# The XML C library for Gnome ## News

Main Menu
Home Introduction FAQ Documentation Reporting bugs and getting help How to help Downloads News XML XSLT Python and bindings libxml architecture The tree output The SAX interface Validation & DTDs Memory Management Encodings support I/O Interfaces Catalog support The parser interfaces Entities or no entities Namespaces Upgrading 1.x code Thread safety DOM Principles A real example Contributions Tutorial flat page, stylesheet
API Indexes
Alphabetic Constructors Functions/Types Modules Symbols
Related links
Mail archive XSLT libxslt DOM gdome2 XML-DSig xmlsec FTP Windows binaries Solaris binaries Pascal bindings Bug Tracker
- ### CVS only : check the Changelog file for a really accurate description Items not finished and worked on, get in touch with the list if you want to test those Finishing up XML Schemas and XInclude ### 2.4.22: May 27 2002 a number of bug fixes: configure scripts, base handling, parser, memory usage, HTML parser, XPath, documentation (Christian Cornelssen), indentation, URI parsing Optimizations for XMLSec, fixing and making public some of the network protocol handlers (Aleksey) performance patch from Gary Pennington Charles Bozeman provided date and time support for XML Schemas datatypes ### 2.4.21: Apr 29 2002 This release is both a bug fix release and also contains the early XML Schemas structures and datatypes code, beware, all interfaces are likely to change, there is huge holes, it is clearly a work in progress and don't even think of putting this code in a production system, it's actually not compiled in by default. The real fixes are: a couple of bugs or limitations introduced in 2.4.20 patches for Borland C++ and MSC by Igor some fixes on XPath strings and conformance patches by Richard Jinks patch from Aleksey for the ExcC14N specification OSF/1 bug fix by Bjorn ### 2.4.20: Apr 15 2002 bug fixes: file descriptor leak, XPath, HTML output, DTD validation XPath conformance testing by Richard Jinks Portability fixes: Solaris, MPE/iX, Windows, OSF/1, python bindings, libxml.m4 ### 2.4.19: Mar 25 2002 bug fixes: half a dozen XPath bugs, Validation, ISO-Latin to UTF8 encoder portability fixes in the HTTP code memory allocation checks using valgrind, and profiling tests revamp of the Windows build and Makefiles ### 2.4.18: Mar 18 2002 bug fixes: tree, SAX, canonicalization, validation, portability, XPath removed the --with-buffer option it was becoming unmaintainable serious cleanup of the Python makefiles speedup patch to XPath very effective for DocBook stylesheets Fixes for Windows build, cleanup of the documentation ### 2.4.17: Mar 8 2002 a lot of bug fixes, including "namespace nodes have no parents in XPath" fixed/improved the Python wrappers, added more examples and more regression tests, XPath extension functions can now return node-sets added the XML Canonicalization support from Aleksey Sanin ### 2.4.16: Feb 20 2002 a lot of bug fixes, most of them were triggered by the XML Testsuite from OASIS and W3C. Compliance has been significantly improved. a couple of portability fixes too. ### 2.4.15: Feb 11 2002 Fixed the Makefiles, especially the python module ones A few bug fixes and cleanup Includes cleanup ### 2.4.14: Feb 8 2002 Change of License to the MIT License basically for integration in XFree86 codebase, and removing confusion around the previous dual-licensing added Python bindings, beta software but should already be quite complete a large number of fixes and cleanups, especially for all tree manipulations cleanup of the headers, generation of a reference API definition in XML ### 2.4.13: Jan 14 2002 update of the documentation: John Fleck and Charlie Bozeman cleanup of timing code from Justin Fletcher fixes for Windows and initial thread support on Win32: Igor and Serguei Narojnyi Cygwin patch from Robert Collins added xmlSetEntityReferenceFunc() for Keith Isdale work on xsldbg ### 2.4.12: Dec 7 2001 a few bug fixes: thread (Gary Pennington), xmllint (Geert Kloosterman), XML parser (Robin Berjon), XPointer (Danny Jamshy), I/O cleanups (robert) Eric Lavigne contributed project files for MacOS some makefiles cleanups ### 2.4.11: Nov 26 2001 fixed a couple of errors in the includes, fixed a few bugs, some code cleanups xmllint man pages improvement by Heiko Rupp updated VMS build instructions from John A Fotheringham Windows Makefiles updates from Igor ### 2.4.10: Nov 10 2001 URI escaping fix (Joel Young) added xmlGetNodePath() (for paths or XPointers generation) Fixes namespace handling problems when using DTD and validation improvements on xmllint: Morus Walter patches for --format and --encode, Stefan Kost and Heiko Rupp improvements on the --shell fixes for xmlcatalog linking pointed by Weiqi Gao fixes to the HTML parser ### 2.4.9: Nov 6 2001 fixes more catalog bugs avoid a compilation problem, improve xmlGetLineNo() ### 2.4.8: Nov 4 2001 fixed SGML catalogs broken in previous release, updated xmlcatalog tool fixed a compile errors and some includes troubles. ### 2.4.7: Oct 30 2001 exported some debugging interfaces serious rewrite of the catalog code integrated Gary Pennington thread safety patch, added configure option and regression tests removed an HTML parser bug fixed a couple of potentially serious validation bugs integrated the SGML DocBook support in xmllint changed the nanoftp anonymous login passwd some I/O cleanup and a couple of interfaces for Perl wrapper general bug fixes updated xmllint man page by John Fleck some VMS and Windows updates ### 2.4.6: Oct 10 2001 added an updated man pages by John Fleck portability and configure fixes an infinite loop on the HTML parser was removed (William) Windows makefile patches from Igor fixed half a dozen bugs reported for libxml or libxslt updated xmlcatalog to be able to modify SGML super catalogs ### 2.4.5: Sep 14 2001 Remove a few annoying bugs in 2.4.4 forces the HTML serializer to output decimal charrefs since some version of Netscape can't handle hexadecimal ones ### 1.8.16: Sep 14 2001 maintenance release of the old libxml1 branch, couple of bug and portability fixes ### 2.4.4: Sep 12 2001 added --convert to xmlcatalog, bug fixes and cleanups of XML Catalog a few bug fixes and some portability changes some documentation cleanups ### 2.4.3: Aug 23 2001 XML Catalog support see the doc New NaN/Infinity floating point code A few bug fixes ### 2.4.2: Aug 15 2001 adds xmlLineNumbersDefault() to control line number generation lot of bug fixes the Microsoft MSC projects files should now be up to date inheritance of namespaces from DTD defaulted attributes fixes a serious potential security bug added a --format option to xmllint ### 2.4.1: July 24 2001 possibility to keep line numbers in the tree some computation NaN fixes extension of the XPath API cleanup for alpha and ia64 targets patch to allow saving through HTTP PUT or POST ### 2.4.0: July 10 2001 Fixed a few bugs in XPath, validation, and tree handling. Fixed XML Base implementation, added a couple of examples to the regression tests A bit of cleanup ### 2.3.14: July 5 2001 fixed some entities problems and reduce memory requirement when substituting them lots of improvements in the XPath queries interpreter can be substantially faster Makefiles and configure cleanups Fixes to XPath variable eval, and compare on empty node set HTML tag closing bug fixed Fixed an URI reference computation problem when validating ### 2.3.13: June 28 2001 2.3.12 configure.in was broken as well as the push mode XML parser a few more fixes for compilation on Windows MSC by Yon Derek ### 1.8.14: June 28 2001 Zbigniew Chyla gave a patch to use the old XML parser in push mode Small Makefile fix ### 2.3.12: June 26 2001 lots of cleanup a couple of validation fix fixed line number counting fixed serious problems in the XInclude processing added support for UTF8 BOM at beginning of entities fixed a strange gcc optimizer bugs in xpath handling of float, gcc-3.0 miscompile uri.c (William), Thomas Leitner provided a fix for the optimizer on Tru64 incorporated Yon Derek and Igor Zlatkovic fixes and improvements for compilation on Windows MSC update of libxml-doc.el (Felix Natter) fixed 2 bugs in URI normalization code ### 2.3.11: June 17 2001 updates to trio, Makefiles and configure should fix some portability problems (alpha) fixed some HTML serialization problems (pre, script, and block/inline handling), added encoding aware APIs, cleanup of this code added xmlHasNsProp() implemented a specific PI for encoding support in the DocBook SGML parser some XPath fixes (-Infinity, / as a function parameter and namespaces node selection) fixed a performance problem and an error in the validation code fixed XInclude routine to implement the recursive behaviour fixed xmlFreeNode problem when libxml is included statically twice added --version to xmllint for bug reports ### 2.3.10: June 1 2001 fixed the SGML catalog support a number of reported bugs got fixed, in XPath, iconv detection, XInclude processing XPath string function should now handle unicode correctly ### 2.3.9: May 19 2001 Lots of bugfixes, and added a basic SGML catalog support: HTML push bugfix #54891 and another patch from Jonas Borgström some serious speed optimization again some documentation cleanups trying to get better linking on Solaris (-R) XPath API cleanup from Thomas Broyer Validation bug fixed #54631, added a patch from Gary Pennington, fixed xmlValidGetValidElements() Added an INSTALL file Attribute removal added to API: #54433 added a basic support for SGML catalogs fixed xmlKeepBlanksDefault(0) API bugfix in xmlNodeGetLang() fixed a small configure portability problem fixed an inversion of SYSTEM and PUBLIC identifier in HTML document ### 1.8.13: May 14 2001 bugfixes release of the old libxml1 branch used by Gnome ### 2.3.8: May 3 2001 Integrated an SGML DocBook parser for the Gnome project Fixed a few things in the HTML parser Fixed some XPath bugs raised by XSLT use, tried to fix the floating point portability issue Speed improvement (8M/s for SAX, 3M/s for DOM, 1.5M/s for DOM+validation using the XML REC as input and a 700MHz celeron). incorporated more Windows cleanup added xmlSaveFormatFile() fixed problems in copying nodes with entities references (gdome) removed some troubles surrounding the new validation module ### 2.3.7: April 22 2001 lots of small bug fixes, corrected XPointer Non deterministic content model validation support added xmlDocCopyNode for gdome2 revamped the way the HTML parser handles end of tags XPath: corrections of namespaces support and number formatting Windows: Igor Zlatkovic patches for MSC compilation HTML output fixes from P C Chow and William M. Brack Improved validation speed sensible for DocBook fixed a big bug with ID declared in external parsed entities portability fixes, update of Trio from Bjorn Reese ### 2.3.6: April 8 2001 Code cleanup using extreme gcc compiler warning options, found and cleared half a dozen potential problem the Eazel team found an XML parser bug cleaned up the user of some of the string formatting function. used the trio library code to provide the one needed when the platform is missing them xpath: removed a memory leak and fixed the predicate evaluation problem, extended the testsuite and cleaned up the result. XPointer seems broken ... ### 2.3.5: Mar 23 2001 Biggest change is separate parsing and evaluation of XPath expressions, there is some new APIs for this too included a number of bug fixes(XML push parser, 51876, notations, 52299) Fixed some portability issues ### 2.3.4: Mar 10 2001 Fixed bugs #51860 and #51861 Added a global variable xmlDefaultBufferSize to allow default buffer size to be application tunable. Some cleanup in the validation code, still a bug left and this part should probably be rewritten to support ambiguous content model :-\ Fix a couple of serious bugs introduced or raised by changes in 2.3.3 parser Fixed another bug in xmlNodeGetContent() Bjorn fixed XPath node collection and Number formatting Fixed a loop reported in the HTML parsing blank space are reported even if the Dtd content model proves that they are formatting spaces, this is for XML conformance ### 2.3.3: Mar 1 2001 small change in XPath for XSLT documentation cleanups fix in validation by Gary Pennington serious parsing performances improvements ### 2.3.2: Feb 24 2001 chasing XPath bugs, found a bunch, completed some TODO fixed a Dtd parsing bug fixed a bug in xmlNodeGetContent ID/IDREF support partly rewritten by Gary Pennington ### 2.3.1: Feb 15 2001 some XPath and HTML bug fixes for XSLT small extension of the hash table interfaces for DOM gdome2 implementation A few bug fixes ### 2.3.0: Feb 8 2001 (2.2.12 was on 25 Jan but I didn't kept track) Lots of XPath bug fixes Add a mode with Dtd lookup but without validation error reporting for XSLT Add support for text node without escaping (XSLT) bug fixes for xmlCheckFilename validation code bug fixes from Gary Pennington Patch from Paul D. Smith correcting URI path normalization Patch to allow simultaneous install of libxml-devel and libxml2-devel the example Makefile is now fixed added HTML to the RPM packages tree copying bugfixes updates to Windows makefiles optimization patch from Bjorn Reese ### 2.2.11: Jan 4 2001 bunch of bug fixes (memory I/O, xpath, ftp/http, ...) added htmlHandleOmittedElem() Applied Bjorn Reese's IPV6 first patch Applied Paul D. Smith patches for validation of XInclude results added XPointer xmlns() new scheme support ### 2.2.10: Nov 25 2000 Fix the Windows problems of 2.2.8 integrate OpenVMS patches better handling of some nasty HTML input Improved the XPointer implementation integrate a number of provided patches ### 2.2.9: Nov 25 2000 erroneous release :-( ### 2.2.8: Nov 13 2000 First version of XInclude support Patch in conditional section handling updated MS compiler project fixed some XPath problems added an URI escaping function some other bug fixes ### 2.2.7: Oct 31 2000 added message redirection XPath improvements (thanks TOM !) xmlIOParseDTD() added various small fixes in the HTML, URI, HTTP and XPointer support some cleanup of the Makefile, autoconf and the distribution content ### 2.2.6: Oct 25 2000: Added an hash table module, migrated a number of internal structure to those Fixed a posteriori validation problems HTTP module cleanups HTML parser improvements (tag errors, script/style handling, attribute normalization) coalescing of adjacent text nodes couple of XPath bug fixes, exported the internal API ### 2.2.5: Oct 15 2000: XPointer implementation and testsuite Lot of XPath fixes, added variable and functions registration, more tests Portability fixes, lots of enhancements toward an easy Windows build and release Late validation fixes Integrated a lot of contributed patches added memory management docs a performance problem when using large buffer seems fixed ### 2.2.4: Oct 1 2000: main XPath problem fixed Integrated portability patches for Windows Serious bug fixes on the URI and HTML code ### 2.2.3: Sep 17 2000 bug fixes cleanup of entity handling code overall review of all loops in the parsers, all sprintf usage has been checked too Far better handling of larges Dtd. Validating against DocBook XML Dtd works smoothly now. ### 1.8.10: Sep 6 2000 bug fix release for some Gnome projects ### 2.2.2: August 12 2000 mostly bug fixes started adding routines to access xml parser context options ### 2.2.1: July 21 2000 a purely bug fixes release fixed an encoding support problem when parsing from a memory block fixed a DOCTYPE parsing problem removed a bug in the function allowing to override the memory allocation routines ### 2.2.0: July 14 2000 applied a lot of portability fixes better encoding support/cleanup and saving (content is now always encoded in UTF-8) the HTML parser now correctly handles encodings added xmlHasProp() fixed a serious problem with &#38; propagated the fix to FTP client cleanup, bugfixes, etc ... Added a page about libxml Internationalization support ### 1.8.9: July 9 2000 fixed the spec the RPMs should be better fixed a serious bug in the FTP implementation, released 1.8.9 to solve rpmfind users problem ### 2.1.1: July 1 2000 fixes a couple of bugs in the 2.1.0 packaging improvements on the HTML parser ### 2.1.0 and 1.8.8: June 29 2000 1.8.8 is mostly a commodity package for upgrading to libxml2 according to new instructions. It fixes a nasty problem about &#38; charref parsing 2.1.0 also ease the upgrade from libxml v1 to the recent version. it also contains numerous fixes and enhancements: added xmlStopParser() to stop parsing improved a lot parsing speed when there is large CDATA blocs includes XPath patches provided by Picdar Technology tried to fix as much as possible DTD validation and namespace related problems output to a given encoding has been added/tested lot of various fixes ### 2.0.0: Apr 12 2000 First public release of libxml2. If you are using libxml, it's a good idea to check the 1.x to 2.x upgrade instructions. NOTE: while initially scheduled for Apr 3 the release occurred only on Apr 12 due to massive workload. The include are now located under $prefix/include/libxml (instead of $prefix/include/gnome-xml), they also are referenced by
      #include <libxml/xxx.h>
  instead of
      #include "xxx.h"
a new URI module for parsing URIs and following strictly RFC 2396 the memory allocation routines used by libxml can now be overloaded dynamically by using xmlMemSetup() The previously CVS only tool tester has been renamed xmllint and is now installed as part of the libxml2 package The I/O interface has been revamped. There is now ways to plug in specific I/O modules, either at the URI scheme detection level using xmlRegisterInputCallbacks() or by passing I/O functions when creating a parser context using xmlCreateIOParserCtxt() there is a C preprocessor macro LIBXML_VERSION providing the version number of the libxml module in use a number of optional features of libxml can now be excluded at configure time (FTP/HTTP/HTML/XPath/Debug) ### 2.0.0beta: Mar 14 2000 This is a first Beta release of libxml version 2 It's available only fromxmlsoft.org FTP, it's packaged as libxml2-2.0.0beta and available as tar and RPMs This version is now the head in the Gnome CVS base, the old one is available under the tag LIB_XML_1_X This includes a very large set of changes. From a programmatic point of view applications should not have to be modified too much, check the upgrade page Some interfaces may changes (especially a bit about encoding). the updates includes: fix I18N support. ISO-Latin-x/UTF-8/UTF-16 (nearly) seems correctly handled now Better handling of entities, especially well-formedness checking and proper PEref extensions in external subsets DTD conditional sections Validation now correctly handle entities content change structures to accommodate DOM Serious progress were made toward compliance, here are the result of the test against the OASIS testsuite (except the Japanese tests since I don't support that encoding yet). This URL is rebuilt every couple of hours using the CVS head version. ### 1.8.7: Mar 6 2000 This is a bug fix release: It is possible to disable the ignorable blanks heuristic used by libxml-1.x, a new function xmlKeepBlanksDefault(0) will allow this. Note that for adherence to XML spec, this behaviour will be disabled by default in 2.x . The same function will allow to keep compatibility for old code. Blanks in <a> </a> constructs are not ignored anymore, avoiding heuristic is really the Right Way :-\ The unchecked use of snprintf which was breaking libxml-1.8.6 compilation on some platforms has been fixed nanoftp.c nanohttp.c: Fixed '#' and '?' stripping when processing URIs ### 1.8.6: Jan 31 2000 added a nanoFTP transport module, debugged until the new version of rpmfind can use it without troubles ### 1.8.5: Jan 21 2000 adding APIs to parse a well balanced chunk of XML (production [43] content of the XML spec) fixed a hideous bug in xmlGetProp pointed by Rune.Djurhuus@fast.no Jody Goldberg <jgoldberg@home.com> provided another patch trying to solve the zlib checks problems The current state in gnome CVS base is expected to ship as 1.8.5 with gnumeric soon ### 1.8.4: Jan 13 2000 bug fixes, reintroduced xmlNewGlobalNs(), fixed xmlNewNs() all exit() call should have been removed from libxml fixed a problem with INCLUDE_WINSOCK on WIN32 platform added newDocFragment() ### 1.8.3: Jan 5 2000 a Push interface for the XML and HTML parsers a shell-like interface to the document tree (try tester --shell :-) lots of bug fixes and improvement added over XMas holidays fixed the DTD parsing code to work with the xhtml DTD added xmlRemoveProp(), xmlRemoveID() and xmlRemoveRef() Fixed bugs in xmlNewNs() External entity loading code has been revamped, now it uses xmlLoadExternalEntity(), some fix on entities processing were added cleaned up WIN32 includes of socket stuff ### 1.8.2: Dec 21 1999 I got another problem with includes and C++, I hope this issue is fixed for good this time Added a few tree modification functions: xmlReplaceNode, xmlAddPrevSibling, xmlAddNextSibling, xmlNodeSetName and xmlDocSetRootElement Tried to improve the HTML output with help from Chris Lahey ### 1.8.1: Dec 18 1999 various patches to avoid troubles when using libxml with C++ compilers the "namespace" keyword and C escaping in include files a problem in one of the core macros IS_CHAR was corrected fixed a bug introduced in 1.8.0 breaking default namespace processing, and more specifically the Dia application fixed a posteriori validation (validation after parsing, or by using a Dtd not specified in the original document) fixed a bug in ### 1.8.0: Dec 12 1999 cleanup, especially memory wise the parser should be more reliable, especially the HTML one, it should not crash, whatever the input ! Integrated various patches, especially a speedup improvement for large dataset from Carl Nygard, configure with --with-buffers to enable them. attribute normalization, oops should have been added long ago ! attributes defaulted from DTDs should be available, xmlSetProp() now does entities escaping by default. ### 1.7.4: Oct 25 1999 Lots of HTML improvement Fixed some errors when saving both XML and HTML More examples, the regression tests should now look clean Fixed a bug with contiguous charref ### 1.7.3: Sep 29 1999 portability problems fixed snprintf was used unconditionally, leading to link problems on system were it's not available, fixed ### 1.7.1: Sep 24 1999 The basic type for strings manipulated by libxml has been renamed in 1.7.1 from CHAR to xmlChar. The reason is that CHAR was conflicting with a predefined type on Windows. However on non WIN32 environment, compatibility is provided by the way of a #define . Changed another error : the use of a structure field called errno, and leading to troubles on platforms where it's a macro ### 1.7.0: Sep 23 1999 Added the ability to fetch remote DTD or parsed entities, see the nanohttp module. Added an errno to report errors by another mean than a simple printf like callback Finished ID/IDREF support and checking when validation Serious memory leaks fixed (there is now a memory wrapper module) Improvement of XPath implementation Added an HTML parser front-end Daniel Veillard