XML Parser for PL/SQL Specifications

These are the Oracle XML Parser for PL/SQL specifications:

• Supports validation and non-validation modes

• Includes built-in error recovery until fatal error

• Supports the W3C XML 1.0 Recommendation

• Supports the W3C XSL-T Final Working Draft

This PL/SQL implementation of the XML processor (or parser) follows the W3C XML specification (rev REC-xml-19980210) and included the required behavior of an XML processor in terms of how it must read XML data and the information it must provide to the application.

XML Parser for PL/SQL: Default Behavior

The following is the default behavior for this PLSQL XML parser:

• A parse tree which can be accessed by DOM APIs is built

• The parser is validating if a DTD is found, otherwise it is non-validating

• Errors are not recorded unless an error log is specified; however, an application error will be raised if parsing fails

The types and methods described in this document are made available by the PLSQL package xmlparser.

• Integrated Document Object Model (DOM) Level 1.0 API

Supported Character Set Encodings

Supports documents in the following Oracle database encodings:

• BIG 5

• EBCDIC-CP-*

• EUC-JP

• EUC-KR

• GB2312

• ISO-2022-JP

• ISO-2022-KR

• ISO-8859-1to -9

• KOI8-R

• Shift_JIS

• US-ASCII

• UTF-8

Default:

UTF-8 is the default encoding if none is specified. Any other ASCII or EBCDIC based encodings that are supported by the Oracle 8i database may be used.

Requirements

Oracle8i database with the Java option enabled.

Online Documentation

Documentation for Oracle XML Parser for PL/SQL is located in the doc directory in your install area and also in Oracle8i XML Reference.

Release Specific Notes

The Oracle XML parser for PL/SQL is an early adopter release and is written in PL/SQL and Java. It will check if an XML document is well-formed and, optionally, if it is valid. The parser will construct an object tree which can be accessed via PLSQL interfaces.

Standards Conformance

The parser conforms to the following standards:

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

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

The parser currently does not currently have SAX or Namespace support. These will be made available in a future version.

Error Recovery

The parser also provides error recovery. It will recover from most errors and continue processing until a fatal error is encountered.

Important note: The contents of both the Windows and UNIX versions are identical. They are simply archived differently for operating system compatibility and your convenience.