Introduction

This programmers manual describes Mini-XML version 2.6, a small XML parsing library that you can use to read and write XML data files in your C and C++ applications.

Mini-XML was initially developed for the Gutenprint project to replace the rather large and unwieldy libxml2 library with something substantially smaller and easier-to-use. It all began one morning in June of 2003 when Robert posted the following sentence to the developer's list:

It's bad enough that we require libxml2, but rolling our own XML parser is a bit more than we can handle.

I then replied with:

Given the limited scope of what you use in XML, it should be trivial to code a mini-XML API in a few hundred lines of code.

I took my own challenge and coded furiously for two days to produced the initial public release of Mini-XML, total lines of code: 696. Robert promptly integrated Mini-XML into Gutenprint and removed libxml2.

Thanks to lots of feedback and support from various developers, Mini-XML has evolved since then to provide a more complete XML implementation and now stands at a whopping 3,441 lines of code, compared to 103,893 lines of code for libxml2 version 2.6.9.

Aside from Gutenprint, Mini-XML is used for the following projects/software applications:

Please email me (mxml @ easysw . com) if you would like your project added or removed from this list, or if you have any comments/quotes you would like me to publish about your experiences with Mini-XML.

Organization of This Document

This manual is organized into the following chapters and appendices:

Chapter 1, "Building, Installing, and Packaging Mini-XML", provides compilation, installation, and packaging instructions for Mini-XML.
Chapter 2, "Getting Started with Mini-XML", shows how to use the Mini-XML library in your programs.
Chapter 3, "More Mini-XML Programming Techniques", shows additional ways to use the Mini-XML library.
Chapter 4, "Using the mxmldoc Utility ", describes how to use the mxmldoc(1) program to generate software documentation.
Appendix A, "Mini-XML License", provides the terms and conditions for using and distributing Mini-XML.
Appendix B, "Release Notes", lists the changes in each release of Mini-XML.
Appendix C, "Library Reference ", contains a complete reference for Mini-XML, generated by mxmldoc .
Appendix D, "XML Schema", shows the XML schema used for the XML files produced by mxmldoc.

Notation Conventions

Various font and syntax conventions are used in this guide. Examples and their meanings and uses are explained below:

mxmldoc mxmldoc(1): The names of commands; the first mention of a command or function in a chapter is followed by a manual page section number.
/var /etc/hosts: File and directory names.
Request ID is Printer-123: Screen output.
lp -d printer filename ENTER: Literal user input; special keys like ENTER are in ALL CAPS.
12.3: Numbers in the text are written using the period (.) to indicate the decimal point.

Abbreviations

The following abbreviations are used throughout this manual:

Gb: Gigabytes, or 1073741824 bytes
kb: Kilobytes, or 1024 bytes
Mb: Megabytes, or 1048576 bytes
UTF-8, UTF-16: Unicode Transformation Format, 8-bit or 16-bit
W3C: World Wide Web Consortium
XML: Extensible Markup Language

Other References

The Unicode Standard, Version 4.0, Addison-Wesley, ISBN 0-321-18578-1: The definition of the Unicode character set which is used for XML.
Extensible Markup Language (XML) 1.0 (Third Edition): The XML specification from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)

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