E
XDK for C: Specifications and Cheat Sheets

This appendix contains the following sections:

• XML Parser for C Specifications

• XML Parser for C Revision History

• XML Parser for C: Parser Functions

• XML Parser for C: DOM API Functions

• XML Parser for C: Namespace API Functions

• XML Parser for C: XSLT API Functions

• XML Parser for C: SAX API Functions

XML Parser for C Specifications

Oracle provides a set of XML parsers for Java, C, C++, and PL/SQL. Each of these parsers is a stand-alone XML component that parses an XML document (or a standalone DTD) so that it can be processed by an application. Library and command-line versions are provided and support the following "standards" and features:

• DOM (Document Object Model) support is provided compliant with the W3C DOM 1.0 Recommendation. These APIs permit applications to access and manipulate an XML document as a tree structure in memory. This interface is used by such applications as editors.

• SAX (Simple API for XML) support is also provided compliant with the SAX 1.0 specification. These APIs permit an application to process XML documents using an event-driven model.

• Support is also included for W3C recommendation for XML Namespaces 1.0 thereby avoiding name collisions, increasing reusability and easing application integration.

• Supports validation and non-validation modes.

• Supports W3C XML 1.0 Recommendation.

• Integrated support for W3C XSLT 1.0 Recommendation.

Validating and Non-Validating Mode Support

The XML Parser for C can parse XML in validating or non-validating modes.

• In non-validating mode, the parser verifies that the XML is well-formed and parses the data into a tree of objects that can be manipulated by the DOM API.

• In validating mode, the parser verifies that the XML is well-formed and validates the XML data against the DTD (if any).

Validation involves checking whether or not the attribute names and element tags are legal, whether nested elements belong where they are, and so on.

Example Code

See Chapter 24, "Using XML Parser for C" for example code and suggestions on how to use the XML Parser for C.

Online Documentation

Documentation for Oracle XML Parser for C is located in the $ORACLE_HOME/xdk/c/parser/doc directory.

Release Specific Notes

The readme.html file in the root directory of the archive contains release specific information including bug fixes, API additions, and so on.

The Oracle XML parser for C is written in C. It will check if an XML document is well-formed, and optionally validate it against a DTD. The parser will construct an object tree which can be accessed via a DOM interface or operate serially via a SAX interface.

Standards Conformance

XML Parser for C conforms to the following standards:

• The W3C recommendation for Extensible Markup Language (XML) 1.0 at http://www.w3.org/TR/1998/REC-xml-19980210

• The W3C recommendation for Document Object Model Level 1 1.0 at http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-DOM-Level-1/

• The W3C proposed recommendation for Namespaces in XML at http://www.w3.org/TR/1998/PR-xml-names-19981117

• The Simple API for XML (SAX) 1.0 at http://www.megginson.com/SAX/index.html

• The W3C Recommendation for XSL Transform 1.0 at http://www.w3.org/TR/xslt

Supported Character Set Encodings

XML Parser for C supports documents in the following encodings, in addition to the ones specified in Appendix A, "Character Sets", of Oracle9i Globalization and National Language Support Guide:

• BIG 5

• EBCDIC-CP-*

• EUC-JP

• EUC-KR

• GB2312

• ISO-2022-JP

• ISO-2022-KR

• ISO-8859-1, ISO-8859-2, ISO-8859-3,..., ISO-8859-9

• ISO-10646-UCS-2

• ISO-10646-UCS-4

• KOI8-R

• Shift_JIS

• US-ASCII

• UTF-8

• UTF-16

Default:

The default encoding is UTF-8. It is recommended that you set the default encoding explicitly if using only single byte character sets (such as US-ASCII or any of the ISO-8859 character sets) for performance up to 25% faster than with multibyte character sets, such as UTF-8.

XML Parser for C Revision History

Table E-1 lists the XML Parser for C revision history.

Table E-1 XML Parser for C: Revision History

Revision	Description
XML Parser 2.0.4.0.0 (C)	This is the first production V2 release. This changes in this release were mainly bug fixes. For the XML parser, the following bugs were fixed: 1352943 XMLPARSE() SOMETIMES CHOKES ON FILENAMES 1302311 PROBLEM WITH PARAMETER ENTITY PROCESSING 1323674 INCONSISTENT ERROR HANDLING IN THE C XML PARSER 1328871 LPXPRINTBUFFER UNCONDITIONALLY PREPENDS XML COMMENT TO OUTPUT 1349962 USING FREED MEMORY LOCATION CAUSES TLPXVNSA31.DIF oraxmldom.h was renamed to oradom.h
	For the XSLT processor, the following bugs were fixed: 1225546 USELESS ERROR MESSAGE NEEDS DETAIL 1267616 TLPXST14.DIF: REPLACE DBL_MAX WITH SBIG_ORAMAXVAL IN LPXXP.C:LPXXPSUBSTRING() 1289228 ERROR CONTEXT REQUIRED FOR DEBUGGING: FILE NAME, LINE#, FUNCTION, ETC
	1289214 XSL:CHOOSE DOESN'T WORK 1298028 XPATH CONSTRUCT NOT(POSITION()=LAST()) NOT WORKING 1298193 XPATH FUNCTIONS DON'T PROVIDE IMPLICIT TYPE CONVERSION OF PARAMS 1323665 C XML PARSER CANNOT SET BASE DIRECTORY OR URI FOR STYLESHEET PARSING 1325452 SEVERE MEMORY CONSUMPTION / LEAK IN XSLPROCESS 1333693 CHAINED TRANSFORMS WITH C XSL PROCESSOR DON'T WORK: LPX-00002
XML Parser 2.0.3.0.0 (C)	SAX memory usage: Much smaller, and flat for any input size and multiple parses (memory leaks plugged). XSLT memory usage: Improved. Validation warnings: Validity Constraint (VC) errors have been changed to warnings and do not terminate parsing. For compatibility with the old behavior (halt on warnings as well as errors), a new flag XML_FLAG_STOP_ON_WARNING (or '-W' to the xml program) has been added. Performance improvements: Switch to finite automata VC structure validation yields 10% performance gain. HTTP support: HTTP URIs are now supported; look for FTP in the next release. For other access methods, the user may define their own callbacks with the new xmlaccess() API.
Oracle XML Parser 2.0.2.0.0 (C)	XSLT improvements: Various bugs fixed in the XSLT processor; error messages are improved; xsl:number, xsl:sort, xsl:namespace-alias, xsl:decimal-format, forwards-compatible processing with xsl:version, and literal result element as stylesheet are now available; the following XSLT-specific additions to the core XPath library are now available: current(), format-number(), generate-id(), and system-property(). Bug fixes: Some problems with validation and matching of start and end tags with SAX were fixed (1227096). Also, a bug with parameter entity processing in external entities was fixed (1225219).
Oracle XML Parser 2.0.1.0.0 (C)	Performance improvements: Major performance improvement over the last, about two and a half times faster for UTF-8 parsing and about four times faster for ASCII parsing. Comparison timing against previous version for parsing (DOM) and validating various standalone files (SPARC Ultra 1 CPU time): File size Old UTF-8 New UTF-8 Speedup Old ASCII New ASCII Speedup 42K 180ms 70ms 2.6 120ms 40ms 3.0 134K 510ms 210ms 2.4 450ms 100ms 4.5 247K 980ms 400ms 2.5 690ms 180ms 3.81M 2860ms 1130ms 2.5 1820ms 380ms 4.82 7M 10550ms 4100ms 2.6 7450ms 1930ms 3.9 10.5M 42250ms 16400ms 2.6 29900ms 7800ms 3.8.
	Conformance improvements: Stricter conformance to the XML 1.0 spec yields higher scores on standard test suites (Jim Clark, Oasis,...). Lists, not arrays: Internal parser data structures are now uniformly lists; arrays have been dropped. Therefore, access is now better suited to a firstChild/nextSibling style loop instead of numChildNodes/getChildNode. DTD parsing:A new API call xmlparsedtd() is added which parses an external DTD directly, without needing an enclosing document. Used mainly by the Class Generator.
	Error reporting: Error messages are improved and more specific, with nearly twice as many as before. Error location is now described by a stack of line number/entity pairs, showing the final location of the error and intermediate inclusions (e.g. line X of file, line Y of entity). NOTE: You must use the new error message file (lpxus.msb) provided with this release; the error message file provided with earlier releases is incompatible. See below. XSL improvements: Various bugs fixed in the XSLT processor; xsl:call-template is now fully supported.
Oracle XML Parser 2.0.0.0.0 (C)	Oracle XML v2 parser is a beta release and is written in C. The main difference from the Oracle XML v1 parser is the ability to format the XML document according to a stylesheet via an integrated an XSLT processor. The XML parser will check if an XML document is well-formed, and optionally validate it against a DTD. The parser will construct an object tree which can be accessed via a DOM interface or operate serially via a SAX interface. Supported operating systems are Solaris 2.6, Linux 2.2, HP-UX 11.0, and NT 4 / Service Pack 3 (and above). Be sure to read the licensing agreement before using this product.

XML Parser for C: Parser Functions

Table E-2 lists the XML Parser for C Parser functions, a brief description, and syntax.

Table E-2 XML Parser for C: Parser Function s 

Function	Brief Description	Syntax and Comments
xmlinit	Initialize XML parser	xmlctx *xmlinit (uword *err, const oratext *encoding, void (*msghdlr)(void *msgctx, const oratext *msg, ub4 errcode), void *msgctx, const xmlsaxcb *saxcb, void *saxcbctx, const xmlmemcb *memcb, void *memcbctx, const oratext *lang);
xmlclean	Clean up memory used during parse	void xmlclean(xmlctx *ctx); For those who want to parse multiple files but would like to free the memory used for parses before the subsequent call to xmlparse() or xmlparsebuf().
xmlparse	Parse a file	uword xmlparse(xmlctx *ctx, const oratext *filename, const oratext *encoding, ub4 flags); Flag bits must be OR'd to override the default behavior of the parser. The following flag bits may be set: XML_FLAG_VALIDATE turns validation on. XML_FLAG_DISCARD_WHITESPACE discards whitespace where it appears to be insignificant. The default behavior is to not validate the input. The default behavior for whitespace processing is to be fully conformant to the XML 1.0 spec, i.e. all whitespace is reported back to the application but it is indicated which whitespace is ignorable.
xmlparsebuf	Parse a buffer	uword xmlparsebuf(xmlctx *ctx, const oratext *buffer, size_t len, const oratext *encoding, ub4 flags);
xmlterm	Shut down XML parser	uword xmlterm(xmlctx *ctx);
createDocument	Create a new document	xmlnode* createDocument(xmlctx *ctx) An XML document is always rooted in a node of type DOCUMENT_NODE-- this function creates that root node and sets it in the context.
isStandalone	Return document's standalone flag	boolean isStandalone(xmlctx *ctx) Returns the boolean value of the document's standalone flag, as specified in the <?xml?> processing instruction.

XML Parser for C: DOM API Functions

Table E-3 lists the XML Parser for C DOM API functions.

Table E-3 XML Parser for C: DOM API Functions  

Function	Brief Description
appendChild	Append child node to current node
appendData	Append character data to end of node's current data
cloneNode	Create a new node identical to the current one
createAttribute	Create an new attribute for an element node
createCDATASection	Create a CDATA_SECTION node
createComment	Create a COMMENT node
createDocumentFragment	Create a DOCUMENT_FRAGMENT node
createElement	Create an ELEMENT node
createEntityReference	Create an ENTITY_REFERENCE node
createProcessingInstruction	Create a PROCESSING_INSTRUCTION (PI) node
createTextNode	Create a TEXT node
deleteData	Remove substring from a node's character data
getAttrName	Return an attribute's name
getAttrSpecified	Return value of attribute's specified flag [DOM getSpecified]
getAttrValue	Return the value of an attribute
getAttribute	Return the value of an attribute
getAttributeIndex	Return an element's attribute given its index
getAttributeNode	Get an element's attribute node given its name [DOM getName]
getAttributes	Return array of element's attributes
getCharData	Return character data for a TEXT node [DOM getData]
getCharLength	Return length of TEXT node's character data [DOM getLength]
getChildNode	Return indexed node from array of nodes [DOM item]
getChildNodes	Return array of node's children
getContentModel	Returns the content model for an element from the DTD [DOM extension]
getDocument	Return top-level DOCUMENT node [DOM extension]
getDocumentElemen	Return highest-level (root) ELEMENT node
getDocType	Returns current DTD
getDocTypeEntities	Returns array of DTD's general entities
getDocTypeName	Returns name of DTD
getDocTypeNotations	Returns array of DTD's notations
getElementsByTagName	Returns list of elements with matching name
getEntityNotation	Returns an entity's NDATA [DOM getNotation]
getEntityPubID	Returns an entity's public ID [DOM getPublicId]
getEntitySysID	Returns an entity's system ID [DOM getSystemId]
getFirstChild	Returns the first child of a node
getImplementation	Returns DOM-implementation structure (if defined)
getLastChild	Returns the last child of a node
getModifier	Returns a content model node's '?', '*', or '+' modifier [DOM extension]
getNextSibling	Returns a node's next sibling
getNamedItem	Returns the named node from a list of nodes
getNodeMapLength	Returns number of entries in a NodeMap [DOM getLength]
getNodeName	Returns a node's name
getNodeType	Returns a node's type code (enumeration)
getNodeValue	Returns a node's "value", its character data
getNotationPubID	Returns a notation's public ID [DOM getPublicId]
getNotationSysID	Returns a notation's system ID [DOM getSystemId]
getOwnerDocument	Returns the DOCUMENT node containing the given node
getPIData	Returns a processing instruction's data [DOM getData]
getPITarget	Returns a processing instruction's target [DOM getTarget]
getParentNode	Returns a node's parent node
getPreviousSibling	Returns a node's "previous" sibling
getTagName	Returns a node's "tagname", same as name for now
hasAttributes	Determines if element node has attributes [DOM extension]
hasChildNodes	Determines if node has children
hasFeature	Determines if DOM implementation supports a specific feature
insertBefore	Inserts a new child node before the given reference node
insertData	Inserts new character data into a node's existing data
isStandalone	Determines if document is standalone [DOM extension]
nodeValid	Validates a node against the current DTD [DOM extension]
normalize	Normalize a node by merging adjacent TEXT nodes
numAttributes	Returns number of element node's attributes [DOM extension]
numChildNodes	Returns number of node's children [DOM extension]
removeAttribute	Removes an element's attribute given its names
removeAttributeNode	Removes an element's attribute given its pointer
removeChild	Removes a node from its parents list of children
removeNamedItem	Removes a node from a list of nodes given its name
replaceChild	Replaces one node with another
replaceData	Replaces a substring of a node's character data with another string setAttribute Sets (adds or replaces) a new attribute for an element node given the attribute's name and value setAttributeNode Sets (adds or replaces) a new attribute for an element node given a pointer to the new attribute
setNamedItem	Sets (adds or replaces) a new node in a parent's list of children
setNodeValue	Sets a node's "value" (character data)
setPIData	Sets a processing instruction's data [DOM setData]

XML Parser for C: Namespace API Functions

Table E-4 lists the XML Parser for C, Namespace functions.

Table E-4 XML Parser for C: Namespace API Functions

Function	Brief Description
getAttrLocal(xmlattr *attrs)	Returns attribute local name
getAttrNamespace(xmlattr *attr)	Returns attribute namespace (URI)
getAttrPrefix(xmlattr *attr)	Returns attribute prefix
getAttrQualifiedName(xmlattr *attr)	Returns attribute fully qualified name
getNodeLocal(xmlnode *node)	Returns node local name
getNodeNamespace(xmlnode *node)	Returns node namespace (URI)
getNodePrefix(xmlnode *node)	Returns node prefix
getNodeQualifiedName(xmlnode *node)	Returns node qualified name

XML Parser for C: XSLT API Functions

Table E-5 lists the XML Parser for C, XSLT functions.

Table E-5 XML Parser for C: XSLT API Functions

Function	Brief Description
xslprocess() xslprocess(xmlctx *docctx, xmlctx *xslctx, xmlctx *resctx, xmlnode **result)	Processes XSL Stylesheet with XML document source and returns success or an error code.

XML Parser for C: SAX API Functions

Table E-6 lists the XML Parser for C, SAX API functions.

Table E-6 XML Parser for C: SAX API Functions

SAX Function	Brief Description
characters(void *ctx, const oratext *ch, size_t len)	Receive notification of character data inside an element.
endDocument(void *ctx)	Receive notification of the end of the document.
endElement(void *ctx, const oratext *name)	Receive notification of the end of an element.
ignorableWhitespace(void *ctx, const oratext *ch, size_t len)	Receive notification of ignorable whitespace in element content.
notationDecl(void *ctx, const oratext *name, const oratext *publicId, const oratext *systemId)	Receive notification of a notation declaration.
processingInstruction(void *ctx, const oratext *target, const oratext *data)	Receive notification of a processing instruction.
startDocument(void *ctx)	Receive notification of the beginning of the document.
startElement(void *ctx, const oratext *name, const struct xmlattrs *attrs)	Receive notification of the start of an element.
unparsedEntityDecl(void *ctx, const oratext *name, const oratext *publicId, const oratext *systemId, const oratext *notationName)	Receive notification of an unparsed entity declaration.
Non-SAX Callback Functions
nsStartElement(void *ctx, const oratext *qname, const oratext *local, const oratext *namespace, const struct xmlattrs *attrs)	Receive notification of the start of a namespace for an element.