README
1
2 Expat, Release 2.0.1
3
4 This is Expat, a C library for parsing XML, written by James Clark.
5 Expat is a stream-oriented XML parser. This means that you register
6 handlers with the parser before starting the parse. These handlers
7 are called when the parser discovers the associated structures in the
8 document being parsed. A start tag is an example of the kind of
9 structures for which you may register handlers.
10
11 Windows users should use the expat_win32bin package, which includes
12 both precompiled libraries and executables, and source code for
13 developers.
14
15 Expat is free software. You may copy, distribute, and modify it under
16 the terms of the License contained in the file COPYING distributed
17 with this package. This license is the same as the MIT/X Consortium
18 license.
19
20 Versions of Expat that have an odd minor version (the middle number in
21 the release above), are development releases and should be considered
22 as beta software. Releases with even minor version numbers are
23 intended to be production grade software.
24
25 If you are building Expat from a check-out from the CVS repository,
26 you need to run a script that generates the configure script using the
27 GNU autoconf and libtool tools. To do this, you need to have
28 autoconf 2.52 or newer and libtool 1.4 or newer (1.5 or newer preferred).
29 Run the script like this:
30
31 ./buildconf.sh
32
33 Once this has been done, follow the same instructions as for building
34 from a source distribution.
35
36 To build Expat from a source distribution, you first run the
37 configuration shell script in the top level distribution directory:
38
39 ./configure
40
41 There are many options which you may provide to configure (which you
42 can discover by running configure with the --help option). But the
43 one of most interest is the one that sets the installation directory.
44 By default, the configure script will set things up to install
45 libexpat into /usr/local/lib, expat.h into /usr/local/include, and
46 xmlwf into /usr/local/bin. If, for example, you'd prefer to install
47 into /home/me/mystuff/lib, /home/me/mystuff/include, and
48 /home/me/mystuff/bin, you can tell configure about that with:
49
50 ./configure --prefix=/home/me/mystuff
51
52 Another interesting option is to enable 64-bit integer support for
53 line and column numbers and the over-all byte index:
54
55 ./configure CPPFLAGS=-DXML_LARGE_SIZE
56
57 However, such a modification would be a breaking change to the ABI
58 and is therefore not recommended for general use - e.g. as part of
59 a Linux distribution - but rather for builds with special requirements.
60
61 After running the configure script, the "make" command will build
62 things and "make install" will install things into their proper
63 location. Have a look at the "Makefile" to learn about additional
64 "make" options. Note that you need to have write permission into
65 the directories into which things will be installed.
66
67 If you are interested in building Expat to provide document
68 information in UTF-16 rather than the default UTF-8, follow these
69 instructions (after having run "make distclean"):
70
71 1. For UTF-16 output as unsigned short (and version/error
72 strings as char), run:
73
74 ./configure CPPFLAGS=-DXML_UNICODE
75
76 For UTF-16 output as wchar_t (incl. version/error strings),
77 run:
78
79 ./configure CFLAGS="-g -O2 -fshort-wchar" \
80 CPPFLAGS=-DXML_UNICODE_WCHAR_T
81
82 2. Edit the MakeFile, changing:
83
84 LIBRARY = libexpat.la
85
86 to:
87
88 LIBRARY = libexpatw.la
89
90 (Note the additional "w" in the library name.)
91
92 3. Run "make buildlib" (which builds the library only).
93 Or, to save step 2, run "make buildlib LIBRARY=libexpatw.la".
94
95 4. Run "make installlib" (which installs the library only).
96 Or, if step 2 was omitted, run "make installlib LIBRARY=libexpatw.la".
97
98 Using DESTDIR or INSTALL_ROOT is enabled, with INSTALL_ROOT being the default
99 value for DESTDIR, and the rest of the make file using only DESTDIR.
100 It works as follows:
101 $ make install DESTDIR=/path/to/image
102 overrides the in-makefile set DESTDIR, while both
103 $ INSTALL_ROOT=/path/to/image make install
104 $ make install INSTALL_ROOT=/path/to/image
105 use DESTDIR=$(INSTALL_ROOT), even if DESTDIR eventually is defined in the
106 environment, because variable-setting priority is
107 1) commandline
108 2) in-makefile
109 3) environment
110
111 Note for Solaris users: The "ar" command is usually located in
112 "/usr/ccs/bin", which is not in the default PATH. You will need to
113 add this to your path for the "make" command, and probably also switch
114 to GNU make (the "make" found in /usr/ccs/bin does not seem to work
115 properly -- appearantly it does not understand .PHONY directives). If
116 you're using ksh or bash, use this command to build:
117
118 PATH=/usr/ccs/bin:$PATH make
119
120 When using Expat with a project using autoconf for configuration, you
121 can use the probing macro in conftools/expat.m4 to determine how to
122 include Expat. See the comments at the top of that file for more
123 information.
124
125 A reference manual is available in the file doc/reference.html in this
126 distribution.
127
128 The homepage for this project is http://www.libexpat.org/. There
129 are links there to connect you to the bug reports page. If you need
130 to report a bug when you don't have access to a browser, you may also
131 send a bug report by email to expat-bugs (a] mail.libexpat.org.
132
133 Discussion related to the direction of future expat development takes
134 place on expat-discuss (a] mail.libexpat.org. Archives of this list and
135 other Expat-related lists may be found at:
136
137 http://mail.libexpat.org/mailman/listinfo/
138