This is Expat, a C library for parsing XML, started by James Clark in 1997. Expat is a stream-oriented XML parser. This means that you register handlers with the parser before starting the parse. These handlers are called when the parser discovers the associated structures in the document being parsed. A start tag is an example of the kind of structures for which you may register handlers.
Windows users should use the
expat_win32
package,
which includes both precompiled libraries and executables, and source code for
developers.
Expat is free software.
You may copy, distribute, and modify it under the terms of the License
contained in the file
COPYING
distributed with this package.
This license is the same as the MIT/X Consortium license.
If you are building Expat from a check-out from the Git repository, you need to run a script that generates the configure script using the GNU autoconf and libtool tools. To do this, you need to have autoconf 2.58 or newer. Run the script like this:
./buildconf.sh
Once this has been done, follow the same instructions as for building from a source distribution.
To build Expat from a source distribution, you first run the configuration shell script in the top level distribution directory:
./configure
There are many options which you may provide to configure (which you
can discover by running configure with the --help
option). But the
one of most interest is the one that sets the installation directory.
By default, the configure script will set things up to install
libexpat into /usr/local/lib
, expat.h
into /usr/local/include
, and
xmlwf
into /usr/local/bin
. If, for example, you'd prefer to install
into /home/me/mystuff/lib
, /home/me/mystuff/include
, and
/home/me/mystuff/bin
, you can tell configure
about that with:
./configure --prefix=/home/me/mystuff
Another interesting option is to enable 64-bit integer support for line and column numbers and the over-all byte index:
./configure CPPFLAGS=-DXML_LARGE_SIZE
However, such a modification would be a breaking change to the ABI and is therefore not recommended for general use โ e.g. as part of a Linux distribution โ but rather for builds with special requirements.
After running the configure script, the make
command will build
things and make install
will install things into their proper
location. Have a look at the Makefile
to learn about additional
make
options. Note that you need to have write permission into
the directories into which things will be installed.
If you are interested in building Expat to provide document
information in UTF-16 encoding rather than the default UTF-8, follow
these instructions (after having run make distclean
):
-
For UTF-16 output as unsigned short (and version/error strings as char), run:
./configure CPPFLAGS=-DXML_UNICODE
For UTF-16 output aswchar_t
(incl. version/error strings), run:
./configure CFLAGS="-g -O2 -fshort-wchar" CPPFLAGS=-DXML_UNICODE_WCHAR_T
Note: The latter requires libc compiled with-fshort-wchar
, as well. -
Edit
Makefile
, changing:
LIBRARY = libexpat.la
to:
LIBRARY = libexpatw.la
(Note the additional "w" in the library name.) -
Run
make buildlib
(which builds the library only). Or, to save step 2, runmake buildlib LIBRARY=libexpatw.la
. -
Run
make installlib
(which installs the library only). Or, if step 2 was omitted, runmake installlib LIBRARY=libexpatw.la
.
Using DESTDIR
or INSTALL_ROOT
is enabled, with INSTALL_ROOT
being the
default value for DESTDIR
, and the rest of the make file using only
DESTDIR
. It works as follows:
make install DESTDIR=/path/to/image
overrides the in-makefile set DESTDIR
, while both
INSTALL_ROOT=/path/to/image make install
make install INSTALL_ROOT=/path/to/image
use DESTDIR=$(INSTALL_ROOT)
, even if DESTDIR
eventually is defined in the
environment, because variable-setting priority is
- commandline
- in-makefile
- environment
Note: This only applies to the Expat library itself, building UTF-16 versions of xmlwf and the tests is currently not supported.
When using Expat with a project using autoconf for configuration, you
can use the probing macro in conftools/expat.m4
to determine how to
include Expat. See the comments at the top of that file for more
information.
A reference manual is available in the file doc/reference.html
in this
distribution.