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<!DOCTYPE html
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<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">
<head>
<title>Mini-XML Home Page</title>
<style><!--
h1, h2, h3, p { font-family: sans-serif; text-align: justify; }
h1.title, p.title { font-family: sans-serif; text-align: center; }
tt, pre, pre a:link, pre a:visited, tt a:link, tt a:visited { font-weight: bold; color: #7f0000; }
--></style>
</head>
<body>
<p class="title" align="center">[&nbsp;<a
href="../index.html">Back to Home Page</a>&nbsp;]</p>
<h1 class="title" align="center">Mini-XML Home Page</h1>
<p class="title" align="center">Current Release: v0.93 [&nbsp;<a
href="mxml-0.93.tar.gz">Download Source (.tar.gz 40k)</a> |
<a href="CHANGES">View Change Log</a> |
<a href="http://freshmeat.net/projects/mxml">Rate/Make Comments</A>&nbsp;]</p>
<h2>Introduction</h2>
<p>Mini-XML is a small XML parsing library that you can use to
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read XML and XML-like data files in your application without
requiring large non-standard libraries. Mini-XML only requires
an ANSI C compatible compiler (GCC works, as do most vendors'
ANSI C compilers) and a "make" program.</p>
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<p>Mini-XML provides the following functionality:</p>
<ul>
<li>Reading and writing of UTF-8 encoded XML files.</li>
<li>Data is stored in a linked-list tree structure,
preserving the XML data hierarchy.</li>
<li>Supports arbitrary element names, attributes, and
attribute values with no preset limits, just available
memory.</li>
<li>Supports integer, real, opaque ("cdata"), and text
data types in "leaf" nodes.</li>
<li>Functions for creating and managing trees of data.</li>
<li>"Find" and "walk" functions for easily locating and
navigating trees of data.</li>
</ul>
<p>Mini-XML doesn't do validation or other types of processing
on the data based upon schema files or other sources of
definition information, nor does it support character entities
other than those required by the XML specification. Also, since
Mini-XML does not support the UTF-16 encoding, it is technically
not a conforming XML consumer/client.</p>
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<h2>Building Mini-XML</h2>
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<p>Mini-XML comes with an autoconf-based configure script; just
type the following command to get things going:</p>
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<pre>
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./configure
</pre>
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<p>The default install prefix is /usr/local, which can be
overridden using the --prefix option:</p>
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<pre>
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./configure --prefix=/foo
</pre>
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<p>Once you have configured the software, type "make" to do the
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build and then run the test program to verify that things are
working, as follows:</p>
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<pre>
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make
./testmxml test.xml
</pre>
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<h2>Installing Mini-XML</h2>
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<p>The "install" target will install Mini-XML in the lib and
include directories:</p>
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<pre>
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make install
</pre>
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<p>Once you have installed it, use the "-lmxml" option to link
your application against it.</p>
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<h2>Documentation</h2>
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<p>The documentation is currently just in this page. At some
point I'll probably do some proper documentation, but for now
just read here and look at the <tt><a
href="testmxml.c">testmxml.c</a></tt> source file for an
example of reading and printing the contents of an XML file to
stdout.</p>
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<p>Mini-XML provides a single header file which you include:</p>
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<pre>
<a href="mxml.h">#include &lt;mxml.h></a>
</pre>
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<p>Nodes are defined by the <tt>mxml_node_t</tt> structure; the
<tt>type</tt> member defines the node type (element, integer,
opaque, real, or text) which determines which value you want to
look at in the <tt>value</tt> union. New nodes can be created
using the <tt>mxmlNewElement()</tt>, <tt>mxmlNewInteger()</tt>,
<tt>mxmlNewOpaque()</tt>, <tt>mxmlNewReal()</tt>, and
<tt>mxmlNewText()</tt> functions. Only elements can have child
nodes, and the top node must be an element, usually "?xml".</p>
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<p>You load an XML file using the <tt>mxmlLoadFile()</tt> function:</p>
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<pre>
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FILE *fp;
mxml_node_t *tree;
fp = fopen("filename.xml", "r");
tree = mxmlLoadFile(NULL, fp, MXML_NO_CALLBACK);
fclose(fp);
</pre>
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<p>Similarly, you save an XML file using the <tt>mxmlSaveFile()</tt>
function:</p>
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<pre>
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FILE *fp;
mxml_node_t *tree;
fp = fopen("filename.xml", "w");
mxmlSaveFile(tree, fp, MXML_NO_CALLBACK);
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fclose(fp);
</pre>
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<p>You can find a named element/node using the
<tt>mxmlFindElement()</tt> function:</p>
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<pre>
mxml_node_t *node = mxmlFindElement(tree, tree, "name", "attr",
"value", MXML_DESCEND);
</pre>
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<p>The <tt>name</tt>, <tt>attr</tt>, and <tt>value</tt>
arguments can be passed as <tt>NULL</tt> to act as wildcards,
e.g.:</p>
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<pre>
/* Find the first "a" element */
node = mxmlFindElement(tree, tree, "a", NULL, NULL, MXML_DESCEND);
/* Find the first "a" element with "href" attribute */
node = mxmlFindElement(tree, tree, "a", "href", NULL, MXML_DESCEND);
/* Find the first "a" element with "href" to a URL */
node = mxmlFindElement(tree, tree, "a", "href",
"http://www.easysw.com/~mike/mxml/", MXML_DESCEND);
/* Find the first element with a "src" attribute*/
node = mxmlFindElement(tree, tree, NULL, "src", NULL, MXML_DESCEND);
/* Find the first element with a "src" = "foo.jpg" */
node = mxmlFindElement(tree, tree, NULL, "src", "foo.jpg", MXML_DESCEND);
</pre>
<p>You can also iterate with the same function:</p>
<pre>
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mxml_node_t *node;
for (node = mxmlFindElement(tree, tree, "name", NULL, NULL, MXML_DESCEND);
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node != NULL;
node = mxmlFindElement(node, tree, "name", NULL, NULL, MXML_DESCEND))
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{
... do something ...
}
</pre>
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<p>Finally, once you are done with the XML data, use the
<tt>mxmlDelete()</tt> function to recursively free the memory
that is used for a particular node or the entire tree:</p>
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<pre>
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mxmlDelete(tree);
</pre>
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<h2>Getting Help and Reporting Problems</h2>
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<p>You can email me at "mxml <i>at</i> easysw <i>dot</i> com" to
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report problems and/or ask for help. Just don't expect an
instant response, as I get a <i>lot</i> of email...</p>
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<h2>Legal Stuff</h2>
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<p>The Mini-XML library is Copyright 2003 by Michael Sweet.</p>
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<p>This library is free software; you can redistribute it
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and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU Library General
Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation;
either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any
later version.</p>
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<p>This library is distributed in the hope that it will be
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useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied
warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR
PURPOSE. See the GNU Library General Public License for
more details.</p>
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<p>You should have received a copy of the GNU Library General
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Public License along with this library; if not, write to the
Free Software Foundation, Inc., 675 Mass Ave, Cambridge, MA
02139, USA.</p>
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</body>
</html>