1 2 Expat, Release 2.1.1 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 2.58 or newer. Run the script like this: 29 30 ./buildconf.sh 31 32 Once this has been done, follow the same instructions as for building 33 from a source distribution. 34 35 To build Expat from a source distribution, you first run the 36 configuration shell script in the top level distribution directory: 37 38 ./configure 39 40 There are many options which you may provide to configure (which you 41 can discover by running configure with the --help option). But the 42 one of most interest is the one that sets the installation directory. 43 By default, the configure script will set things up to install 44 libexpat into /usr/local/lib, expat.h into /usr/local/include, and 45 xmlwf into /usr/local/bin. If, for example, you'd prefer to install 46 into /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 51 Another interesting option is to enable 64-bit integer support for 52 line and column numbers and the over-all byte index: 53 54 ./configure CPPFLAGS=-DXML_LARGE_SIZE 55 56 However, such a modification would be a breaking change to the ABI 57 and is therefore not recommended for general use - e.g. as part of 58 a Linux distribution - but rather for builds with special requirements. 59 60 After running the configure script, the "make" command will build 61 things and "make install" will install things into their proper 62 location. Have a look at the "Makefile" to learn about additional 63 "make" options. Note that you need to have write permission into 64 the directories into which things will be installed. 65 66 If you are interested in building Expat to provide document 67 information in UTF-16 encoding rather than the default UTF-8, follow 68 these 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 97 Using DESTDIR or INSTALL_ROOT is enabled, with INSTALL_ROOT being the default 98 value for DESTDIR, and the rest of the make file using only DESTDIR. 99 It works as follows: 100 $ make install DESTDIR=/path/to/image 101 overrides the in-makefile set DESTDIR, while both 102 $ INSTALL_ROOT=/path/to/image make install 103 $ make install INSTALL_ROOT=/path/to/image 104 use DESTDIR=$(INSTALL_ROOT), even if DESTDIR eventually is defined in the 105 environment, because variable-setting priority is 106 1) commandline 107 2) in-makefile 108 3) environment 109 110 Note: This only applies to the Expat library itself, building UTF-16 versions 111 of xmlwf and the tests is currently not supported. 112 113 Note for Solaris users: The "ar" command is usually located in 114 "/usr/ccs/bin", which is not in the default PATH. You will need to 115 add this to your path for the "make" command, and probably also switch 116 to GNU make (the "make" found in /usr/ccs/bin does not seem to work 117 properly -- appearantly it does not understand .PHONY directives). If 118 you're using ksh or bash, use this command to build: 119 120 PATH=/usr/ccs/bin:$PATH make 121 122 When using Expat with a project using autoconf for configuration, you 123 can use the probing macro in conftools/expat.m4 to determine how to 124 include Expat. See the comments at the top of that file for more 125 information. 126 127 A reference manual is available in the file doc/reference.html in this 128 distribution. 129 130 The homepage for this project is http://www.libexpat.org/. There 131 are links there to connect you to the bug reports page. If you need 132 to report a bug when you don't have access to a browser, you may also 133 send a bug report by email to expat-bugs (a] mail.libexpat.org. 134 135 Discussion related to the direction of future expat development takes 136 place on expat-discuss (a] mail.libexpat.org. Archives of this list and 137 other Expat-related lists may be found at: 138 139 http://mail.libexpat.org/mailman/listinfo/ 140