README revision 104349
1 2 Expat, Release 1.95.5 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 executalbes, 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 2.52 or newer and libtool 1.4 or newer. Run the script like 29this: 30 31 ./buildconf.sh 32 33Once this has been done, follow the same instructions as for building 34from a source distribution. 35 36To build Expat from a source distribution, you first run the 37configuration shell script in the top level distribution directory: 38 39 ./configure 40 41There are many options which you may provide to configure (which you 42can discover by running configure with the --help option). But the 43one of most interest is the one that sets the installation directory. 44By default, the configure script will set things up to install 45libexpat into /usr/local/lib, expat.h into /usr/local/include, and 46xmlwf into /usr/local/bin. If, for example, you'd prefer to install 47into /home/me/mystuff/lib, /home/me/mystuff/include, and 48/home/me/mystuff/bin, you can tell configure about that with: 49 50 ./configure --prefix=/home/me/mystuff 51 52After running the configure script, the "make" command will build 53things and "make install" will install things into their proper 54location. Note that you need to have write permission into the 55directories into which things will be installed. 56 57If you are interested in building Expat to provide document 58information in UTF-16 rather than the default UTF-8, following these 59instructions: 60 61 1. For UTF-16 output as unsigned short (and version/error 62 strings as char), run: 63 64 ./configure CPPFLAGS=-DXML_UNICODE 65 66 For UTF-16 output as wchar_t (incl. version/error strings), 67 run: 68 69 ./configure CFLAGS="-g -O2 -fshort-wchar" \ 70 CPPFLAGS=-DXML_UNICODE_WCHAR_T 71 72 2. Edit the MakeFile, changing: 73 74 LIBRARY = libexpat.la 75 76 to: 77 78 LIBRARY = libexpatw.la 79 80 (Note the additional "w" in the library name.) 81 82 3. Run "make buildlib" (which builds the library only). 83 84 4. Run "make installlib" (which installs the library only). 85 86Note for Solaris users: The "ar" command is usually located in 87"/usr/ccs/bin", which is not in the default PATH. You will need to 88add this to your path for the "make" command, and probably also switch 89to GNU make (the "make" found in /usr/ccs/bin does not seem to work 90properly -- appearantly it does not understand .PHONY directives). If 91you're using ksh or bash, use this command to build: 92 93 PATH=/usr/ccs/bin:$PATH make 94 95When using Expat with a project using autoconf for configuration, you 96can use the probing macro in conftools/expat.m4 to determine how to 97include Expat. See the comments at the top of that file for more 98information. 99 100A reference manual is available in the file doc/reference.html in this 101distribution. 102 103The homepage for this project is http://www.libexpat.org/. There 104are links there to connect you to the bug reports page. If you need 105to report a bug when you don't have access to a browser, you may also 106send a bug report by email to expat-bugs@mail.libexpat.org. 107 108Discussion related to the direction of future expat development takes 109place on expat-discuss@mail.libexpat.org. Archives of this list and 110other Expat-related lists may be found at: 111 112 http://mail.libexpat.org/mailman-21/listinfo/ 113