| |
| Expat, Release 2.1.0 |
| |
| This is Expat, a C library for parsing XML, written by James Clark. |
| 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_win32bin 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. |
| |
| Versions of Expat that have an odd minor version (the middle number in |
| the release above), are development releases and should be considered |
| as beta software. Releases with even minor version numbers are |
| intended to be production grade software. |
| |
| If you are building Expat from a check-out from the CVS 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 - e.g. as part of |
| a Linux distribution - 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"): |
| |
| 1. For UTF-16 output as unsigned short (and version/error |
| strings as char), run: |
| |
| ./configure CPPFLAGS=-DXML_UNICODE |
| |
| For UTF-16 output as wchar_t (incl. version/error strings), |
| run: |
| |
| ./configure CFLAGS="-g -O2 -fshort-wchar" \ |
| CPPFLAGS=-DXML_UNICODE_WCHAR_T |
| |
| 2. Edit the MakeFile, changing: |
| |
| LIBRARY = libexpat.la |
| |
| to: |
| |
| LIBRARY = libexpatw.la |
| |
| (Note the additional "w" in the library name.) |
| |
| 3. Run "make buildlib" (which builds the library only). |
| Or, to save step 2, run "make buildlib LIBRARY=libexpatw.la". |
| |
| 4. Run "make installlib" (which installs the library only). |
| Or, if step 2 was omitted, run "make 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=$(INSTALL_ROOT), even if DESTDIR eventually is defined in the |
| environment, because variable-setting priority is |
| 1) commandline |
| 2) in-makefile |
| 3) environment |
| |
| Note: This only applies to the Expat library itself, building UTF-16 versions |
| of xmlwf and the tests is currently not supported. |
| |
| Note for Solaris users: The "ar" command is usually located in |
| "/usr/ccs/bin", which is not in the default PATH. You will need to |
| add this to your path for the "make" command, and probably also switch |
| to GNU make (the "make" found in /usr/ccs/bin does not seem to work |
| properly -- appearantly it does not understand .PHONY directives). If |
| you're using ksh or bash, use this command to build: |
| |
| PATH=/usr/ccs/bin:$PATH make |
| |
| 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. |
| |
| The homepage for this project is http://www.libexpat.org/. There |
| are links there to connect you to the bug reports page. If you need |
| to report a bug when you don't have access to a browser, you may also |
| send a bug report by email to expat-bugs@mail.libexpat.org. |
| |
| Discussion related to the direction of future expat development takes |
| place on expat-discuss@mail.libexpat.org. Archives of this list and |
| other Expat-related lists may be found at: |
| |
| http://mail.libexpat.org/mailman/listinfo/ |