# expat - XML Parser Toolkit

### Version 19990728

Copyright (c) 1998, 1999 James Clark. Expat is subject to the Mozilla Public License Version 1.1. Alternatively you may use expat under the GNU General Public License instead. Please contact me if you wish to negotiate an alternative license.

This is a test version of expat which adds support for parsing external DTDs and parameter entities. Compiling with -DXML_DTD enables this support. There's a new `-p` option for xmlwf which will cause it to process external DTDs and parameter entities; this implies the `-x` option. See the comment above `XML_SetParamEntityParsing` in `xmlparse.h` for the API addition that enables this.

Expat is an XML 1.0 parser written in C. It aims to be fully conforming. It is currently not a validating XML processor. The current production version of expat can be downloaded from ftp://ftp.jclark.com/pub/xml/expat.zip.

The directory `xmltok` contains a low-level library for tokenizing XML. The interface is documented in `xmltok/xmltok.h`.

The directory `xmlparse` contains an XML parser library which is built on top of the `xmltok` library. The interface is documented in `xmlparse/xmlparse.h`. The directory `sample` contains a simple example program using this interface; `sample/build.bat` is a batch file to build the example using Visual C++.

The directory `xmlwf` contains the `xmlwf` application, which uses the `xmlparse` library. The arguments to `xmlwf` are one or more files which are each to be checked for well-formedness. An option `-d dir` can be specified; for each well-formed input file the corresponding canonical XML will be written to `dir/f`, where `f` is the filename (without any path) of the input file. A `-x` option will cause references to external general entities to be processed. A `-s` option will make documents that are not standalone cause an error (a document is considered standalone if either it is intrinsically standalone because it has no external subset and no references to parameter entities in the internal subset or it is declared as standalone in the XML declaration).

The `bin` directory contains Win32 executables. The `lib` directory contains Win32 import libraries.

Answers to some frequently asked questions about expat can be found in the expat FAQ.