1 2 Expat, Release 2.1.1 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 2.58 or newer. Run the script like this: 29 30 ./buildconf.sh 31 32Once this has been done, follow the same instructions as for building 33from a source distribution. 34 35To build Expat from a source distribution, you first run the 36configuration shell script in the top level distribution directory: 37 38 ./configure 39 40There are many options which you may provide to configure (which you 41can discover by running configure with the --help option). But the 42one of most interest is the one that sets the installation directory. 43By default, the configure script will set things up to install 44libexpat into /usr/local/lib, expat.h into /usr/local/include, and 45xmlwf into /usr/local/bin. If, for example, you'd prefer to install 46into /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 51Another interesting option is to enable 64-bit integer support for 52line and column numbers and the over-all byte index: 53 54 ./configure CPPFLAGS=-DXML_LARGE_SIZE 55 56However, such a modification would be a breaking change to the ABI 57and is therefore not recommended for general use - e.g. as part of 58a Linux distribution - but rather for builds with special requirements. 59 60After running the configure script, the "make" command will build 61things and "make install" will install things into their proper 62location. Have a look at the "Makefile" to learn about additional 63"make" options. Note that you need to have write permission into 64the directories into which things will be installed. 65 66If you are interested in building Expat to provide document 67information in UTF-16 encoding rather than the default UTF-8, follow 68these 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 97Using DESTDIR or INSTALL_ROOT is enabled, with INSTALL_ROOT being the default 98value for DESTDIR, and the rest of the make file using only DESTDIR. 99It works as follows: 100 $ make install DESTDIR=/path/to/image 101overrides the in-makefile set DESTDIR, while both 102 $ INSTALL_ROOT=/path/to/image make install 103 $ make install INSTALL_ROOT=/path/to/image 104use DESTDIR=$(INSTALL_ROOT), even if DESTDIR eventually is defined in the 105environment, because variable-setting priority is 1061) commandline 1072) in-makefile 1083) environment 109 110Note: This only applies to the Expat library itself, building UTF-16 versions 111of xmlwf and the tests is currently not supported. 112 113Note for Solaris users: The "ar" command is usually located in 114"/usr/ccs/bin", which is not in the default PATH. You will need to 115add this to your path for the "make" command, and probably also switch 116to GNU make (the "make" found in /usr/ccs/bin does not seem to work 117properly -- appearantly it does not understand .PHONY directives). If 118you're using ksh or bash, use this command to build: 119 120 PATH=/usr/ccs/bin:$PATH make 121 122When using Expat with a project using autoconf for configuration, you 123can use the probing macro in conftools/expat.m4 to determine how to 124include Expat. See the comments at the top of that file for more 125information. 126 127A reference manual is available in the file doc/reference.html in this 128distribution. 129 130The homepage for this project is http://www.libexpat.org/. There 131are links there to connect you to the bug reports page. If you need 132to report a bug when you don't have access to a browser, you may also 133send a bug report by email to expat-bugs@mail.libexpat.org. 134 135Discussion related to the direction of future expat development takes 136place on expat-discuss@mail.libexpat.org. Archives of this list and 137other Expat-related lists may be found at: 138 139 http://mail.libexpat.org/mailman/listinfo/ 140