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 21, "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 Oracle8i 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.

Release Specific Notes

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

Oracle XML Parser for C is an early beta release and 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. Neither interface is 100% complete in this release.

Standards Conformance

The XML Parser for C 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/

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

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