valign="top" width="200" bgcolor="#8b7765"><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="1" width="100%" bgcolor="#000000"><tr><td><table width="100%" border="0" cellspacing="1" cellpadding="3"><tr><td colspan="1" bgcolor="#eecfa1" align="center"><center><b>Developer Menu</b></center></td></tr><tr><td bgcolor="#fffacd"><form action="search.php" enctype="application/x-www-form-urlencoded" method="get"><input name="query" type="text" size="20" value="" /><input name="submit" type="submit" value="Search ..." /></form><ul><li><a href="index.html" style="font-weight:bold">Main Menu</a></li><li><a href="html/index.html" style="font-weight:bold">Reference Manual</a></li><li><a href="examples/index.html" style="font-weight:bold">Code Examples</a></li><li><a href="guidelines.html">XML Guidelines</a></li><li><a href="tutorial/index.html">Tutorial</a></li><li><a href="xmlreader.html">The Reader Interface</a></li><li><a href="ChangeLog.html">ChangeLog</a></li><li><a href="XSLT.html">XSLT</a></li><li><a href="python.html">Python and bindings</a></li><li><a href="architecture.html">libxml2 architecture</a></li><li><a href="tree.html">The tree output</a></li><li><a href="interface.html">The SAX interface</a></li><li><a href="xmlmem.html">Memory Management</a></li><li><a href="xmlio.html">I/O Interfaces</a></li><li><a href="library.html">The parser interfaces</a></li><li><a href="entities.html">Entities or no entities</a></li><li><a href="namespaces.html">Namespaces</a></li><li><a href="upgrade.html">Upgrading 1.x code</a></li><li><a href="threads.html">Thread safety</a></li><li><a href="DOM.html">DOM Principles</a></li><li><a href="example.html">A real example</a></li><li><a href="xml.html">flat page</a>, <a href="site.xsl">stylesheet</a></li></ul></td></tr></table><table width="100%" border="0" cellspacing="1" cellpadding="3"><tr><td colspan="1" bgcolor="#eecfa1" align="center"><center><b>API Indexes</b></center></td></tr><tr><td bgcolor="#fffacd"><ul><li><a href="APIchunk0.html">Alphabetic</a></li><li><a href="APIconstructors.html">Constructors</a></li><li><a href="APIfunctions.html">Functions/Types</a></li><li><a href="APIfiles.html">Modules</a></li><li><a href="APIsymbols.html">Symbols</a></li></ul></td></tr></table><table width="100%" border="0" cellspacing="1" cellpadding="3"><tr><td colspan="1" bgcolor="#eecfa1" align="center"><center><b>Related links</b></center></td></tr><tr><td bgcolor="#fffacd"><ul><li><a href="http://mail.gnome.org/archives/xml/">Mail archive</a></li><li><a href="http://xmlsoft.org/XSLT/">XSLT libxslt</a></li><li><a href="http://phd.cs.unibo.it/gdome2/">DOM gdome2</a></li><li><a href="http://www.aleksey.com/xmlsec/">XML-DSig xmlsec</a></li><li><a href="ftp://xmlsoft.org/">FTP</a></li><li><a href="http://www.zlatkovic.com/projects/libxml/">Windows binaries</a></li><li><a href="http://opencsw.org/packages/libxml2">Solaris binaries</a></li><li><a href="http://www.explain.com.au/oss/libxml2xslt.html">MacOsX binaries</a></li><li><a href="http://lxml.de/">lxml Python bindings</a></li><li><a href="http://cpan.uwinnipeg.ca/dist/XML-LibXML">Perl bindings</a></li><li><a href="http://libxmlplusplus.sourceforge.net/">C++ bindings</a></li><li><a href="http://www.zend.com/php5/articles/php5-xmlphp.php#Heading4">PHP bindings</a></li><li><a href="http://sourceforge.net/projects/libxml2-pas/">Pascal bindings</a></li><li><a href="http://libxml.rubyforge.org/">Ruby bindings</a></li><li><a href="http://tclxml.sourceforge.net/">Tcl bindings</a></li><li><a href="http://bugzilla.gnome.org/buglist.cgi?product=libxml2">Bug Tracker</a></li></ul></td></tr></table></td></tr></table></td><td valign="top" bgcolor="#8b7765"><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="1" width="100%"><tr><td><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="1" width="100%" bgcolor="#000000"><tr><td><table border="0" cellpadding="3" cellspacing="1" width="100%"><tr><td bgcolor="#fffacd"><p>This section is directly intended to help programmers getting bootstrapped
   11: using the XML tollkit from the C language. It is not intended to be
   12: extensive. I hope the automatically generated documents will provide the
   13: completeness required, but as a separate set of documents. The interfaces of
   14: the XML parser are by principle low level, Those interested in a higher level
   15: API should <a href="#DOM">look at DOM</a>.</p><p>The <a href="html/libxml-parser.html">parser interfaces for XML</a> are
   16: separated from the <a href="html/libxml-htmlparser.html">HTML parser
   17: interfaces</a>.  Let's have a look at how the XML parser can be called:</p><h3><a name="Invoking" id="Invoking">Invoking the parser : the pull method</a></h3><p>Usually, the first thing to do is to read an XML input. The parser accepts
   18: documents either from in-memory strings or from files.  The functions are
   19: defined in "parser.h":</p><dl><dt><code>xmlDocPtr xmlParseMemory(char *buffer, int size);</code></dt>
   20:     <dd><p>Parse a null-terminated string containing the document.</p>
   21:     </dd>
   22: </dl><dl><dt><code>xmlDocPtr xmlParseFile(const char *filename);</code></dt>
   23:     <dd><p>Parse an XML document contained in a (possibly compressed)
   24:       file.</p>
   25:     </dd>
   26: </dl><p>The parser returns a pointer to the document structure (or NULL in case of
   27: failure).</p><h3 id="Invoking1">Invoking the parser: the push method</h3><p>In order for the application to keep the control when the document is
   28: being fetched (which is common for GUI based programs) libxml2 provides a
   29: push interface, too, as of version 1.8.3. Here are the interface
   30: functions:</p><pre>xmlParserCtxtPtr xmlCreatePushParserCtxt(xmlSAXHandlerPtr sax,
   31:                                          void *user_data,
   32:                                          const char *chunk,
   33:                                          int size,
   34:                                          const char *filename);
   35: int              xmlParseChunk          (xmlParserCtxtPtr ctxt,
   36:                                          const char *chunk,
   37:                                          int size,
   38:                                          int terminate);</pre><p>and here is a simple example showing how to use the interface:</p><pre>            FILE *f;
   39: 
   40:             f = fopen(filename, "r");
   41:             if (f != NULL) {
   42:                 int res, size = 1024;
   43:                 char chars[1024];
   44:                 xmlParserCtxtPtr ctxt;
   45: 
   46:                 res = fread(chars, 1, 4, f);
   47:                 if (res &gt; 0) {
   48:                     ctxt = xmlCreatePushParserCtxt(NULL, NULL,
   49:                                 chars, res, filename);
   50:                     while ((res = fread(chars, 1, size, f)) &gt; 0) {
   51:                         xmlParseChunk(ctxt, chars, res, 0);
   52:                     }
   53:                     xmlParseChunk(ctxt, chars, 0, 1);
   54:                     doc = ctxt-&gt;myDoc;
   55:                     xmlFreeParserCtxt(ctxt);
   56:                 }
   57:             }</pre><p>The HTML parser embedded into libxml2 also has a push interface; the
   58: functions are just prefixed by "html" rather than "xml".</p><h3 id="Invoking2">Invoking the parser: the SAX interface</h3><p>The tree-building interface makes the parser memory-hungry, first loading
   59: the document in memory and then building the tree itself. Reading a document
   60: without building the tree is possible using the SAX interfaces (see SAX.h and
   61: <a href="http://www.daa.com.au/~james/gnome/xml-sax/xml-sax.html">James
   62: Henstridge's documentation</a>). Note also that the push interface can be
   63: limited to SAX: just use the two first arguments of
   64: <code>xmlCreatePushParserCtxt()</code>.</p><h3><a name="Building" id="Building">Building a tree from scratch</a></h3><p>The other way to get an XML tree in memory is by building it. Basically
   65: there is a set of functions dedicated to building new elements. (These are
   66: also described in &lt;libxml/tree.h&gt;.) For example, here is a piece of
   67: code that produces the XML document used in the previous examples:</p><pre>    #include &lt;libxml/tree.h&gt;
   68:     xmlDocPtr doc;
   69:     xmlNodePtr tree, subtree;
   70: 
   71:     doc = xmlNewDoc("1.0");
   72:     doc-&gt;children = xmlNewDocNode(doc, NULL, "EXAMPLE", NULL);
   73:     xmlSetProp(doc-&gt;children, "prop1", "gnome is great");
   74:     xmlSetProp(doc-&gt;children, "prop2", "&amp; linux too");
   75:     tree = xmlNewChild(doc-&gt;children, NULL, "head", NULL);
   76:     subtree = xmlNewChild(tree, NULL, "title", "Welcome to Gnome");
   77:     tree = xmlNewChild(doc-&gt;children, NULL, "chapter", NULL);
   78:     subtree = xmlNewChild(tree, NULL, "title", "The Linux adventure");
   79:     subtree = xmlNewChild(tree, NULL, "p", "bla bla bla ...");
   80:     subtree = xmlNewChild(tree, NULL, "image", NULL);
   81:     xmlSetProp(subtree, "href", "linus.gif");</pre><p>Not really rocket science ...</p><h3><a name="Traversing" id="Traversing">Traversing the tree</a></h3><p>Basically by <a href="html/libxml-tree.html">including "tree.h"</a> your
   82: code has access to the internal structure of all the elements of the tree.
   83: The names should be somewhat simple like <strong>parent</strong>,
   84: <strong>children</strong>, <strong>next</strong>, <strong>prev</strong>,
   85: <strong>properties</strong>, etc... For example, still with the previous
   86: example:</p><pre><code>doc-&gt;children-&gt;children-&gt;children</code></pre><p>points to the title element,</p><pre>doc-&gt;children-&gt;children-&gt;next-&gt;children-&gt;children</pre><p>points to the text node containing the chapter title "The Linux
   87: adventure".</p><p><strong>NOTE</strong>: XML allows <em>PI</em>s and <em>comments</em> to be
   88: present before the document root, so <code>doc-&gt;children</code> may point
   89: to an element which is not the document Root Element; a function
   90: <code>xmlDocGetRootElement()</code> was added for this purpose.</p><h3><a name="Modifying" id="Modifying">Modifying the tree</a></h3><p>Functions are provided for reading and writing the document content. Here
   91: is an excerpt from the <a href="html/libxml-tree.html">tree API</a>:</p><dl><dt><code>xmlAttrPtr xmlSetProp(xmlNodePtr node, const xmlChar *name, const
   92:   xmlChar *value);</code></dt>
   93:     <dd><p>This sets (or changes) an attribute carried by an ELEMENT node.
   94:       The value can be NULL.</p>
   95:     </dd>
   96: </dl><dl><dt><code>const xmlChar *xmlGetProp(xmlNodePtr node, const xmlChar
   97:   *name);</code></dt>
   98:     <dd><p>This function returns a pointer to new copy of the property
   99:       content. Note that the user must deallocate the result.</p>
  100:     </dd>
  101: </dl><p>Two functions are provided for reading and writing the text associated
  102: with elements:</p><dl><dt><code>xmlNodePtr xmlStringGetNodeList(xmlDocPtr doc, const xmlChar
  103:   *value);</code></dt>
  104:     <dd><p>This function takes an "external" string and converts it to one
  105:       text node or possibly to a list of entity and text nodes. All
  106:       non-predefined entity references like &amp;Gnome; will be stored
  107:       internally as entity nodes, hence the result of the function may not be
  108:       a single node.</p>
  109:     </dd>
  110: </dl><dl><dt><code>xmlChar *xmlNodeListGetString(xmlDocPtr doc, xmlNodePtr list, int
  111:   inLine);</code></dt>
  112:     <dd><p>This function is the inverse of
  113:       <code>xmlStringGetNodeList()</code>. It generates a new string
  114:       containing the content of the text and entity nodes. Note the extra
  115:       argument inLine. If this argument is set to 1, the function will expand
  116:       entity references.  For example, instead of returning the &amp;Gnome;
  117:       XML encoding in the string, it will substitute it with its value (say,
  118:       "GNU Network Object Model Environment").</p>
  119:     </dd>
  120: </dl><h3><a name="Saving" id="Saving">Saving a tree</a></h3><p>Basically 3 options are possible:</p><dl><dt><code>void xmlDocDumpMemory(xmlDocPtr cur, xmlChar**mem, int
  121:   *size);</code></dt>
  122:     <dd><p>Returns a buffer into which the document has been saved.</p>
  123:     </dd>
  124: </dl><dl><dt><code>extern void xmlDocDump(FILE *f, xmlDocPtr doc);</code></dt>
  125:     <dd><p>Dumps a document to an open file descriptor.</p>
  126:     </dd>
  127: </dl><dl><dt><code>int xmlSaveFile(const char *filename, xmlDocPtr cur);</code></dt>
  128:     <dd><p>Saves the document to a file. In this case, the compression
  129:       interface is triggered if it has been turned on.</p>
  130:     </dd>
  131: </dl><h3><a name="Compressio" id="Compressio">Compression</a></h3><p>The library transparently handles compression when doing file-based
  132: accesses. The level of compression on saves can be turned on either globally
  133: or individually for one file:</p><dl><dt><code>int  xmlGetDocCompressMode (xmlDocPtr doc);</code></dt>
  134:     <dd><p>Gets the document compression ratio (0-9).</p>
  135:     </dd>
  136: </dl><dl><dt><code>void xmlSetDocCompressMode (xmlDocPtr doc, int mode);</code></dt>
  137:     <dd><p>Sets the document compression ratio.</p>
  138:     </dd>
  139: </dl><dl><dt><code>int  xmlGetCompressMode(void);</code></dt>
  140:     <dd><p>Gets the default compression ratio.</p>
  141:     </dd>
  142: </dl><dl><dt><code>void xmlSetCompressMode(int mode);</code></dt>
  143:     <dd><p>Sets the default compression ratio.</p>
  144:     </dd>
  145: </dl><p><a href="bugs.html">Daniel Veillard</a></p></td></tr></table></td></tr></table></td></tr></table></td></tr></table></td></tr></table></body></html>

FreeBSD-CVSweb <freebsd-cvsweb@FreeBSD.org>