EXPAT-DOM, THE EXPAT WRAPPER

Overview

This library is a wrapper for Expat C library (http://expat.sourceforge.net). This library makes XML easy to use in C by providing a very simple DOM interface. You do not need to register handlers. The library parses the whole file or buffer and returns a pointer to the DOM structure that you can navigate by calling the special functions, such as dom_find_node(). You also can navigate the structure, using its internal fields, e.g. child, parent and next.

All function in the library are thread-safe. Please, refer to the example on how to use this library below.

Requirements

This library requires Expat library in order to compile successfully. If you use a Linux distribution with packging system, try installing libexpat-dev package.

Installation Instructions

The simplest way to compile this package is:

1. 'cd' to the directory containing the package's source code and type ./configure to configure the package for your system. While running, 'configure' prints some messages telling which features it is checking for. There are many options which you may provide to configure (which you can discover by running configure with the --help option).

2. Type make to compile the package.

3. Type make install to install the programs, libraries and any data files and documentation.

Documentation

The library is distributed with detailed documentation. The documentation in HTML format is stored in sub-folder named 'doc'.

Example

This is a simple example of library usage

#include "expat-dom.h"

int main( int argc, char *argv[]){
	dom_t *dom, *node, *project, *author;
	char *xml=
		"<projects>\
			<project name=\"Expat\">\
		    	<author>Clark Cooper</author>\
			    <website>http://expat.sourceforge.net/</website>\
			</project>\
			<project name=\"Expat-dom\">\
		    	<author>Sergey Kolotsey</author>\
			    <website>http://example.com</website>\
			</project>\
		</projects>";


	if( NULL !=(dom=dom_parse_buffer( xml, strlen( xml)))){
	    if(( node=dom_find_node( dom, "projects"))){
	        project=node->child;
	        while( project){
	            if( 0==strcasecmp( project->name, "project")){
	                char *name=dom_find_attr( project->attr, "name");
	                if( name && ( author=dom_find_node( project, "author"))){
	                    char author_buffer[1024];
	                    strncpy( author_buffer, author->data, 
	                    	author->data_len<1023? author->data_len : 1023);
	                    author_buffer[author->data_len<1023? author->data_len : 1023]=0;
	                    printf("Project %s, author %s\n", name, author_buffer);
	                }
	            }
	            project=project->next;
	        }

	    }else{
	        fprintf( stderr, "Could not find root node\n");
	    }
	    dom_free( dom);
	    return 0;

	}else{
	    fprintf( stderr, "Parse XML error: %s\n", strerror( errno));
	    return 1;
	}
}

See file 'example.c'. To build this file, run gcc -lexpat -lexpat-dom -o example example.c in console.

Copyright notice

Expat-dom 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.