libxml2dom

The libxml2dom package provides a traditional DOM wrapper around the Python bindings for libxml2. In contrast to the standard libxml2 bindings, libxml2dom provides an API reminiscent of minidom, pxdom and other Python-based and Python-related XML toolkits. Performance is fairly respectable since libxml2dom makes direct use of libxml2mod - the low-level wrapping of libxml2 for Python. Moreover, serialisation of documents is much faster than many other toolkits because libxml2dom can make direct use of libxml2 rather than employing Python-level mechanisms to visit and serialise nodes.

Copyright and Licence

For reasons of consistency, libxml2dom uses the same MIT-style licence as libxml2. See the file COPYING.txt in the docs directory within the source code distribution.

Installation

Given the availability of libxml2, libxml2dom only needs to reside on the PYTHONPATH and can be installed using the setup.py script provided:

python setup.py install

Dependencies and Installation Issues

The following descriptions identify dependencies and describe appropriate installation issues with each dependency:

libxml2 2.6.16

Building libxml2 from source and configuring the Python bindings can be done as follows:

cd libxml2-2.6.16
./configure --with-python=/usr/local/bin/python
make

If you are to use an installation of Python installed outside /usr/local then specify the "prefix" accordingly. Install (possibly as root) in the usual way:

make install

Previous releases of libxml2 in the 2.6 series may work, but some bugs were observed with the previously recommended 2.6.0 and these may not have been fixed until 2.6.16 or slightly earlier.

Issues

The patches directory in the source code distribution contains a patch against libxml2 2.5.7 which resolves an issue exposed by libxml2dom. Although it is recommended that later releases of libxml2 are used instead, the source code distribution of libxml2 2.5.7 can be patched as follows:

patch -p0 < libxml2dom/patches/libxml2/libxml.c.diff

The command should be run outside/above the libxml2-2.5.7 directory, and the stated path should be adjusted accordingly.

Python 2.2

Python releases from 2.2 onwards should be compatible with libxml2dom. The principal requirement from such releases is the new-style class support which permits the use of properties in the libxml2dom implementation, thus simplifying the code somewhat.

Changelog

New in libxml2dom 0.2.1

• Moved libxml2macro script to the tools directory.
• Added getElementsByTagNameNS.
• Added HTML parsing support.
• Improved some of the API documentation.

New in libxml2dom 0.2

• Adopted libxml2macro code within the libxml2dom classes, removing any dependencies on the libxml2 module - this makes everything much faster and virtually removes any necessity to use libxml2macro.
• Improved attribute and document node handling.
• Introduced document reference management.
• Introduced NodeList wrapper objects.

New in libxml2dom 0.1.3

• Fixed createElement.
• Introduced experimental libxml2macro tools, tests and libraries.

New in libxml2dom 0.1.2

• Fixed getAttributeNode and getAttributeNodeNS.
• Added comment node creation.
• Fixed empty namespace usage with elements and attributes.
• Introduced usage of the libxml2 file and memory parsing features.
• Introduced suppression of DTD retrieval and validation as the default behaviour.
• Added experimental XPath method support.

New in libxml2dom 0.1.1

• Fixed text node creation.
• Fixed setAttributeNS.
• Added encoding parameters to convenience methods.
• Added the missing previousSibling property.
• Added release number to the package.