1 2 Expat, Release 2.0.1 3 4This is Expat, a C library for parsing XML, written by James Clark. 5Expat is a stream-oriented XML parser. This means that you register 6handlers with the parser before starting the parse. These handlers 7are called when the parser discovers the associated structures in the 8document being parsed. A start tag is an example of the kind of 9structures for which you may register handlers. 10 11Windows users should use the expat_win32bin package, which includes 12both precompiled libraries and executables, and source code for 13developers. 14 15Expat is free software. You may copy, distribute, and modify it under 16the terms of the License contained in the file COPYING distributed 17with this package. This license is the same as the MIT/X Consortium 18license. 19 20Versions of Expat that have an odd minor version (the middle number in 21the release above), are development releases and should be considered 22as beta software. Releases with even minor version numbers are 23intended to be production grade software. 24 25If you are building Expat from a check-out from the CVS repository, 26you need to run a script that generates the configure script using the 27GNU autoconf and libtool tools. To do this, you need to have 28autoconf 2.52 or newer and libtool 1.4 or newer (1.5 or newer preferred). 29Run the script like this: 30 31 ./buildconf.sh 32 33Once this has been done, follow the same instructions as for building 34from a source distribution. 35 36To build Expat from a source distribution, you first run the 37configuration shell script in the top level distribution directory: 38 39 ./configure 40 41There are many options which you may provide to configure (which you 42can discover by running configure with the --help option). But the 43one of most interest is the one that sets the installation directory. 44By default, the configure script will set things up to install 45libexpat into /usr/local/lib, expat.h into /usr/local/include, and 46xmlwf into /usr/local/bin. If, for example, you'd prefer to install 47into /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 52Another interesting option is to enable 64-bit integer support for 53line and column numbers and the over-all byte index: 54 55 ./configure CPPFLAGS=-DXML_LARGE_SIZE 56 57However, such a modification would be a breaking change to the ABI 58and is therefore not recommended for general use - e.g. as part of 59a Linux distribution - but rather for builds with special requirements. 60 61After running the configure script, the "make" command will build 62things and "make install" will install things into their proper 63location. Have a look at the "Makefile" to learn about additional 64"make" options. Note that you need to have write permission into 65the directories into which things will be installed. 66 67If you are interested in building Expat to provide document 68information in UTF-16 rather than the default UTF-8, follow these 69instructions (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 98Using DESTDIR or INSTALL_ROOT is enabled, with INSTALL_ROOT being the default 99value for DESTDIR, and the rest of the make file using only DESTDIR. 100It works as follows: 101 $ make install DESTDIR=/path/to/image 102overrides the in-makefile set DESTDIR, while both 103 $ INSTALL_ROOT=/path/to/image make install 104 $ make install INSTALL_ROOT=/path/to/image 105use DESTDIR=$(INSTALL_ROOT), even if DESTDIR eventually is defined in the 106environment, because variable-setting priority is 1071) commandline 1082) in-makefile 1093) environment 110 111Note for Solaris users: The "ar" command is usually located in 112"/usr/ccs/bin", which is not in the default PATH. You will need to 113add this to your path for the "make" command, and probably also switch 114to GNU make (the "make" found in /usr/ccs/bin does not seem to work 115properly -- appearantly it does not understand .PHONY directives). If 116you're using ksh or bash, use this command to build: 117 118 PATH=/usr/ccs/bin:$PATH make 119 120When using Expat with a project using autoconf for configuration, you 121can use the probing macro in conftools/expat.m4 to determine how to 122include Expat. See the comments at the top of that file for more 123information. 124 125A reference manual is available in the file doc/reference.html in this 126distribution. 127 128The homepage for this project is http://www.libexpat.org/. There 129are links there to connect you to the bug reports page. If you need 130to report a bug when you don't have access to a browser, you may also 131send a bug report by email to expat-bugs@mail.libexpat.org. 132 133Discussion related to the direction of future expat development takes 134place on expat-discuss@mail.libexpat.org. Archives of this list and 135other Expat-related lists may be found at: 136 137 http://mail.libexpat.org/mailman/listinfo/ 138