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</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 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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="https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/libxml2/issues">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
using the XML tollkit from the C language. It is not intended to be
extensive. I hope the automatically generated documents will provide the
completeness required, but as a separate set of documents. The interfaces of
the XML parser are by principle low level, Those interested in a higher level
API should <a href="#DOM">look at DOM</a>.</p><p>The <a href="html/libxml-parser.html">parser interfaces for XML</a> are
separated from the <a href="html/libxml-htmlparser.html">HTML parser
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
documents either from in-memory strings or from files.  The functions are
defined in "parser.h":</p><dl>
  <dt><code>xmlDocPtr xmlParseMemory(char *buffer, int size);</code></dt>
    <dd><p>Parse a null-terminated string containing the document.</p>
    </dd>
</dl><dl>
  <dt><code>xmlDocPtr xmlParseFile(const char *filename);</code></dt>
    <dd><p>Parse an XML document contained in a (possibly compressed)
      file.</p>
    </dd>
</dl><p>The parser returns a pointer to the document structure (or NULL in case of
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
being fetched (which is common for GUI based programs) libxml2 provides a
push interface, too, as of version 1.8.3. Here are the interface
functions:</p><pre>xmlParserCtxtPtr xmlCreatePushParserCtxt(xmlSAXHandlerPtr sax,
                                         void *user_data,
                                         const char *chunk,
                                         int size,
                                         const char *filename);
int              xmlParseChunk          (xmlParserCtxtPtr ctxt,
                                         const char *chunk,
                                         int size,
                                         int terminate);</pre><p>and here is a simple example showing how to use the interface:</p><pre>            FILE *f;

            f = fopen(filename, "r");
            if (f != NULL) {
                int res, size = 1024;
                char chars[1024];
                xmlParserCtxtPtr ctxt;

                res = fread(chars, 1, 4, f);
                if (res &gt; 0) {
                    ctxt = xmlCreatePushParserCtxt(NULL, NULL,
                                chars, res, filename);
                    while ((res = fread(chars, 1, size, f)) &gt; 0) {
                        xmlParseChunk(ctxt, chars, res, 0);
                    }
                    xmlParseChunk(ctxt, chars, 0, 1);
                    doc = ctxt-&gt;myDoc;
                    xmlFreeParserCtxt(ctxt);
                }
            }</pre><p>The HTML parser embedded into libxml2 also has a push interface; the
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
the document in memory and then building the tree itself. Reading a document
without building the tree is possible using the SAX interfaces (see SAX.h and
<a href="http://www.daa.com.au/~james/gnome/xml-sax/xml-sax.html">James
Henstridge's documentation</a>). Note also that the push interface can be
limited to SAX: just use the two first arguments of
<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
there is a set of functions dedicated to building new elements. (These are
also described in &lt;libxml/tree.h&gt;.) For example, here is a piece of
code that produces the XML document used in the previous examples:</p><pre>    #include &lt;libxml/tree.h&gt;
    xmlDocPtr doc;
    xmlNodePtr tree, subtree;

    doc = xmlNewDoc("1.0");
    doc-&gt;children = xmlNewDocNode(doc, NULL, "EXAMPLE", NULL);
    xmlSetProp(doc-&gt;children, "prop1", "gnome is great");
    xmlSetProp(doc-&gt;children, "prop2", "&amp; linux too");
    tree = xmlNewChild(doc-&gt;children, NULL, "head", NULL);
    subtree = xmlNewChild(tree, NULL, "title", "Welcome to Gnome");
    tree = xmlNewChild(doc-&gt;children, NULL, "chapter", NULL);
    subtree = xmlNewChild(tree, NULL, "title", "The Linux adventure");
    subtree = xmlNewChild(tree, NULL, "p", "bla bla bla ...");
    subtree = xmlNewChild(tree, NULL, "image", NULL);
    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
code has access to the internal structure of all the elements of the tree.
The names should be somewhat simple like <strong>parent</strong>,
<strong>children</strong>, <strong>next</strong>, <strong>prev</strong>,
<strong>properties</strong>, etc... For example, still with the previous
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
adventure".</p><p><strong>NOTE</strong>: XML allows <em>PI</em>s and <em>comments</em> to be
present before the document root, so <code>doc-&gt;children</code> may point
to an element which is not the document Root Element; a function
<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
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
  xmlChar *value);</code></dt>
    <dd><p>This sets (or changes) an attribute carried by an ELEMENT node.
      The value can be NULL.</p>
    </dd>
</dl><dl>
  <dt><code>const xmlChar *xmlGetProp(xmlNodePtr node, const xmlChar
  *name);</code></dt>
    <dd><p>This function returns a pointer to new copy of the property
      content. Note that the user must deallocate the result.</p>
    </dd>
</dl><p>Two functions are provided for reading and writing the text associated
with elements:</p><dl>
  <dt><code>xmlNodePtr xmlStringGetNodeList(xmlDocPtr doc, const xmlChar
  *value);</code></dt>
    <dd><p>This function takes an "external" string and converts it to one
      text node or possibly to a list of entity and text nodes. All
      non-predefined entity references like &amp;Gnome; will be stored
      internally as entity nodes, hence the result of the function may not be
      a single node.</p>
    </dd>
</dl><dl>
  <dt><code>xmlChar *xmlNodeListGetString(xmlDocPtr doc, xmlNodePtr list, int
  inLine);</code></dt>
    <dd><p>This function is the inverse of
      <code>xmlStringGetNodeList()</code>. It generates a new string
      containing the content of the text and entity nodes. Note the extra
      argument inLine. If this argument is set to 1, the function will expand
      entity references.  For example, instead of returning the &amp;Gnome;
      XML encoding in the string, it will substitute it with its value (say,
      "GNU Network Object Model Environment").</p>
    </dd>
</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
  *size);</code></dt>
    <dd><p>Returns a buffer into which the document has been saved.</p>
    </dd>
</dl><dl>
  <dt><code>extern void xmlDocDump(FILE *f, xmlDocPtr doc);</code></dt>
    <dd><p>Dumps a document to an open file descriptor.</p>
    </dd>
</dl><dl>
  <dt><code>int xmlSaveFile(const char *filename, xmlDocPtr cur);</code></dt>
    <dd><p>Saves the document to a file. In this case, the compression
      interface is triggered if it has been turned on.</p>
    </dd>
</dl><h3><a name="Compressio" id="Compressio">Compression</a></h3><p>The library transparently handles compression when doing file-based
accesses. The level of compression on saves can be turned on either globally
or individually for one file:</p><dl>
  <dt><code>int  xmlGetDocCompressMode (xmlDocPtr doc);</code></dt>
    <dd><p>Gets the document compression ratio (0-9).</p>
    </dd>
</dl><dl>
  <dt><code>void xmlSetDocCompressMode (xmlDocPtr doc, int mode);</code></dt>
    <dd><p>Sets the document compression ratio.</p>
    </dd>
</dl><dl>
  <dt><code>int  xmlGetCompressMode(void);</code></dt>
    <dd><p>Gets the default compression ratio.</p>
    </dd>
</dl><dl>
  <dt><code>void xmlSetCompressMode(int mode);</code></dt>
    <dd><p>Sets the default compression ratio.</p>
    </dd>
</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>