The XSLT C library for Gnome

libxslt

• Introduction
• Documentation
• Reporting bugs and getting help
• how to help
• Downloads
• News
• The xsltproc command
• The programming API

Introduction

This document describes libxslt, the XSLT C library developped for the Gnome project.

Here are some key points about libxslt:

• Libxslt is a C implementation
• Libxslt is based on libxml for XML parsing, tree manipulation and XPath support
• It is written in plain C, making as few assumptions as possible, and sticking closely to ANSI C/POSIX for easy embedding. Should works on Linux/Unix/Windows.
• This library is released under the GNU LGPL. If you are not happy with this, drop me a mail.

Documentation

There are some on-line resources about using libxml:

1. Check the API documentation automatically extracted from code comments (using gtk doc).
2. Look at the mailing-list archive.

Reporting bugs and getting help

Well, bugs or missing features are always possible, and I will make a point of fixing them in a timely fashion. The best way to report a bug is to use the Gnome bug tracking database (make sure to use the "libxslt" module name). I look at reports there regularly and it's good to have a reminder when a bug is still open. Check the instructions on reporting bugs and be sure to specify that the bug is for the package libxslt.

There is also a mailing-list xml@rpmfind.net for libxml and libxslt, with an on-line archive. To subscribe to this majordomo based list, send a mail message to majordomo@rpmfind.net with "subscribe xml" in the content of the message.

Alternatively, you can just send the bug to the xml@rpmfind.net list, if it's really libxml related I will approve it..

Of course, bugs reports with a suggested patch for fixing them will probably be processed faster.

If you're looking for help, a quick look at the list archive may actually provide the answer, I usually send source samples when answering libxml usage questions. The auto-generated documentation is not as polished as I would like (I need to learn more about Docbook), but it's a good starting point.

How to help

You can help the project in various ways, the best thing to do first is to subscribe to the mailing-list as explained before, check the archives and the Gnome bug database::

1. provide patches when you find problems
2. provide the diffs when you port libxslt to a new platform. They may not be integrated in all cases but help pinpointing portability problems and
3. provice documentation fixes (either as patches to the code comments or as HTML diffs).
4. provide new documentations pieces (translations, examples, etc ...)
5. Check the TODO file and try to close one of the items
6. take one of the points raised in the archive or the bug database and provide a fix. Get in touch with me before to avoid synchronization problems and check that the suggested fix will fit in nicely :-)

Downloads

The latest versions of libxslt can be found on rpmfind.net or on the Gnome FTP server either as a source archive or RPM packages. (NOTE that you need both the libxml2 and libxml2-devel packages installed to compile applications using libxml.)

Contribs:

I do accept external contributions, especially if compiling on another platform, get in touch with me to upload the package. I will keep them in the contrib directory

Libxslt is also available from CVS:

• The Gnome CVS base. Check the Gnome CVS Tools page; the CVS module is libxslt.

News

CVS only : check the Changelog file for a really accurate description

0.2.0: Feb 15 2000

• second beta version, released at the same time as libxml2-2.3.1
• getting close to feature completion, lot of bug fixes, some in the HTML and XPath support of libxml
• start becoming usable for real work. This version can now regenerate the XML 2e HTML from the original XML sources and the associated stylesheets (in section I of the XML REC)
• Still misses extension element/function/prefixes support. Support of key() and document() is not complete

0.1.0: Feb 8 2000

• first beta version, released at the same time as libxml2-2.3.0
• lots of bug fixes, first "testing" version, but incomplete

0.0.1: Jan 25 2000

• first alpha version released at the same time as libxml2-2.2.12
• Framework in place, should work on simple examples, but far from being feature complete

The xsltproc command

This program is the simplest way to use libxslt from the command line, it takes as first argument the path or URL to an XSLT stylesheet. the next arguments are filenames or URIs of the inputs to be processed. The output of the processing is redirected on the standard output.

The programming API

@@TODO

check the generated pages and the source of xsltproc.c, basically done in a few steps:

1. configure the parser for XSLT:

   xmlSubstituteEntitiesDefault(1);

   xmlLoadExtDtdDefaultValue = 1;

2. parse the stylesheet with xsltParseStylesheetFile()
3. parse the document with xmlParseFile()
4. apply the stylesheet using xsltApplyStylesheet()
5. save the result using xsltSaveResultToFile() if needed set xmlIndentTreeOutput to 1

Steps 2,3, and 5 will probably need to be changed depending on you processing needs and environment for example if reading/saving from/to memory

Contributions

• Bjorn Reese is the author of the number support

Daniel Veillard

$Id: xslt.html,v 1.5 2001/02/15 16:43:12 veillard Exp $