README
1
2 Expat, Release 1.95.7
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
95The unit and regression tests for Expat require the "check" library on
96Unix; more information is available at http://check.sourceforge.net/,
97and downloadable packages are available from the library's project
98page on SourceForge: http://sourceforge.net/projects/check/. You do
99not need to install the check library to build and use Expat, only to
100build and run Expat's test suite.
101
102When using Expat with a project using autoconf for configuration, you
103can use the probing macro in conftools/expat.m4 to determine how to
104include Expat. See the comments at the top of that file for more
105information.
106
107A reference manual is available in the file doc/reference.html in this
108distribution.
109
110The homepage for this project is http://www.libexpat.org/. There
111are links there to connect you to the bug reports page. If you need
112to report a bug when you don't have access to a browser, you may also
113send a bug report by email to expat-bugs@mail.libexpat.org.
114
115Discussion related to the direction of future expat development takes
116place on expat-discuss@mail.libexpat.org. Archives of this list and
117other Expat-related lists may be found at:
118
119 http://mail.libexpat.org/mailman-21/listinfo/
120