Expat, Release 2.0.0

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 2.52 or newer and libtool 1.4 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

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 rather than the default UTF-8, follow these

instructions:

        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).

        4. Run "make installlib" (which installs the library only).

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/