libxml2 Reference Manual

Libxml2 is the XML C parser and toolkit developed for the Gnome project (but usable outside of the Gnome platform), it is free software available under the MIT License. XML itself is a metalanguage to design markup languages, i.e. text language where semantic and structure are added to the content using extra "markup" information enclosed between angle brackets. HTML is the most well-known markup language. Though the library is written in C a variety of language bindings make it available in other environments.

Libxml2 implements a number of existing standards related to markup languages:

the XML standard: http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml
Namespaces in XML: http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml-names/
XML Base: http://www.w3.org/TR/xmlbase/
RFC 2396 : Uniform Resource Identifiers http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2396.txt
XML Path Language (XPath) 1.0: http://www.w3.org/TR/xpath
HTML4 parser: http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/
XML Pointer Language (XPointer) Version 1.0: http://www.w3.org/TR/xptr
XML Inclusions (XInclude) Version 1.0: http://www.w3.org/TR/xinclude/
ISO-8859-x encodings, as well as rfc2044 [UTF-8] and rfc2781 [UTF-16] Unicode encodings, and more if using iconv support
part of SGML Open Technical Resolution TR9401:1997
XML Catalogs Working Draft 06 August 2001: http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/entity/spec-2001-08-06.html
Canonical XML Version 1.0: http://www.w3.org/TR/xml-c14n and the Exclusive XML Canonicalization CR draft http://www.w3.org/TR/xml-exc-c14n
Relax NG, ISO/IEC 19757-2:2003, http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/relax-ng/spec-20011203.html
W3C XML Schemas Part 2: Datatypes REC 02 May 2001
W3C xml:id Working Draft 7 April 2004

As a result the libxml2 API is very large. If you get lost searching for some specific API use the online search engine hosted on xmlsoft.org the libxml2 and libxslt project page.