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<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"
    "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
<html>
<head>
  <title>The XSLT C library for Gnome</title>
  <meta name="GENERATOR" content="amaya 8.8.5, see http://www.w3.org/Amaya/">
  <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html">
</head>

<body bgcolor="#ffffff">
<h1 align="center">The XSLT C library for Gnome</h1>

<h1 style="text-align: center">libxslt</h1>

<p>Libxslt is the <a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xslt">XSLT</a>C
librarydeveloped for the Gnome project. XSLT itself is a an XML language to
definetransformation for XML. Libxslt is based on <a
href="http://xmlsoft.org/">libxml2</a>the XML C library developed for
theGnome project. It also implements most of the <a
href="http://www.exslt.org/">EXSLT</a>set of processor-portable
extensionsfunctions and some of Saxon's evaluate and expressions
extensions.</p>

<p>People can either embed the library in their application or use
xsltprocthe command line processing tool. This library is free software and
can bereused in commercial applications (see the <a
href="intro.html">intro</a>)</p>

<p>External documents:</p>
<ul>
  <li>John Fleck wrote <a href="tutorial/libxslttutorial.html">a tutorial
    forlibxslt</a></li>
  <li><a href="xsltproc.html">xsltproc user manual</a></li>
  <li><a href="http://xmlsoft.org/">the libxml documentation</a></li>
</ul>

<p></p>

<p>Logo designed by <a href="mailto:liyanage@access.ch">Marc Liyanage</a>.</p>

<h2><a name="Introducti">Introduction</a></h2>

<p>This document describes <a href="http://xmlsoft.org/XSLT/">libxslt</a>,the
<a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xslt">XSLT</a>C library developed for the<a
href="http://www.gnome.org/">Gnome</a>project.</p>

<p>Here are some key points about libxslt:</p>
<ul>
  <li>Libxslt is a C implementation</li>
  <li>Libxslt is based on libxml for XML parsing, tree manipulation and
    XPathsupport</li>
  <li>It is written in plain C, making as few assumptions as possible,
    andsticking closely to ANSI C/POSIX for easy embedding. Should works
    onLinux/Unix/Windows.</li>
  <li>This library is released under the <a
    href="http://www.opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.html">MITLicence</a></li>
  <li>Though not designed primarily with performances in mind, libxslt
    seemsto be a relatively fast processor.</li>
</ul>

<h2><a name="Documentat">Documentation</a></h2>

<p>There are some on-line resources about using libxslt:</p>
<ol>
  <li>Check the <a
    href="html/libxslt-lib.html#LIBXSLT-LIB">APIdocumentation</a>automatically
    extracted from code comments (using theprogram apibuild.py, developed for
    libxml, together with the xsl script'newapi.xsl' and the libxslt xsltproc
    program).</li>
  <li>Look at the <a
    href="http://mail.gnome.org/archives/xslt/">mailing-listarchive</a>.</li>
  <li>Of course since libxslt is based on libxml, it's a good idea to atleast
    read <a href="http://xmlsoft.org/">libxml description</a></li>
</ol>

<h2><a name="Reporting">Reporting bugs and getting help</a></h2>

<p>If you need help with the XSLT language itself, here are a number ofuseful
resources:</p>
<ul>
  <li>I strongly suggest to subscribe to <a
    href="http://www.mulberrytech.com/xsl/xsl-list">XSL-list</a>, check <a
    href="http://www.biglist.com/lists/xsl-list/archives/">the
    XSL-listarchives</a></li>
  <li>The <a href="http://www.dpawson.co.uk/xsl/xslfaq.html">XSL FAQ</a>.</li>
  <li>The <a
    href="http://www.nwalsh.com/docs/tutorials/xsl/xsl/slides.html">tutorial</a>written
    by Paul Grosso and Norman Walsh is a very good on-lineintrodution to the
    language.</li>
  <li>The <a
    href="http://www.zvon.org/xxl/XSLTutorial/Books/Book1/index.html">onlyZvon
    XSLT tutorial</a>details a lot of constructs with examples.</li>
  <li><a href="http://www.jenitennison.com/xslt/index.html">Jeni
    Tennison'sXSLT</a>pages provide links to a lot of answers</li>
  <li>the <a href="http://incrementaldevelopment.com/xsltrick/">Gallery
    ofXSLT Tricks</a>provides non-standard use case of XSLT</li>
  <li>And I suggest to buy Michael Kay "XSLT Programmer's Reference"
    bookpublished by <a href="http://www.wrox.com/">Wrox</a>if you plan to
    workseriously with XSLT in the future.</li>
</ul>

<p>Well, bugs or missing features are always possible, and I will make apoint
of fixing them in a timely fashion. The best way to report a bug is touse the
<a href="http://bugzilla.gnome.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=libxslt">Gnome
bugtracking database</a>(make sure to use the "libxslt" module name).
Beforefiling a bug, check the <a
href="http://bugzilla.gnome.org/buglist.cgi?product=libxslt">list of
existinglibxslt bugs</a>to make sure it hasn't already been filed. I look at
reportsthere regularly and it's good to have a reminder when a bug is still
open. Besure to specify that the bug is for the package libxslt.</p>

<p>For small problems you can try to get help on IRC, the #xml channel
onirc.gnome.org (port 6667) usually have a few person subscribed which may
help(but there is no garantee and if a real issue is raised it should go on
themailing-list for archival).</p>

<p>There is also a mailing-list <a
href="mailto:xslt@gnome.org">xslt@gnome.org</a>for libxslt, with an <a
href="http://mail.gnome.org/archives/xslt/">on-line archive</a>. To
subscribeto this list, please visit the <a
href="http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/xslt">associated Web</a>pageand
follow the instructions.</p>

<p>Alternatively, you can just send the bug to the <a
href="mailto:xslt@gnome.org">xslt@gnome.org</a>list, if it's really
libxsltrelated I will approve it.. Please do not send me mail directly
especiallyfor portability problem, it makes things really harder to track and
in somecases I'm not the best person to answer a given question, ask the
listinstead. <strong>Do not send code, I won't debug it</strong>(but patches
arereally appreciated!).</p>

<p>Please note that with the current amount of virus and SPAM, sending mailto
the list without being subscribed won't work. There is *far too manybounces*
(in the order of a thousand a day !) I cannot approve them manuallyanymore.
If your mail to the list bounced waiting for administrator approval,it is
LOST ! Repost it and fix the problem triggering the error. Also pleasenote
that <span style="color: #FF0000; background-color: #FFFFFF">emails witha
legal warning asking to not copy or redistribute freely the informationsthey
contain</span>are <strong>NOT</strong>acceptable for the mailing-list,such
mail will as much as possible be discarded automatically, and are lesslikely
to be answered if they made it to the list, <strong>DO NOT</strong>post to
the list from an email address where such legal requirements areautomatically
added, get private paying support if you can't shareinformations.</p>

<p>Check the following too <span
style="color: #E50000">beforeposting</span>:</p>
<ul>
  <li><a href="search.php">use the search engine</a>to get
    informationsrelated to your problem.</li>
  <li>make sure you are <a href="ftp://xmlsoft.org/libxslt/">using a
    recentversion</a>, and that the problem still shows up in those</li>
  <li>check the <a
    href="http://mail.gnome.org/archives/xslt/">listarchives</a>to see if the
    problem was reported already, in this casethere is probably a fix
    available, similarly check the <a
    href="http://bugzilla.gnome.org/buglist.cgi?product=libxslt">registeredopen
    bugs</a></li>
  <li>make sure you can reproduce the bug with xsltproc, a very useful
    thingto do is run the transformation with -v argument and redirect
    thestandard error to a file, then search in this file for the
    transformationlogs just preceding the possible problem</li>
  <li>Please send the command showing the error as well as the input
    andstylesheet (as an attachment)</li>
</ul>

<p>Then send the bug with associated informations to reproduce it to the <a
href="mailto:xslt@gnome.org">xslt@gnome.org</a>list; if it's really
libxsltrelated I will approve it. Please do not send mail to me directly, it
makesthings really hard to track and in some cases I am not the best person
toanswer a given question, ask on the list.</p>

<p>To <span style="color: #E50000">be really clear about support</span>:</p>
<ul>
  <li>Support or help <span style="color: #E50000">request MUST be sent tothe
    list or on bugzilla</span>in case of problems, so that the Questionand
    Answers can be shared publicly. Failing to do so carries the
    implicitmessage "I want free support but I don't want to share the
    benefits withothers" and is not welcome. I will automatically Carbon-Copy
    thexslt@gnome.org mailing list for any technical reply made about libxml2
    orlibxslt.</li>
  <li>There is <span style="color: #E50000">no garantee for support</span>,if
    your question remains unanswered after a week, repost it, making sureyou
    gave all the detail needed and the informations requested.</li>
  <li>Failing to provide informations as requested or double checking
    firstfor prior feedback also carries the implicit message "the time of
    thelibrary maintainers is less valuable than my time" and might not
    bewelcome.</li>
</ul>

<p>Of course, bugs reports with a suggested patch for fixing them
willprobably be processed faster.</p>

<p>If you're looking for help, a quick look at <a
href="http://mail.gnome.org/archives/xslt/">the list archive</a>may
actuallyprovide the answer, I usually send source samples when answering
libxsltusage questions. The <a
href="html/libxslt-lib.html#LIBXSLT-LIB">auto-generated
documentation</a>isnot as polished as I would like (I need to learn more
about Docbook), butit's a good starting point.</p>

<h2><a name="help">How to help</a></h2>

<p>You can help the project in various ways, the best thing to do first is
tosubscribe to the mailing-list as explained before, check the <a
href="http://mail.gnome.org/archives/xslt/">archives </a>and the <a
href="http://bugzilla.gnome.org/buglist.cgi?product=libxslt">Gnome
bugdatabase:</a>:</p>
<ol>
  <li>provide patches when you find problems</li>
  <li>provide the diffs when you port libxslt to a new platform. They may
    notbe integrated in all cases but help pinpointing portability
  problemsand</li>
  <li>provide documentation fixes (either as patches to the code comments
    oras HTML diffs).</li>
  <li>provide new documentations pieces (translations, examples, etc ...)</li>
  <li>Check the TODO file and try to close one of the items</li>
  <li>take one of the points raised in the archive or the bug database
    andprovide a fix. <a href="mailto:daniel@veillard.com">Get in touch with
    me</a>before to avoid synchronization problems and check that the
    suggestedfix will fit in nicely :-)</li>
</ol>

<h2><a name="Downloads">Downloads</a></h2>

<p>The latest versions of libxslt can be found on the <a
href="ftp://xmlsoft.org/libxslt/">xmlsoft.org</a>server and on mirrors (<a
href="ftp://fr.rpmfind.net/pub/libxml/">France</a>) or on the <a
href="ftp://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/MIRRORS.html">Gnome FTP server</a>as a<a
href="ftp://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/sources/libxslt/1.1/">sourcearchive</a>,
Antonin Sprinzl also provides <a href="ftp://gd.tuwien.ac.at/pub/libxml/">a
mirror in Austria</a>. (NOTE thatyou need the <a
href="http://rpmfind.net/linux/RPM/libxml2.html">libxml2</a>,<a
href="http://rpmfind.net/linux/RPM/libxml2-devel.html">libxml2-devel</a>,<a
href="http://rpmfind.net/linux/RPM/libxslt.html">libxslt</a>and <a
href="http://rpmfind.net/linux/RPM/libxslt-devel.html">libxslt-devel</a>packages
installed to compile applications using libxslt.) <a
href="mailto:igor@zlatkovic.com">Igor Zlatkovic</a>is now the maintainer
ofthe Windows port, <a
href="http://www.zlatkovic.com/projects/libxml/index.html">he
providesbinaries</a>. <a href="mailto:Gary.Pennington@sun.com">Gary
Pennington</a>provides <a href="http://garypennington.net/libxml2/">Solaris
binaries</a>.<a href="mailto:Steve.Ball@explain.com.au">Steve
Ball</a>provides <a href="http://www.explain.com.au/oss/libxml2xslt.html">Mac
Os Xbinaries</a>.</p>

<p><a name="Contribs">Contribs:</a></p>

<p>I do accept external contributions, especially if compiling on
anotherplatform, get in touch with me to upload the package. I will keep them
in the<a href="ftp://xmlsoft.org/libxml2/contribs/">contrib directory</a></p>

<p>Libxslt is also available from CVS:</p>
<ul>
  <li><p>The <a href="http://cvs.gnome.org/viewcvs/libxslt/">Gnome
    CVSbase</a>. Check the <a
    href="http://developer.gnome.org/tools/cvs.html">Gnome CVS Tools</a>page;
    the CVS module is <b>libxslt</b>.</p>
  </li>
  <li><a
    href="ftp://xmlsoft.org/libxml2/libxslt-cvs-snapshot.tar.gz">snapshots
    fromCVS</a>updated every hour are also provided</li>
</ul>

<h2><a name="FAQ">FAQ</a></h2>
<ol>
  <li><em>Troubles compiling or linking programs using libxslt</em>
    <p>Usually the problem comes from the fact that the compiler doesn't
    getthe right compilation or linking flags. There is a small shell
    script<code>xslt-config</code>which is installed as part of libxslt
    usualinstall process which provides those flags. Use</p>
    <p><code>xslt-config --cflags</code></p>
    <p>to get the compilation flags and</p>
    <p><code>xslt-config --libs</code></p>
    <p>to get the linker flags. Usually this is done directly from
    theMakefile as:</p>
    <p><code>CFLAGS=`xslt-config --cflags`</code></p>
    <p><code>LIBS=`xslt-config --libs`</code></p>
    <p>Note also that if you use the EXSLT extensions from the program
    thenyou should prepend <code>-lexslt</code>to the LIBS options</p>
  </li>
  <li><em>passing parameters on the xsltproc command line doesn't work</em>
    <p><em>xsltproc --param test alpha foo.xsl foo.xml</em></p>
    <p><em>the param does not get passed and ends up as ""</em></p>
    <p>In a nutshell do a double escaping at the shell prompt:</p>
    <p>xsltproc --param test "'alpha'" foo.xsl foo.xml</p>
    <p>i.e. the string value is surrounded by " and ' then terminated by 'and
    ". Libxslt interpret the parameter values as XPath expressions, sothe
    string -&gt;<code>alpha</code>&lt;- is intepreted as the node setmatching
    this string. You really want -&gt;<code>'alpha'</code>&lt;- tobe passed
    to the processor. And to allow this you need to escape thequotes at the
    shell level using -&gt;<code>"'alpha'"</code>&lt;- .</p>
    <p>or use</p>
    <p>xsltproc --stringparam test alpha foo.xsl foo.xml</p>
  </li>
  <li><em>Is there C++ bindings ?</em>
    <p>Yes for example <a
    href="http://pmade.org/pjones/software/xmlwrapp/">xmlwrapp</a>, see <a
    href="python.html">the related pages about bindings</a></p>
  </li>
</ol>

<h2><a name="News">News</a></h2>

<p>The <a href="ChangeLog.html">change log</a>describes the recents commitsto
the <a href="http://cvs.gnome.org/viewcvs/libxslt/">CVS</a>code base.</p>

<p>Those are the public releases made:</p>

<h3>1.1.17: Jun 6 2006</h3>
<ul>
  <li>portability fixes: python detection</li>
  <li>bug fixes: some regression tests, attribute/namespaces output (Kasimier
    Buchcik), problem in mixed xsl:value-of and xsl:text uses (Kasimier)</li>
  <li>improvements: internal refactoring (Kasimier Buchcik), use of the XPath
    object cache in libxml2-2.6.25 (Kasimier)</li>
</ul>

<h3>1.1.16: May 01 2006</h3>
<ul>
  <li>portability fixes: EXSLT date/time on Solaris and IRIX (Albert
    Chin),HP-UX  build (Albert Chin),</li>
  <li>build fixes: Python detection(Joseph Sacco), plugin configurei(Joel
    Reed)</li>
  <li>bug fixes: pattern compilation fix(William Brack), EXSLT date/timefix
    (Thomas Broyer), EXSLT function bug, potential loop on variableeval,
    startup race (Christopher Palmer), debug statement left in python(Nic
    Ferrier), various cleanup based on Coverity reports), error onOut of
    memory condition (Charles Hardin), various namespace prefixesfixes
    (Kasimier Buchcik),</li>
  <li>improvement: speed up sortingi, start of internals refactoring
    (KasimierBuchcik)</li>
  <li>documentation: man page fixes and updates (Daniel Leidert)</li>
</ul>

<h3>1.1.15: Sep 04 2005</h3>
<ul>
  <li>build fixes: Windows build cleanups and updates (Igor Zlatkovic),remove
    jhbuild warnings</li>
  <li>bug fixes: negative number formatting (William Brack), numberformatting
    per mille definition (William Brack), XInclude default values(William),
    text copy bugs (William), bug related to xmlXPathContext size,reuse
    libxml2 memory management for text nodes, dictionnary text bug,forbid
    variables in match (needs libxml2-2.6.21)</li>
  <li>improvements: EXSLT dyn:map (Mark Vakoc),</li>
  <li>documentation: EXSLT date and time functions namespace in man
    (JonathanWakely)</li>
</ul>

<h3>1.1.14: Apr 02 2005</h3>
<ul>
  <li>bug fixes: text node on stylesheet document without a
    dictionary(William Brack), more checking of XSLT syntax, calling
    xsltInit()multiple times, mode values interning raised by Mark Vakoc, bug
    inpattern matching with ancestors, bug in patterna matching with
    cascadingselect, xinclude and document() problem, build outside of source
    tree(Mike Castle)</li>
  <li>improvement: added a --nodict mode to xsltproc to check problems
    fordocuemtns without dictionnaries</li>
</ul>

<h3>1.1.13: Mar 13 2005</h3>
<ul>
  <li>build fixes: 64bits cleanup (William Brack), python 2.4 test
    (William),LIBXSLT_VERSION_EXTRA on Windows (William), Windows makefiles
    fixes (JoelReed), libgcrypt-devel requires for RPM spec.</li>
  <li>bug fixes: exslt day-of-week-in-month (Sal Paradise),
    xsl:call-templateshould not change the current template rule (William
    Brack), evaluationof global variables (William Brack), RVT's in XPath
    predicates (William),namespace URI on template names (Mark Vakoc), stat()
    for Windows patch(Aleksey Gurtovoy), pattern expression fixes (William
    Brack), out ofmemory detection misses (William), parserOptions
    propagation (William),exclude-result-prefixes fix (William), // patten
    fix (William).</li>
  <li>extensions: module support (Joel Reed), dictionnary based
    speedupstrying to get rid of xmlStrEqual as much as possible.</li>
  <li>documentation: added Wiki (Joel Reed)</li>
</ul>

<h3>1.1.12: Oct 29 2004</h3>
<ul>
  <li>build fixes: warnings removal (William).</li>
  <li>bug fixes: attribute document pointer fix (Mark Vakoc), exslt
    datenegative periods (William Brack), generated tree structure
    fixes,namespace lookup fix, use reentrant gmtime_r (William
    Brack),exslt:funtion namespace fix (William), potential NULL pointer
    reference(Dennis Dams, William), force string interning on
    generateddocuments.</li>
  <li>documentation: update of the second tutorial (Panagiotis Louridas),
    addexslt doc in rpm packages, fix the xsltproc man page.</li>
</ul>

<h3>1.1.11: Sep 29 2004</h3>
<ul>
  <li>bug fixes: xsl:include problems (William Brack), UTF8 number
    pattern(William), date-time validation (William), namespace fix
    (William),various Exslt date fixes (William), error callback fixes, leak
    withnamespaced global variable, attempt to fix a weird problem
  #153137</li>
  <li>improvements: exslt:date-sum tests (Derek Poon)</li>
  <li>documentation: second tutorial by Panagiotis Lourida</li>
</ul>

<h3>1.1.10: Aug 31 2004</h3>
<ul>
  <li>build fix: NUL in c file blocking compilation on Solaris, Windows
    build(Igor Zlatkovic)</li>
  <li>fix: key initialization problem (William Brack)</li>
  <li>documentation: fixed missing man page description for --path</li>
</ul>

<h3>1.1.9: Aug 22 2004</h3>
<ul>
  <li>build fixes: missing tests (William Brack), Python dependancies,
    Pythonon 64bits boxes, --with-crypto flag (Rob Richards),</li>
  <li>fixes: RVT key handling (William), Python binding (William and
    SitsofeWheeler), key and XPath troubles (William), template priority on
    imports(William), str:tokenize with empty strings (William), #default
    namespacealias behaviour (William), doc ordering missing for main
    document(William), 64bit bug (Andreas Schwab)</li>
  <li>improvements: EXSLT date:sum added (Joel Reed), hook for
    documentloading for David Hyatt, xsltproc --nodtdattr to avoid defaulting
    DTDattributes, extend xsltproc --version with CVS stamp (William).</li>
  <li>Documentation: web page problem reported by Oliver Stoeneberg</li>
</ul>

<h3>1.1.8: July 5 2004</h3>
<ul>
  <li>build fixes: Windows runtime options (Oliver Stoeneberg), Windowsbinary
    package layout (Igor Zlatkovic), libgcrypt version test and
  link(William)</li>
  <li>documentation: fix libxslt namespace name in doc (William)</li>
  <li>bug fixes: undefined namespace message (William Brack), search
    engine(William), multiple namespace fixups (William), namespace fix for
    keyevaluation (William), Python memory debug bindings,</li>
  <li>improvements: crypto extensions for exslt (Joel Reed, William)</li>
</ul>

<h3>1.1.7: May 17 2004</h3>
<ul>
  <li>build fix: warning about localtime_r on Solaris</li>
  <li>bug fix: UTF8 string tokenize (William Brack), subtle memorycorruption,
    linefeed after comment at document level
    (William),disable-output-escaping problem (William), pattern compilation
    in deepimported stylesheets (William), namespace extension prefix
    bug,libxslt.m4 bug (Edward Rudd), namespace lookup for attribute,
    namespacedDOCTYPE name</li>
</ul>

<h3>1.1.6: Apr 18 2004</h3>
<ul>
  <li>2 bug fixes about keys fixed one by Mark Vakoc</li>
</ul>

<h3>1.1.5: Mar 23 2004</h3>
<ul>
  <li>performance: use dictionnary lookup for variables</li>
  <li>remove use of _private from source documents</li>
  <li>cleanup of "make tests" output</li>
  <li>bugfixes: AVT in local variables, use localtime_r to avoid
    threadtroubles (William), dictionary handling bug (William), limited
    number ofstubstitutions in AVT (William), tokenize fix for UTF-8
    (William),superfluous namespace (William), xsltproc error code
    on&lt;xsl:message&gt; halt, OpenVMS fix, dictionnary reference
    countingchange.</li>
</ul>

<h3>1.1.4: Feb 23 2004</h3>
<ul>
  <li>bugfixes: attributes without doc (Mariano Suárez-Alvarez), problem
    withYelp, extension problem</li>
  <li>display extension modules (Steve Little)</li>
  <li>Windows compilation patch (Mark Vadoc), Mingw (Mikhail Grushinskiy)</li>
</ul>

<h3>1.1.3: Feb 16 2004</h3>
<ul>
  <li>Rewrote the Attribute Value Template code, new XPath
    compilationinterfaces, dictionnary reuses for XSLT with potential for
    seriousperformance improvements.</li>
  <li>bug fixes: portability (William Brack), key() in node-set()
    results(William), comment before doctype (William), math and node-set()
    problems(William), cdata element and default namespace (William),
    behaviour onunknown XSLT elements (Stefan Kost), priority of "//foo"
    patterns(William), xsl:element and xsl:attribute QName check (William),
    commentswith -- (William), attribute namespace (William), check for ?&gt;
    in PI(William)</li>
  <li>Documentations: cleanup (John Fleck and William)</li>
  <li>Python: patch for OS-X (Gianni Ceccarelli), enums export
    (Stephanebidoul)</li>
</ul>

<h3>1.1.2: Dec 24 2003</h3>
<ul>
  <li>Documentation fixes (John Fleck, William Brack), EXSLT
    documentation(William Brack)</li>
  <li>Windows compilation fixes for MSVC and Mingw (Igor Zlatkovic)</li>
  <li>Bug fixes: exslt:date returning NULL strings (William Brack),namespaces
    output (William Brack),  key and namespace definition problem,passing
    options down to the document() parser, xsl:number fixes
  (WilliamBrack)</li>
</ul>

<h3>1.1.1: Dec 10 2003</h3>
<ul>
  <li>code cleanup (William Brack)</li>
  <li>Windows: Makefile improvements (Igor Zlatkovic)</li>
  <li>documentation improvements: William Brack, libexslt man page
    (JonathanWakely)</li>
  <li>param in EXSLT functions (Shaun McCance)</li>
  <li>XSLT debugging improvements (Mark Vakoc)</li>
  <li>bug fixes: number formatting (Bjorn Reese), exslt:tokenize
    (WilliamBrack), key selector parsing with | reported by Oleg
    Paraschenko,xsl:element with computed namespaces (William Brack),
    xslt:import/includerecursion detection (William Brack), exslt:function
    used in keys (WilliamBrack), bug when CDATA_SECTION are foun in the tree
    (William Brack),entities handling when using XInclude.</li>
</ul>

<h3>1.1.0: Nov 4 2003</h3>
<ul>
  <li>Removed DocBook SGML broken support</li>
  <li>fix xsl:key to work with PIs</li>
  <li>Makefile and build improvement (Graham Wilson), build cleanup
    (WilliamBrack), macro fix (Justin Fletcher), build outside of source tree
    (RoumenPetrov)</li>
  <li>xsltproc option display fix (Alexey Efimov), --load-trace
    (CrutcherDunnavant)</li>
  <li>Python: never use stdout for error</li>
  <li>extension memory error fix (Karl Eichwalder)</li>
  <li>header path fixes (Steve Ball)</li>
  <li>added saxon:line-number() to libexslt (Brett Kail)</li>
  <li>Fix some tortuous template problems when using predicates
  (WilliamBrack)</li>
  <li>Debugger status patch (Kasimier Buchcik)</li>
  <li>Use new libxml2-2.6.x APIs for faster processing</li>
  <li>Make sure xsl:sort is empty</li>
  <li>Fixed a bug in default processing of attributes</li>
  <li>Removes the deprecated breakpoint library</li>
  <li>detect invalid names on templates (William Brack)</li>
  <li>fix exslt:document (and similar) base handling problem</li>
</ul>

<h3>1.0.33: Sep 12 2003</h3>

<p>This is a bugfix only release</p>
<ul>
  <li>error message missing argument (William Brack)</li>
  <li>mode not cascaded in template fallbacks (William Brack)</li>
  <li>catch redefinition of parameter/variables  (William Brack)</li>
  <li>multiple keys with same namespace name (William Brack)</li>
  <li>patch for compilation using MingW on Windows (Mikhail Grushinskiy)</li>
  <li>header export macros for Windows (Igor Zlatkovic)</li>
  <li>cdata-section-elements handling of namespaced names</li>
  <li>compilation without libxml2 XPointer support (Mark Vadoc)</li>
  <li>apply-templates crash (William Brack)</li>
  <li>bug with imported templates (William Brack)</li>
  <li>imported attribute-sets merging bug (DocBook) (William Brack)</li>
</ul>

<h3>1.0.32: Aug 9 2003</h3>
<ul>
  <li>bugfixes: xsltSaveResultToFile() python binding (Chris Jaeger),
    EXSLTfunction (William Brack), RVT for globals (William Brack), EXSLT
    date(William Brack),
    <p>speed of large text output, xsl:copy with attributes, strip-space
    andnamespaces prefix, fix for --path xsltproc option, EXST:tokenize
    (ShaunMcCance), EXSLT:seconds (William Brack), sort with multiple keys
    (WilliamBrack), checking of { and } for attribute value templates
    (WilliamBrack)</p>
  </li>
  <li>Python bindings for extension elements (Sean Treadway)</li>
  <li>EXSLT:split added (Shaun McCance)</li>
  <li>portability fixes for HP-UX/Solaris/IRIX (William Brack)</li>
  <li>doc cleanup</li>
</ul>

<h3>1.0.31: Jul 6 2003</h3>
<ul>
  <li>bugfixes: xsl:copy on namespace nodes, AVT for xsl:sort order, fix
    forthe debugger (Keith Isdale), output filename limitation, trio.h
    andtriodef.h added (Albert Chin), EXSLT node-set (Peter
    Breitenlohner),xsltChoose and whitespace (Igor Zlatkovic),
    <p>stylesheet compilation (Igor Zlatkovic), NaN and sort (William
    Brack),RVT bug introduced in 1.0.30</p>
  </li>
  <li>avoid generating &amp;quot; (fix in libxml2-2.5.8)</li>
  <li>fix 64bit cleaness problem and compilation troubles introduced
  in1.0.30</li>
  <li>Windows makefile generation (Igor Zlatkovic)</li>
  <li>HP-UX portability fix</li>
</ul>

<h3>1.0.30: May 4 2003</h3>
<ul>
  <li>Fixes and new APIs to handle Result Value Trees and avoid leaks</li>
  <li>Fixes for: EXSLT math pow() function (Charles Bozeman), globalparameter
    and global variables mismatch, a segfault on patterncompilation errors,
    namespace copy in xsl:copy-of, python generatorproblem, OpenVMS trio
    update, premature call to xsltFreeStackElem (Igor),current node when
    templates applies to attributes</li>
</ul>

<h3>1.0.29: Apr 1 2003</h3>
<ul>
  <li>performance improvements especially for large flat documents</li>
  <li>bug fixes: Result Value Tree handling, XML IDs, keys(), extra
    namespacedeclarations with xsl:elements.</li>
  <li>portability: python and trio fixes (Albert Chin), python on Solaris(Ben
    Phillips)</li>
</ul>

<h3>1.0.28: Mar 24 2003</h3>
<ul>
  <li>fixed node() in patterns semantic.</li>
  <li>fixed a memory access problem in format-number()</li>
  <li>fixed stack overflow in recursive global variable or params</li>
  <li>cleaned up Result Value Tree handling, and fixed a couple of old bugsin
    the process</li>
</ul>

<h3>1.0.27: Feb 24 2003</h3>
<ul>
  <li>bug fixes: spurious xmlns:nsX="" generation, serialization bug
    (inlibxml2), a namespace copy problem, errors in the RPM spec prereqs</li>
  <li>Windows path canonicalization and document cache fix (Igor)</li>
</ul>

<h3>1.0.26: Feb 10 2003</h3>
<ul>
  <li>Fixed 3 serious bugs in document() and stylesheet compilation
    whichcould lead to a crash</li>
</ul>

<h3>1.0.25: Feb 5 2003</h3>
<ul>
  <li>Bug fix: double-free for standalone stylesheets introduced in 1.0.24,
    Csyntax pbm, 3 bugs reported by Eric van der Vlist</li>
  <li>Some XPath and XInclude related problems were actually fixed
    inlibxml2-2.5.2</li>
  <li>Documentation: emphasize taht --docbook is not for XML docs.</li>
</ul>

<h3>1.0.24: Jan 14 2003</h3>
<ul>
  <li>bug fixes: imported global varables, python bindings (Stéphane
    Bidoul),EXSLT memory leak (Charles Bozeman), namespace generation
    onxsl:attribute, space handling with imports (Daniel
    Stodden),extension-element-prefixes (Josh Parsons), comments within
    xsl:text (MattSergeant), superfluous xmlns generation, XInclude related
    bug fornumbering, EXSLT strings (Alexey Efimov), attribute-sets
    computation onimports, extension module init and shutdown callbacks not
    called</li>
  <li>HP-UX portability (Alexey Efimov), Windows makefiles (Igor and
    StephaneBidoul), VMS makefile updates (Craig A. Berry)</li>
  <li>adds xsltGetProfileInformation() (Michael Rothwell)</li>
  <li>fix the API generation scripts</li>
  <li>API to provide the sorting routines (Richard Jinks)</li>
  <li>added XML description of the EXSLT API</li>
  <li>added ESXLT URI (un)escaping (Jörg Walter)</li>
  <li>Some memory leaks have been found and fixed</li>
  <li>document() now support fragment identifiers in URIs</li>
</ul>

<h3>1.0.23: Nov 17 2002</h3>
<ul>
  <li>Windows build cleanup (Igor)</li>
  <li>Unix build and RPM packaging cleanup</li>
  <li>Improvement of the python bindings: extension functions and
    activatingEXSLT</li>
  <li>various bug fixes: number formatting, portability for bounded
    stringfunctions, CData nodes, key(), @*[...] patterns</li>
  <li>Documentation improvements (John Fleck)</li>
  <li>added libxslt.m4 (Thomas Schraitle)</li>
</ul>

<h3>1.0.22: Oct 18 2002</h3>
<ul>
  <li>Updates on the Windows Makefiles</li>
  <li>Added a security module, and a related set of new options
  toxsltproc</li>
  <li>Allowed per transformation error handler.</li>
  <li>Fixed a few bugs: node() semantic, URI escaping, media-type,
    attributelists</li>
</ul>

<h3>1.0.21: Sep 26 2002</h3>
<ul>
  <li>Bug fixes: match="node()", date:difference() (Igor and CharlieBozeman),
    disable-output-escaping</li>
  <li>Python bindings: style.saveResultToString() from Ralf Mattes</li>
  <li>Logos from Marc Liyanage</li>
  <li>Mem leak fix from Nathan Myers</li>
  <li>Makefile: DESTDIR fix from Christophe Merlet, AMD x86_64
    (Mandrake),Windows (Igor), Python detection</li>
  <li>Documentation improvements: John Fleck</li>
</ul>

<h3>1.0.20: Aug 23 2002</h3>
<ul>
  <li>Windows makefile updates (Igor) and x86-64 (Frederic Crozat)</li>
  <li>fixed HTML meta tag saving for Mac/IE users</li>
  <li>possible leak patches from Nathan Myers</li>
  <li>try to handle document('') as best as possible depending in
  thecases</li>
  <li>Fixed the DocBook stylesheets handling problem</li>
  <li>Fixed a few XSLT reported errors</li>
</ul>

<h3>1.0.19:  July 6 2002</h3>
<ul>
  <li>EXSLT: dynamic functions and date support bug fixes (Mark Vakoc)</li>
  <li>xsl:number fix: Richard Jinks</li>
  <li>xsl:format-numbers fix: Ken Neighbors</li>
  <li>document('') fix: bug pointed by Eric van der Vlist</li>
  <li>xsl:message with terminate="yes" fixes: William Brack</li>
  <li>xsl:sort order support added: Ken Neighbors</li>
  <li>a few other bug fixes, some of them requiring the latest version
    oflibxml2</li>
</ul>

<h3>1.0.18: May 27 2002</h3>
<ul>
  <li>a number of bug fixes: attributes, extra namespace
    declarations(DocBook), xsl:include crash (Igor), documentation (Christian
    Cornelssen,Charles Bozeman and Geert Kloosterman),  element-available
    (RichardJinks)</li>
  <li>xsltproc can now list teh registered extensions thanks to MarkVakoc</li>
  <li>there is a new API to save directly to a stringxsltSaveResultToString()
    by Morus Walter</li>
  <li>specific error registration function for the python API</li>
</ul>

<h3>1.0.17: April 29 2002</h3>
<ul>
  <li>cleanup in code, XSLT debugger support and Makefiles for Windows
  byIgor</li>
  <li>a C++ portability fix by Mark Vakoc</li>
  <li>EXSLT date improvement and regression tests by Charles Bozeman</li>
  <li>attempt to fix a bug in xsltProcessUserParamInternal</li>
</ul>

<h3>1.0.16: April 15 2002</h3>
<ul>
  <li>Bug fixes: strip-space, URL in HTML output, error when xsltproc
    can'tsave</li>
  <li>portability fixes: OSF/1, IEEE on alphas, Windows, Python bindings</li>
</ul>

<h3>1.0.15: Mar 25 2002</h3>
<ul>
  <li>Bugfixes: XPath, python Makefile, recursive attribute sets,
    @foo[..]templates</li>
  <li>Debug of memory alocation with valgind</li>
  <li>serious profiling leading to significant improvement for
    DocBookprocessing</li>
  <li>revamp of the Windows build</li>
</ul>

<h3>1.0.14: Mar 18 2002</h3>
<ul>
  <li>Improvement in the XPath engine (libxml2-2.4.18)</li>
  <li>Nasty bug fix related to exslt:node-set</li>
  <li>Fixed the python Makefiles, cleanup of doc comments, Windowsportability
    fixes</li>
</ul>

<h3>1.0.13: Mar 8 2002</h3>
<ul>
  <li>a number of bug fixes including "namespace node have no parents"</li>
  <li>Improvement of the Python bindings</li>
  <li>Charles Bozeman provided fixes and regression tests for exslt
    datefunctions.</li>
</ul>

<h3>1.0.12: Feb 11 2002</h3>
<ul>
  <li>Fixed the makefiles especially the python module ones</li>
  <li>half a dozen bugs fixes including 2 old ones</li>
</ul>

<h3>1.0.11: Feb 8 2002</h3>
<ul>
  <li>Change of Licence to the <a
    href="http://www.opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.html">MITLicence</a></li>
  <li>Added a beta version of the Python bindings, including support toextend
    the engine with functions written in Python</li>
  <li>A number of bug fixes</li>
  <li>Charlie Bozeman provided more EXSLT functions</li>
  <li>Portability fixes</li>
</ul>

<h3>1.0.10: Jan 14 2002</h3>
<ul>
  <li>Windows fixes for Win32 from Igor</li>
  <li>Fixed the Solaris compilation trouble (Albert)</li>
  <li>Documentation changes and updates: John Fleck</li>
  <li>Added a stringparam option to avoid escaping hell at the shelllevel</li>
  <li>A few bug fixes</li>
</ul>

<h3>1.0.9: Dec 7 2001</h3>
<ul>
  <li>Makefile patches from Peter Williams</li>
  <li>attempt to fix the compilation problem associated to prelinking</li>
  <li>obsoleted libxsltbreakpoint now deprecated and frozen to 1.0.8 API</li>
  <li>xsltproc return codes are now significant, John Fleck updated
    thedocumentation</li>
  <li>patch to allow as much as 40 steps in patterns (Marc Tardif), should
    bemade dynamic really</li>
  <li>fixed a bug raised by Nik Clayton when using doctypes with
  HTMLoutput</li>
  <li>patches from Keith Isdale to interface with xsltdebugger</li>
</ul>

<h3>1.0.8: Nov 26 2001</h3>
<ul>
  <li>fixed an annoying header problem, removed a few bugs and some
    codecleanup</li>
  <li>patches for Windows and update of Windows Makefiles by Igor</li>
  <li>OpenVMS port instructions from John A Fotheringham</li>
  <li>fixed some Makefiles annoyance and libraries prelinkinginformations</li>
</ul>

<h3>1.0.7: Nov 10 2001</h3>
<ul>
  <li>remove a compilation problem with LIBXSLT_PUBLIC</li>
  <li>Finishing the integration steps for Keith Isdale debugger</li>
  <li>fixes the handling of indent="no" on HTML output</li>
  <li>fixes on the configure script and RPM spec file</li>
</ul>

<h3>1.0.6: Oct 30 2001</h3>
<ul>
  <li>bug fixes on number formatting (Thomas), date/time functions
    (BruceMiller)</li>
  <li>update of the Windows Makefiles (Igor)</li>
  <li>fixed DOCTYPE generation rules for HTML output (me)</li>
</ul>

<h3>1.0.5: Oct 10 2001</h3>
<ul>
  <li>some portability fixes, including Windows makefile updates fromIgor</li>
  <li>fixed a dozen bugs on XSLT and EXSLT (me and Thomas Broyer)</li>
  <li>support for Saxon's evaluate and expressions extensions added
    (initialcontribution from Darren Graves)</li>
  <li>better handling of XPath evaluation errors</li>
</ul>

<h3>1.0.4: Sep 12 2001</h3>
<ul>
  <li>Documentation updates from John fleck</li>
  <li>bug fixes (DocBook  FO generation should be fixed)  and
    portabilityimprovements</li>
  <li>Thomas Broyer improved the existing EXSLT support and added String,Time
    and Date core functions support</li>
</ul>

<h3>1.0.3:  Aug 23 2001</h3>
<ul>
  <li>XML Catalog support see the doc</li>
  <li>New NaN/Infinity floating point code</li>
  <li>A few bug fixes</li>
</ul>

<h3>1.0.2:  Aug 15 2001</h3>
<ul>
  <li>lot of bug fixes, increased the testsuite</li>
  <li>a large chunk of EXSLT is implemented</li>
  <li>improvements on the extension framework</li>
  <li>documentation improvements</li>
  <li>Windows MSC projects files should be up-to-date</li>
  <li>handle attributes inherited from the DTD by default</li>
</ul>

<h3>1.0.1:  July 24 2001</h3>
<ul>
  <li>initial EXSLT framework</li>
  <li>better error reporting</li>
  <li>fixed the profiler on Windows</li>
  <li>bug fixes</li>
</ul>

<h3>1.0.0: July 10 2001</h3>
<ul>
  <li>a lot of cleanup, a lot of regression tests added or fixed</li>
  <li>added a documentation for <a
    href="extensions.html">writingextensions</a></li>
  <li>fixed some variable evaluation problems (with William)</li>
  <li>added profiling of stylesheet execution accessible as the
    xsltproc--profile option</li>
  <li>fixed element-available() and the implementation of the variouschunking
    methods present, Norm Walsh provided a lot of feedback</li>
  <li>exclude-result-prefixes and namespaces output should now work
  asexpected</li>
  <li>added support of embedded stylesheet as described in section 2.7 of
    thespec</li>
</ul>

<h3>0.14.0: July 5 2001</h3>
<ul>
  <li>lot of bug fixes, and code cleanup</li>
  <li>completion of the little XSLT-1.0 features left unimplemented</li>
  <li>Added and implemented the extension API suggested by Thomas Broyer</li>
  <li>the Windows MSC environment should be complete</li>
  <li>tested and optimized with a really large document (DocBook
    DefinitiveGuide) libxml/libxslt should really be faster on serious
    workloads</li>
</ul>

<h3>0.13.0: June 26 2001</h3>
<ul>
  <li>lots of cleanups</li>
  <li>fixed a C++ compilation problem</li>
  <li>couple of fixes to xsltSaveTo()</li>
  <li>try to fix Docbook-xslt-1.4 and chunking, updated the regression
    testwith them</li>
  <li>fixed pattern compilation and priorities problems</li>
  <li>Patches for Windows and MSC project mostly contributed by Yon Derek</li>
  <li>update to the Tutorial by John Fleck</li>
  <li>William fixed bugs in templates and for-each functions</li>
  <li>added a new interface xsltRunStylesheet() for a more flexible
    output(incomplete), added -o option to xsltproc</li>
</ul>

<h3>0.12.0: June 18 2001</h3>
<ul>
  <li>fixed a dozen of bugs reported</li>
  <li>HTML generation should be quite better (requires libxml-2.3.11
    upgradetoo)</li>
  <li>William fixed some problems with document()</li>
  <li>Fix namespace nodes selection and copy (requires libxml-2.3.11
    upgradetoo)</li>
  <li>John Fleck added a<a
  href="tutorial/libxslttutorial.html">tutorial</a></li>
  <li>Fixes for namespace handling when evaluating variables</li>
  <li>XInclude global flag added to process XInclude on document()
  ifrequested</li>
  <li>made xsltproc --version more detailed</li>
</ul>

<h3>0.11.0: June 1 2001</h3>

<p>Mostly a bug fix release.</p>
<ul>
  <li>integration of catalogs from xsltproc</li>
  <li>added --version to xsltproc for bug reporting</li>
  <li>fixed errors when handling ID in external parsed entities</li>
  <li>document() should hopefully work correctly but ...</li>
  <li>fixed bug with PI and comments processing</li>
  <li>William fixed the XPath string functions when using unicode</li>
</ul>

<h3>0.10.0: May 19 2001</h3>
<ul>
  <li>cleanups to make stylesheet read-only (not 100% complete)</li>
  <li>fixed URI resolution in document()</li>
  <li>force all XPath expression to be compiled at stylesheet parsing
    time,even if unused ...</li>
  <li>Fixed HTML default output detection</li>
  <li>Fixed double attribute generation #54446</li>
  <li>Fixed {{ handling in attributes #54451</li>
  <li>More tests and speedups for DocBook document transformations</li>
  <li>Fixed a really bad race like bug in xsltCopyTreeList()</li>
  <li>added a documentation on the libxslt internals</li>
  <li>William Brack and Bjorn Reese improved format-number()</li>
  <li>Fixed multiple sort, it should really work now</li>
  <li>added a --docbook option for SGML DocBook input (hackish)</li>
  <li>a number of other bug fixes and regression test added as people
    weresubmitting them</li>
</ul>

<h3>0.9.0: May 3 2001</h3>
<ul>
  <li>lot of various bugfixes, extended the regression suite</li>
  <li>xsltproc should work with multiple params</li>
  <li>added an option to use xsltproc with HTML input</li>
  <li>improved the stylesheet compilation, processing of complex
    stylesheetsshould be faster</li>
  <li>using the same stylesheet for concurrent processing on
    multithreadedprograms should work now</li>
  <li>fixed another batch of namespace handling problems</li>
  <li>Implemented multiple level of sorting</li>
</ul>

<h3>0.8.0: Apr 22 2001</h3>
<ul>
  <li>fixed ansidecl.h problem</li>
  <li>fixed unparsed-entity-uri() and generate-id()</li>
  <li>sort semantic fixes and priority prob from William M. Brack</li>
  <li>fixed namespace handling problems in XPath expression
    computations(requires libxml-2.3.7)</li>
  <li>fixes to current() and key()</li>
  <li>other, smaller fixes, lots of testing with N Walsh DocBook
    HTMLstylesheets</li>
</ul>

<h3>0.7.0: Apr 10 2001</h3>
<ul>
  <li>cleanup using stricter compiler flags</li>
  <li>command line parameter passing</li>
  <li>fix to xsltApplyTemplates from William M. Brack</li>
  <li>added the XSLTMark in the regression tests as well as document()</li>
</ul>

<h3>0.6.0: Mar 22 2001</h3>
<ul>
  <li>another beta</li>
  <li>requires 2.3.5, which provide XPath expression compilation support</li>
  <li>document() extension should function properly</li>
  <li>fixed a number or reported bugs</li>
</ul>

<h3>0.5.0: Mar 10 2001</h3>
<ul>
  <li>fifth beta</li>
  <li>some optimization work, for the moment 2 XSLT transform cannot use
    thesame stylesheet at the same time (to be fixed)</li>
  <li>fixed problems with handling of tree results</li>
  <li>fixed a reported strip-spaces problem</li>
  <li>added more reported/fixed bugs to the test suite</li>
  <li>incorporated William M. Brack fix for imports and global variables
    aswell as patch for with-param support in apply-templates</li>
  <li>a bug fix on for-each</li>
</ul>

<h3>0.4.0: Mar 1 2001</h3>
<ul>
  <li>fourth beta test, released at the same time of libxml2-2.3.3</li>
  <li>bug fixes</li>
  <li>some optimization</li>
  <li>started implement extension support, not finished</li>
  <li>implemented but not tested multiple file output</li>
</ul>

<h3>0.3.0: Feb 24 2001</h3>
<ul>
  <li>third beta test, released at the same time of libxml2-2.3.2</li>
  <li>lot of bug fixes</li>
  <li>some optimization</li>
  <li>added DocBook XSL based testsuite</li>
</ul>

<h3>0.2.0: Feb 15 2001</h3>
<ul>
  <li>second beta version, released at the same time as libxml2-2.3.1</li>
  <li>getting close to feature completion, lot of bug fixes, some in the
    HTMLand XPath support of libxml</li>
  <li>start becoming usable for real work. This version can now regeneratethe
    XML 2e HTML from the original XML sources and the associatedstylesheets
    (in <a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml#b4d250b6c21">section I of the
    XMLREC</a>)</li>
  <li>Still misses extension element/function/prefixes support. Support
    ofkey() and document() is not complete</li>
</ul>

<h3>0.1.0: Feb 8 2001</h3>
<ul>
  <li>first beta version, released at the same time as libxml2-2.3.0</li>
  <li>lots of bug fixes, first "testing" version, but incomplete</li>
</ul>

<h3>0.0.1: Jan 25 2001</h3>
<ul>
  <li>first alpha version released at the same time as libxml2-2.2.12</li>
  <li>Framework in place, should work on simple examples, but far from
    beingfeature complete</li>
</ul>

<h2><a name="xsltproc">The xsltproc tool</a></h2>

<p>This program is the simplest way to use libxslt: from the command line.
Itis also used for doing the regression tests of the library.</p>

<p>It takes as first argument the path or URL to an XSLT stylesheet, the
nextarguments are filenames or URIs of the inputs to be processed. The output
ofthe processing is redirected on the standard output. There is actually a
fewmore options available:</p>
<pre>orchis:~ -&gt; xsltproc
Usage: xsltproc [options] stylesheet file [file ...]
   Options:
      --version or -V: show the version of libxml and libxslt used
      --verbose or -v: show logs of what's happening
      --output file or -o file: save to a given file
      --timing: display the time used
      --repeat: run the transformation 20 times
      --debug: dump the tree of the result instead
      --novalid: skip the Dtd loading phase
      --noout: do not dump the result
      --maxdepth val : increase the maximum depth
      --html: the input document is(are) an HTML file(s)
      --docbook: the input document is SGML docbook
      --param name value : pass a (parameter,value) pair
      --nonet refuse to fetch DTDs or entities over network
      --warnnet warn against fetching over the network
      --catalogs : use the catalogs from $SGML_CATALOG_FILES
      --xinclude : do XInclude processing on document intput
      --profile or --norman : dump profiling informations 
orchis:~ -&gt;</pre>

<h2><a name="DocBook">DocBook</a></h2>

<p><img src="duck.png" align="right" alt="The duck picture"></p>

<p><a href="http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/docbook/">DocBook</a>is
anXML/SGML vocabulary particularly well suited to books and papers
aboutcomputer hardware and software.</p>

<p>xsltproc and libxslt are not specifically dependant on DocBook, but sincea
lot of people use xsltproc and libxml2 for DocBook formatting, here are afew
pointers and informations which may be helpful:</p>
<ul>
  <li>The <a
    href="http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/docbook/">DocBookhomepage at
    Oasis</a>you should find pointers there on all the lastestversions of the
    DTDs and XSLT stylesheets</li>
  <li><a href="http://www.docbook.org/">DocBook: The Definitive
    Guide</a>isthe official reference documentation for DocBook.</li>
  <li><a
    href="https://sourceforge.net/docman/index.php?group_id=21935">DocBookOpen
    Repository</a>contains a lot of informations about DocBook</li>
  <li>Bob Stayton provides a <a href="http://www.sagehill.net/">lot
    ofresources</a>and consulting services around DocBook.</li>
  <li>Here is a <a href="/buildDocBookCatalog">shell script</a>to generateXML
    Catalogs for DocBook 4.1.2 . If it can write to the /etc/xml/directory,
    it will set-up /etc/xml/catalog and /etc/xml/docbook based onthe
    resources found on the system. Otherwise it will just create~/xmlcatalog
    and ~/dbkxmlcatalog and doing:
    <p><code>export XMLCATALOG=$HOME/xmlcatalog</code></p>
    <p>should allow to process DocBook documentations without
    requiringnetwork accesses for the DTd or stylesheets</p>
  </li>
  <li>I have uploaded <a
    href="ftp://xmlsoft.org/libxml2/test/dbk412catalog.tar.gz">asmall
    tarball</a>containing XML Catalogs for DocBook 4.1.2 which seemsto work
    fine for me too</li>
  <li>Informations on installing a <a
    href="http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/hoenicka_markus/ntsgml.html">WindowsDocBook
    processing setup</a>based on Cygwin (using the binaries from theofficial
    Windows port should be possible too)</li>
  <li>Alexander Kirillov's page on <a
    href="http://www.math.sunysb.edu/~kirillov/dbxml/">Using DocBook
    XML4.1.2</a>(RPM packages)</li>
  <li>Tim Waugh's <a href="http://cyberelk.net/tim/xmlto/">xmlto
    front-endconversion script</a></li>
  <li>Linux Documentation Project <a
    href="http://www.linuxdoc.org/HOWTO/mini/DocBook-Install/">DocBook-Install-mini-HOWTO</a></li>
  <li>ScrollKeeper the open documentation cataloging project has a <a
    href="http://scrollkeeper.sourceforge.net/docbook.shtml">DocBooksection</a></li>
  <li>Dan York presentation on <a
    href="http://www.lodestar2.com/people/dyork/talks/2001/xugo/docbook/index.html">Publishingusing
    DocBook XML</a></li>
</ul>

<p>Do not use the --docbook option of xsltproc to process XML
DocBookdocuments, this option is only intended to provide some (limited)
support ofthe SGML version of DocBook.</p>

<p>Points which are not DocBook specific but still worth mentionningagain:</p>
<ul>
  <li>if you think DocBook processing time is too slow, make sure you haveXML
    Catalogs pointing to a local installation of the DTD of DocBook.Check the
    <a href="http://xmlsoft.org/catalog.html">XML Catalog page</a>to
    understand more on this subject.</li>
  <li>before processing a new document, use the command
    <p><code>xmllint --valid --noout path_to_document</code></p>
    <p>to make sure that your input is valid DocBook. And fixes the
    errorsbefore processing further. Note that XSLT processing may work
    correctlywith some forms of validity errors left, but in general it can
    givetroubles on output.</p>
  </li>
</ul>

<h2><a name="API">The programming API</a></h2>

<p>Okay this section is clearly incomplete. But integrating libxslt into
yourapplication should be relatively easy. First check the few steps
describedbelow, then for more detailed informations, look at the<a
href="html/libxslt-lib.html">generated pages</a>for the API and the sourceof
libxslt/xsltproc.c  and the  <a
href="tutorial/libxslttutorial.html">tutorial</a>.</p>

<p>Basically doing an XSLT transformation can be done in a few steps:</p>
<ol>
  <li>configure the parser for XSLT:
    <p>xmlSubstituteEntitiesDefault(1);</p>
    <p>xmlLoadExtDtdDefaultValue = 1;</p>
  </li>
  <li>parse the stylesheet with xsltParseStylesheetFile()</li>
  <li>parse the document with xmlParseFile()</li>
  <li>apply the stylesheet using xsltApplyStylesheet()</li>
  <li>save the result using xsltSaveResultToFile() if needed
    setxmlIndentTreeOutput to 1</li>
</ol>

<p>Steps 2,3, and 5 will probably need to be changed depending on
youprocessing needs and environment for example if reading/saving
from/tomemory, or if you want to apply XInclude processing to the stylesheet
orinput documents.</p>

<h2><a name="Python">Python and bindings</a></h2>

<p>There is a number of language bindings and wrappers available for
libxml2,the list below is not exhaustive. Please contact the <a
href="http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/xml-bindings">xml-bindings@gnome.org</a>(<a
href="http://mail.gnome.org/archives/xml-bindings/">archives</a>) inorder to
get updates to this list or to discuss the specific topic of libxml2or
libxslt wrappers or bindings:</p>
<ul>
  <li><a
    href="http://mail.gnome.org/archives/xml/2001-March/msg00014.html">MattSergeant</a>developped
    <a href="http://axkit.org/download/">XML::LibXMLand XML::LibXSLT</a>,
    Perl wrappers for libxml2/libxslt as part of the <a
    href="http://axkit.com/">AxKit XML application server</a></li>
  <li><a href="mailto:dkuhlman@cutter.rexx.com">Dave Kuhlman</a>provides
    andearlier version of the libxml/libxslt <a
    href="http://www.rexx.com/~dkuhlman">wrappers for Python</a></li>
  <li>Petr Kozelka provides <a
    href="http://sourceforge.net/projects/libxml2-pas">Pascal units to
    gluelibxml2</a>with Kylix, Delphi and other Pascal compilers</li>
  <li>Wai-Sun "Squidster" Chia provides <a
    href="http://www.rubycolor.org/arc/redist/">bindings for
    Ruby</a>andlibxml2 bindings are also available in Ruby through the <a
    href="http://libgdome-ruby.berlios.de/">libgdome-ruby</a>modulemaintained
    by Tobias Peters.</li>
  <li>Steve Ball and contributors maintains <a
    href="http://tclxml.sourceforge.net/">libxml2 and libxslt bindings
    forTcl</a></li>
  <li><a href="mailto:xmlwrapp@pmade.org">Peter Jones</a>maintains
    C++bindings for libxslt within <a
    href="http://pmade.org/pjones/software/xmlwrapp/">xmlwrapp</a></li>
  <li><a href="phillim2@comcast.net">Mike Phillips</a>provides a moduleusing
    <a href="http://siasl.dyndns.org/projects/projects.html">libxsltfor
    PHP</a>.</li>
  <li><a href="http://savannah.gnu.org/projects/classpathx/">LibxmlJ</a>isan
    effort to create a 100% JAXP-compatible Java wrapper for libxml2
    andlibxslt as part of GNU ClasspathX project.</li>
  <li>Patrick McPhee provides Rexx bindings fof libxml2 and libxslt, look
    for<a href="http://www.interlog.com/~ptjm/software.html">RexxXML</a>.</li>
  <li><a
    href="http://www.satimage.fr/software/en/xml_suite.html">Satimage</a>provides
    <a
    href="http://www.satimage.fr/software/en/downloads_osaxen.html">XMLLibosax</a>.
    This is an osax for Mac OS X with a set of commands toimplement in
    AppleScript the XML DOM, XPATH and XSLT.</li>
</ul>

<p>The libxslt Python module depends on the <a
href="http://xmlsoft.org/python.html">libxml2 Python</a>module.</p>

<p>The distribution includes a set of Python bindings, which are garanteed
tobe maintained as part of the library in the future, though the
Pythoninterface have not yet reached the completeness of the C API.</p>

<p><a href="mailto:stephane.bidoul@softwareag.com">Stéphane
Bidoul</a>maintains <a href="http://users.skynet.be/sbi/libxml-python/">a
Windows portof the Python bindings</a>.</p>

<p>Note to people interested in building bindings, the API is formalized as<a
href="libxslt-api.xml">an XML API description file</a>which allows toautomate
a large part of the Python bindings, this includes functiondescriptions,
enums, structures, typedefs, etc... The Python script used tobuild the
bindings is python/generator.py in the source distribution.</p>

<p>To install the Python bindings there are 2 options:</p>
<ul>
  <li>If you use an RPM based distribution, simply install the <a
    href="http://rpmfind.net/linux/rpm2html/search.php?query=libxml2-python">libxml2-pythonRPM</a>and
    the <a
    href="http://rpmfind.net/linux/rpm2html/search.php?query=libxslt-python">libxslt-pythonRPM</a>.</li>
  <li>Otherwise use the <a
    href="ftp://xmlsoft.org/libxml2/python/">libxml2-pythonmodule
    distribution</a>corresponding to your installed version oflibxml2 and
    libxslt. Note that to install it you will need both libxml2and libxslt
    installed and run "python setup.py build install" in themodule tree.</li>
</ul>

<p>The distribution includes a set of examples and regression tests for
thepython bindings in the <code>python/tests</code>directory. Here are
someexcepts from those tests:</p>

<h3>basic.py:</h3>

<p>This is a basic test of XSLT interfaces: loading a stylesheet and
adocument, transforming the document and saving the result.</p>
<pre>import libxml2
import libxslt

styledoc = libxml2.parseFile("test.xsl")
style = libxslt.parseStylesheetDoc(styledoc)
doc = libxml2.parseFile("test.xml")
result = style.applyStylesheet(doc, None)
style.saveResultToFilename("foo", result, 0)
style.freeStylesheet()
doc.freeDoc()
result.freeDoc()</pre>

<p>The Python module is called libxslt, you will also need the libxml2
modulefor the operations on XML trees. Let's have a look at the objects
manipulatedin that example and how is the processing done:</p>
<ul>
  <li><code>styledoc</code>: is a libxml2 document tree. It is obtained
    byparsing the XML file "test.xsl" containing the stylesheet.</li>
  <li><code>style</code>: this is a precompiled stylesheet ready to be usedby
    the following transformations (note the plural form,
    multipletransformations can resuse the same stylesheet).</li>
  <li><code>doc</code>: this is the document to apply the transformation
    to.In this case it is simply generated by parsing it from a file but
    anyother processing is possible as long as one get a libxml2 Doc. Note
    thatHTML tree are suitable for XSLT processing in libxslt. This is
    actuallyhow this page is generated !</li>
  <li><code>result</code>: this is a document generated by applying
    thestylesheet to the document. Note that some of the stylesheet
    informationsmay be related to the serialization of that document and as
    in thisexample a specific saveResultToFilename() method of the stylesheet
    shouldbe used to save it to a file (in that case to "foo").</li>
</ul>

<p>Also note the need to explicitely deallocate documents with
freeDoc()except for the stylesheet document which is freed when its compiled
form isgarbage collected.</p>

<h3>extfunc.py:</h3>

<p>This one is a far more complex test. It shows how to modify the
behaviourof an XSLT transformation by passing parameters and how to extend
the XSLTengine with functions defined in python:</p>
<pre>import libxml2
import libxslt
import string

nodeName = None
def f(ctx, str):
    global nodeName

    #
    # Small check to verify the context is correcly accessed
    #
    try:
        pctxt = libxslt.xpathParserContext(_obj=ctx)
        ctxt = pctxt.context()
        tctxt = ctxt.transformContext()
        nodeName = tctxt.insertNode().name
    except:
        pass

    return string.upper(str)

libxslt.registerExtModuleFunction("foo", "http://example.com/foo", f)</pre>

<p>This code defines and register an extension function. Note that
thefunction can be bound to any name (foo) and how the binding is
alsoassociated to a namespace name "http://example.com/foo". From an XSLT
pointof view the function just returns an upper case version of the string
passedas a parameter. But the first part of the function also read some
contextualinformation from the current XSLT processing environement, in that
case itlooks for the current insertion node in the resulting output (either
theresulting document or the Result Value Tree being generated), and saves it
toa global variable for checking that the access actually worked.</p>

<p>For more informations on the xpathParserContext and
transformContextobjects check the <a href="internals.html">libray internals
description</a>.The pctxt is actually an object from a class derived from
thelibxml2.xpathParserContext() with just a couple more properties including
thepossibility to look up the XSLT transformation context from the
XPathcontext.</p>
<pre>styledoc = libxml2.parseDoc("""
&lt;xsl:stylesheet version='1.0'
  xmlns:xsl='http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform'
  xmlns:foo='http://example.com/foo'
  xsl:exclude-result-prefixes='foo'&gt;

  &lt;xsl:param name='bar'&gt;failure&lt;/xsl:param&gt;
  &lt;xsl:template match='/'&gt;
    &lt;article&gt;&lt;xsl:value-of select='foo:foo($bar)'/&gt;&lt;/article&gt;
  &lt;/xsl:template&gt;
&lt;/xsl:stylesheet&gt;
""")</pre>

<p>Here is a simple example of how to read an XML document from a
pythonstring with libxml2. Note how this stylesheet:</p>
<ul>
  <li>Uses a global parameter <code>bar</code></li>
  <li>Reference the extension function f</li>
  <li>how the Namespace name "http://example.com/foo" has to be bound to
    aprefix</li>
  <li>how that prefix is excluded from the output</li>
  <li>how the function is called from the select</li>
</ul>
<pre>style = libxslt.parseStylesheetDoc(styledoc)
doc = libxml2.parseDoc("&lt;doc/&gt;")
result = style.applyStylesheet(doc, { "bar": "'success'" })
style.freeStylesheet()
doc.freeDoc()</pre>

<p>that part is identical, to the basic example except that thetransformation
is passed a dictionnary of parameters. Note that the stringpassed "success"
had to be quoted, otherwise it is interpreted as an XPathquery for the childs
of root named "success".</p>
<pre>root = result.children
if root.name != "article":
    print "Unexpected root node name"
    sys.exit(1)
if root.content != "SUCCESS":
    print "Unexpected root node content, extension function failed"
    sys.exit(1)
if nodeName != 'article':
    print "The function callback failed to access its context"
    sys.exit(1)

result.freeDoc()</pre>

<p>That part just verifies that the transformation worked, that the
parametergot properly passed to the engine, that the function f() got called
and thatit properly accessed the context to find the name of the insertion
node.</p>

<h3>pyxsltproc.py:</h3>

<p>this module is a bit too long to be described there but it is basically
arewrite of the xsltproc command line interface of libxslt in Python.
Itprovides nearly all the functionalities of xsltproc and can be used as a
basemodule to write Python customized XSLT processors. One of the thing to
noticeare:</p>
<pre>libxml2.lineNumbersDefault(1)
libxml2.substituteEntitiesDefault(1)</pre>

<p>those two calls in the main() function are needed to force the
libxml2processor to generate DOM trees compliant with the XPath data
model.</p>

<h2><a name="Internals">Library internals</a></h2>

<h3>Table  of contents</h3>
<ul>
  <li><a href="internals.html#Introducti">Introduction</a></li>
  <li><a href="internals.html#Basics">Basics</a></li>
  <li><a href="internals.html#Keep">Keep it simple stupid</a></li>
  <li><a href="internals.html#libxml">The libxml nodes</a></li>
  <li><a href="internals.html#XSLT">The XSLT processing steps</a></li>
  <li><a href="internals.html#XSLT1">The XSLT stylesheet compilation</a></li>
  <li><a href="internals.html#XSLT2">The XSLT template compilation</a></li>
  <li><a href="internals.html#processing">The processing itself</a></li>
  <li><a href="internals.html#XPath">XPath expressions compilation</a></li>
  <li><a href="internals.html#XPath1">XPath interpretation</a></li>
  <li><a href="internals.html#Descriptio">Description of XPathObjects</a></li>
  <li><a href="internals.html#XPath3">XPath functions</a></li>
  <li><a href="internals.html#stack">The variables stack frame</a></li>
  <li><a href="internals.html#Extension">Extension support</a></li>
  <li><a href="internals.html#Futher">Further reading</a></li>
  <li><a href="internals.html#TODOs">TODOs</a></li>
</ul>

<h3><a name="Introducti2">Introduction</a></h3>

<p>This document describes the processing of <a
href="http://xmlsoft.org/XSLT/">libxslt</a>, the <a
href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xslt">XSLT</a>C library developed for the <a
href="http://www.gnome.org/">Gnome</a>project.</p>

<p>Note: this documentation is by definition incomplete and I am not good
atspelling, grammar, so patches and suggestions are <a
href="mailto:veillard@redhat.com">really welcome</a>.</p>

<h3><a name="Basics1">Basics</a></h3>

<p>XSLT is a transformation language. It takes an input document and
astylesheet document and generates an output document:</p>

<p align="center"><img src="processing.gif"
alt="the XSLT processing model"></p>

<p>Libxslt is written in C. It relies on <a
href="http://www.xmlsoft.org/">libxml</a>, the XML C library for Gnome,
forthe following operations:</p>
<ul>
  <li>parsing files</li>
  <li>building the in-memory DOM structure associated with the
    documentshandled</li>
  <li>the XPath implementation</li>
  <li>serializing back the result document to XML and HTML. (Text is
    handleddirectly.)</li>
</ul>

<h3><a name="Keep1">Keep it simple stupid</a></h3>

<p>Libxslt is not very specialized. It is built under the assumption that
allnodes from the source and output document can fit in the virtual memory
ofthe system. There is a big trade-off there. It is fine for reasonably
sizeddocuments but may not be suitable for large sets of data. The gain is
that itcan be used in a relatively versatile way. The input or output may
never beserialized, but the size of documents it can handle are limited by
the sizeof the memory available.</p>

<p>More specialized memory handling approaches are possible, like buildingthe
input tree from a serialization progressively as it is consumed,factoring
repetitive patterns, or even on-the-fly generation of the output asthe input
is parsed but it is possible only for a limited subset of thestylesheets. In
general the implementation of libxslt follows the followingpattern:</p>
<ul>
  <li>KISS (keep it simple stupid)</li>
  <li>when there is a clear bottleneck optimize on top of this
    simpleframework and refine only as much as is needed to reach the
    expectedresult</li>
</ul>

<p>The result is not that bad, clearly one can do a better job but
morespecialized too. Most optimization like building the tree on-demand
wouldneed serious changes to the libxml XPath framework. An easy step would
be toserialize the output directly (or call a set of SAX-like output handler
tokeep this a flexible interface) and hence avoid the memory consumption of
theresult.</p>

<h3><a name="libxml">The libxml nodes</a></h3>

<p>DOM-like trees, as used and generated by libxml and libxslt, arerelatively
complex. Most node types follow the given structure except a fewvariations
depending on the node type:</p>

<p align="center"><img src="node.gif" alt="description of a libxml node"></p>

<p>Nodes carry a <strong>name</strong>and the node
<strong>type</strong>indicates the kind of node it represents, the most
common ones are:</p>
<ul>
  <li>document nodes</li>
  <li>element nodes</li>
  <li>text nodes</li>
</ul>

<p>For the XSLT processing, entity nodes should not be generated (i.e.
theyshould be replaced by their content). Most nodes also contains the
following"navigation" informations:</p>
<ul>
  <li>the containing <strong>doc</strong>ument</li>
  <li>the <strong>parent</strong>node</li>
  <li>the first <strong>children</strong>node</li>
  <li>the <strong>last</strong>children node</li>
  <li>the <strong>prev</strong>ious sibling</li>
  <li>the following sibling (<strong>next</strong>)</li>
</ul>

<p>Elements nodes carries the list of attributes in the properties,
anattribute itself holds the navigation pointers and the children list
(theattribute value is not represented as a simple string to allow usage
ofentities references).</p>

<p>The <strong>ns</strong>points to the namespace declaration for
thenamespace associated to the node, <strong>nsDef</strong>is the linked
listof namespace declaration present on element nodes.</p>

<p>Most nodes also carry an <strong>_private</strong>pointer which can beused
by the application to hold specific data on this node.</p>

<h3><a name="XSLT">The XSLT processing steps</a></h3>

<p>There are a few steps which are clearly decoupled at the
interfacelevel:</p>
<ol>
  <li>parse the stylesheet and generate a DOM tree</li>
  <li>take the stylesheet tree and build a compiled version of it
    (thecompilation phase)</li>
  <li>take the input and generate a DOM tree</li>
  <li>process the stylesheet against the input tree and generate an
  outputtree</li>
  <li>serialize the output tree</li>
</ol>

<p>A few things should be noted here:</p>
<ul>
  <li>the steps 1/ 3/ and 5/ are optional</li>
  <li>the stylesheet obtained at 2/ can be reused by multiple processing
    4/(and this should also work in threaded programs)</li>
  <li>the tree provided in 2/ should never be freed using xmlFreeDoc, but
    byfreeing the stylesheet.</li>
  <li>the input tree 4/ is not modified except the _private field which maybe
    used for labelling keys if used by the stylesheet</li>
</ul>

<h3><a name="XSLT1">The XSLT stylesheet compilation</a></h3>

<p>This is the second step described. It takes a stylesheet tree,
and"compiles" it. This associates to each node a structure stored in
the_private field and containing information computed in the stylesheet:</p>

<p align="center"><img src="stylesheet.gif"
alt="a compiled XSLT stylesheet"></p>

<p>One xsltStylesheet structure is generated per document parsed for
thestylesheet. XSLT documents allow includes and imports of other
documents,imports are stored in the <strong>imports</strong>list (hence
keeping thetree hierarchy of includes which is very important for a proper
XSLTprocessing model) and includes are stored in the
<strong>doclist</strong>list. An imported stylesheet has a parent link to
allow browsing of thetree.</p>

<p>The DOM tree associated to the document is stored in
<strong>doc</strong>.It is preprocessed to remove ignorable empty nodes and
all the nodes in theXSLT namespace are subject to precomputing. This usually
consist ofextracting all the context information from the context tree
(attributes,namespaces, XPath expressions), and storing them in an
xsltStylePreCompstructure associated to the <strong>_private</strong>field of
the node.</p>

<p>A couple of notable exceptions to this are XSLT template nodes (more
onthis later) and attribute value templates. If they are actually
templates,the value cannot be computed at compilation time. (Some
preprocessing couldbe done like isolation and preparsing of the XPath
subexpressions but it'snot done, yet.)</p>

<p>The xsltStylePreComp structure also allows storing of the precompiled
formof an XPath expression that can be associated to an XSLT element (more
onthis later).</p>

<h3><a name="XSLT2">The XSLT template compilation</a></h3>

<p>A proper handling of templates lookup is one of the keys of fast
XSLTprocessing. (Given a node in the source document this is the process
offinding which templates should be applied to this node.) Libxslt follows
thehint suggested in the <a
href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xslt#patterns">5.2Patterns</a>section of the XSLT
Recommendation, i.e. it doesn't evaluate itas an XPath expression but
tokenizes it and compiles it as a set of rules tobe evaluated on a candidate
node. There usually is an indication of the nodename in the last step of this
evaluation and this is used as a key check forthe match. As a result libxslt
builds a relatively more complex set ofstructures for the templates:</p>

<p align="center"><img src="templates.gif"
alt="The templates related structure"></p>

<p>Let's describe a bit more closely what is built. First the
xsltStylesheetstructure holds a pointer to the template hash table. All the
XSLT patternscompiled in this stylesheet are indexed by the value of the the
targetelement (or attribute, pi ...) name, so when a element or an attribute
"foo"needs to be processed the lookup is done using the name as a key.</p>

<p>Each of the patterns is compiled into an xsltCompMatch structure. It
holdsthe set of rules based on the tokenization of the pattern stored in
reverseorder (matching is easier this way). It also holds some information
about theprevious matches used to speed up the process when one iterates over
a set ofsiblings. (This optimization may be defeated by trashing when
runningthreaded computation, it's unclear that this is a big deal in
practice.)Predicate expressions are not compiled at this stage, they may be
at run-timeif needed, but in this case they are compiled as full XPath
expressions (theuse of some fixed predicate can probably be optimized, they
are not yet).</p>

<p>The xsltCompMatch are then stored in the hash table, the clash list
isitself sorted by priority of the template to implement "naturally" the
XSLTpriority rules.</p>

<p>Associated to the compiled pattern is the xsltTemplate itself
containingthe information required for the processing of the pattern
including, ofcourse, a pointer to the list of elements used for building the
patternresult.</p>

<p>Last but not least a number of patterns do not fit in the hash
tablebecause they are not associated to a name, this is the case for
patternsapplying to the root, any element, any attributes, text nodes, pi
nodes, keysetc. Those are stored independently in the stylesheet structure as
separatelinked lists of xsltCompMatch.</p>

<h3><a name="processing">The processing itself</a></h3>

<p>The processing is defined by the XSLT specification (the basis of
thealgorithm is explained in <a
href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xslt#section-Introduction">the
Introduction</a>section). Basically it works by taking the root of the input
document andapplying the following algorithm:</p>
<ol>
  <li>Finding the template applying to it. This is a lookup in the
    templatehash table, walking the hash list until the node satisfies all
    the stepsof the pattern, then checking the appropriate(s) global
    templates to seeif there isn't a higher priority rule to apply</li>
  <li>If there is no template, apply the default rule (recurse on
  thechildren)</li>
  <li>else walk the content list of the selected templates, for each of them:
    <ul>
      <li>if the node is in the XSLT namespace then the node has a
        _privatefield pointing to the preprocessed values, jump to the
        specificcode</li>
      <li>if the node is in an extension namespace, look up the
        associatedbehavior</li>
      <li>otherwise copy the node.</li>
    </ul>
    <p>The closure is usually done through the
    XSLT<strong>apply-templates</strong>construct recursing by applying
    theadequate template on the input node children or on the result of
    anassociated XPath selection lookup.</p>
  </li>
</ol>

<p>Note that large parts of the input tree may not be processed by a
givenstylesheet and that on the opposite some may be processed multiple
times.(This often is the case when a Table of Contents is built).</p>

<p>The module <code>transform.c</code>is the one implementing most of
thislogic. <strong>xsltApplyStylesheet()</strong>is the entry point,
itallocates an xsltTransformContext containing the following:</p>
<ul>
  <li>a pointer to the stylesheet being processed</li>
  <li>a stack of templates</li>
  <li>a stack of variables and parameters</li>
  <li>an XPath context</li>
  <li>the template mode</li>
  <li>current document</li>
  <li>current input node</li>
  <li>current selected node list</li>
  <li>the current insertion points in the output document</li>
  <li>a couple of hash tables for extension elements and functions</li>
</ul>

<p>Then a new document gets allocated (HTML or XML depending on the type
ofoutput), the user parameters and global variables and parameters
areevaluated. Then <strong>xsltProcessOneNode()</strong>which implements
the1-2-3 algorithm is called on the root element of the input. Step 1/
isimplemented by calling <strong>xsltGetTemplate()</strong>, step 2/
isimplemented by <strong>xsltDefaultProcessOneNode()</strong>and step 3/
isimplemented by <strong>xsltApplyOneTemplate()</strong>.</p>

<h3><a name="XPath">XPath expression compilation</a></h3>

<p>The XPath support is actually implemented in the libxml module (where itis
reused by the XPointer implementation). XPath is a relatively
classicexpression language. The only uncommon feature is that it is working
on XMLtrees and hence has specific syntax and types to handle them.</p>

<p>XPath expressions are compiled using <strong>xmlXPathCompile()</strong>.It
will take an expression string in input and generate a structurecontaining
the parsed expression tree, for example the expression:</p>
<pre>/doc/chapter[title='Introduction']</pre>

<p>will be compiled as</p>
<pre>Compiled Expression : 10 elements
  SORT
    COLLECT  'child' 'name' 'node' chapter
      COLLECT  'child' 'name' 'node' doc
        ROOT
      PREDICATE
        SORT
          EQUAL =
            COLLECT  'child' 'name' 'node' title
              NODE
            ELEM Object is a string : Introduction
              COLLECT  'child' 'name' 'node' title
                NODE</pre>

<p>This can be tested using the  <code>testXPath</code>command (in thelibxml
codebase) using the <code>--tree</code>option.</p>

<p>Again, the KISS approach is used. No optimization is done. This could bean
interesting thing to add. <a
href="http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/library/x-xslt2/?dwzone=x?open&amp;l=132%2ct=gr%2c+p=saxon">MichaelKay
describes</a>a lot of possible and interesting optimizations done inSaxon
which would be possible at this level. I'm unsure they would providemuch gain
since the expressions tends to be relatively simple in general andstylesheets
are still hand generated. Optimizations at the interpretationsounds likely to
be more efficient.</p>

<h3><a name="XPath1">XPath interpretation</a></h3>

<p>The interpreter is implemented by
<strong>xmlXPathCompiledEval()</strong>which is the front-end to
<strong>xmlXPathCompOpEval()</strong>the functionimplementing the evaluation
of the expression tree. This evaluation followsthe KISS approach again. It's
recursive and calls<strong>xmlXPathNodeCollectAndTest()</strong>to collect
nodes set whenevaluating a <code>COLLECT</code>node.</p>

<p>An evaluation is done within the framework of an XPath context stored inan
<strong>xmlXPathContext</strong>structure, in the framework of
atransformation the context is maintained within the XSLT context. Its
contentfollows the requirements from the XPath specification:</p>
<ul>
  <li>the current document</li>
  <li>the current node</li>
  <li>a hash table of defined variables (but not used by XSLT)</li>
  <li>a hash table of defined functions</li>
  <li>the proximity position (the place of the node in the current
  nodelist)</li>
  <li>the context size (the size of the current node list)</li>
  <li>the array of namespace declarations in scope (there also is a
    namespacehash table but it is not used in the XSLT transformation).</li>
</ul>

<p>For the purpose of XSLT an <strong>extra</strong>pointer has been
addedallowing to retrieve the XSLT transformation context. When an
XPathevaluation is about to be performed, an XPath parser context is
allocatedcontaining and XPath object stack (this is actually an XPath
evaluationcontext, this is a remain of the time where there was no separate
parsing andevaluation phase in the XPath implementation). Here is an overview
of the setof contexts associated to an XPath evaluation within an
XSLTtransformation:</p>

<p align="center"><img src="contexts.gif"
alt="The set of contexts associated "></p>

<p>Clearly this is a bit too complex and confusing and should be refactoredat
the next set of binary incompatible releases of libxml. For example
thexmlXPathCtxt has a lot of unused parts and should probably be merged
withxmlXPathParserCtxt.</p>

<h3><a name="Descriptio">Description of XPath Objects</a></h3>

<p>An XPath expression manipulates XPath objects. XPath defines the
defaulttypes boolean, numbers, strings and node sets. XSLT adds the result
treefragment type which is basically an unmodifiable node set.</p>

<p>Implementation-wise, libxml follows again a KISS approach,
thexmlXPathObject is a structure containing a type description and the
variouspossibilities. (Using an enum could have gained some bytes.) In the
case ofnode sets (or result tree fragments), it points to a separate
xmlNodeSetobject which contains the list of pointers to the document
nodes:</p>

<p align="center"><img src="object.gif"
alt="An Node set object pointing to "></p>

<p>The <a href="http://xmlsoft.org/html/libxml-xpath.html">XPath
API</a>(andits <a
href="http://xmlsoft.org/html/libxml-xpathinternals.html">'internal'part</a>)
includes a number of functions to create, copy, compare, convert orfree XPath
objects.</p>

<h3><a name="XPath3">XPath functions</a></h3>

<p>All the XPath functions available to the interpreter are registered in
thefunction hash table linked from the XPath context. They all share the
samesignature:</p>
<pre>void xmlXPathFunc (xmlXPathParserContextPtr ctxt, int nargs);</pre>

<p>The first argument is the XPath interpretation context, holding
theinterpretation stack. The second argument defines the number of
objectspassed on the stack for the function to consume (last argument is on
top ofthe stack).</p>

<p>Basically an XPath function does the following:</p>
<ul>
  <li>check <code>nargs</code>for proper handling of errors or functionswith
    variable numbers of parameters</li>
  <li>pop the parameters from the stack using <code>obj
    =valuePop(ctxt);</code></li>
  <li>do the function specific computation</li>
  <li>push the result parameter on the stack using
    <code>valuePush(ctxt,res);</code></li>
  <li>free up the input parameters
  with<code>xmlXPathFreeObject(obj);</code></li>
  <li>return</li>
</ul>

<p>Sometime the work can be done directly by modifying in-situ the top
objecton the stack <code>ctxt-&gt;value</code>.</p>

<h3><a name="stack">The XSLT variables stack frame</a></h3>

<p>Not to be confused with XPath object stack, this stack holds the
XSLTvariables and parameters as they are defined through the recursive calls
ofcall-template, apply-templates and default templates. This is used to
definethe scope of variables being called.</p>

<p>This part seems to be the most urgent attention right now, first it isdone
in a very inefficient way since the location of the variables andparameters
within the stylesheet tree is still done at run time (it reallyshould be done
statically at compile time), and I am still unsure that myunderstanding of
the template variables and parameter scope is actuallyright.</p>

<p>This part of the documentation is still to be written once this part ofthe
code will be stable. <span style="background-color: #FF0000">TODO</span></p>

<h3><a name="Extension">Extension support</a></h3>

<p>There is a separate document explaining <a href="extensions.html">how
theextension support works</a>.</p>

<h3><a name="Futher">Further reading</a></h3>

<p>Michael Kay wrote <a
href="http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/library/x-xslt2/?dwzone=x?open&amp;l=132%2ct=gr%2c+p=saxon">areally
interesting article on Saxon internals</a>and the work he did onperformance
issues. I wishes I had read it before starting libxslt design (Iwould
probably have avoided a few mistakes and progressed faster). A lot ofthe
ideas in his papers should be implemented or at least tried inlibxslt.</p>

<p>The <a href="http://xmlsoft.org/">libxml documentation</a>, especially <a
href="http://xmlsoft.org/xmlio.html">the I/O interfaces</a>and the <a
href="http://xmlsoft.org/xmlmem.html">memory management</a>.</p>

<h3><a name="TODOs">TODOs</a></h3>

<p>redesign the XSLT stack frame handling. Far too much work is done
atexecution time. Similarly for the attribute value templates handling,
atleast the embedded subexpressions ought to be precompiled.</p>

<p>Allow output to be saved to a SAX like output (this notion of SAX like
APIfor output should be added directly to libxml).</p>

<p>Implement and test some of the optimization explained by Michael
Kayespecially:</p>
<ul>
  <li>static slot allocation on the stack frame</li>
  <li>specific boolean interpretation of an XPath expression</li>
  <li>some of the sorting optimization</li>
  <li>Lazy evaluation of location path. (this may require more changes
    butsounds really interesting. XT does this too.)</li>
  <li>Optimization of an expression tree (This could be done as a
    completelyindependent module.)</li>
</ul>

<p></p>

<p>Error reporting, there is a lot of case where the XSLT
specificationspecify that a given construct is an error are not checked
adequately bylibxslt. Basically one should do a complete pass on the XSLT
spec again andadd all tests to the stylesheet compilation. Using the DTD
provided in theappendix and making direct checks using the libxml validation
API sounds agood idea too (though one should take care of not raising errors
forelements/attributes in different namespaces).</p>

<p>Double check all the places where the stylesheet compiled form might
bemodified at run time (extra removal of blanks nodes, hint on
thexsltCompMatch).</p>

<p></p>

<h2><a name="Extensions">Writing extensions</a></h2>

<h3>Table  of content</h3>
<ul>
  <li><a href="extensions.html#Introducti">Introduction</a></li>
  <li><a href="extensions.html#Basics">Basics</a></li>
  <li><a href="extensions.html#Keep">Extension modules</a></li>
  <li><a href="extensions.html#Registerin">Registering a module</a></li>
  <li><a href="extensions.html#module">Loading a module</a></li>
  <li><a href="extensions.html#Registerin1">Registering an
    extensionfunction</a></li>
  <li><a href="extensions.html#Implementi">Implementing an
    extensionfunction</a></li>
  <li><a href="extensions.html#Examples">Examples for
  extensionfunctions</a></li>
  <li><a href="extensions.html#Registerin2">Registering an
    extensionelement</a></li>
  <li><a href="extensions.html#Implementi1">Implementing an
    extensionelement</a></li>
  <li><a href="extensions.html#Example">Example for extensionelements</a></li>
  <li><a href="extensions.html#shutdown">The shutdown of a module</a></li>
  <li><a href="extensions.html#Future">Future work</a></li>
</ul>

<h3><a name="Introducti1">Introduction</a></h3>

<p>This document describes the work needed to write extensions to thestandard
XSLT library for use with <a href="http://xmlsoft.org/XSLT/">libxslt</a>, the
<a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xslt">XSLT</a>C library developed for the <a
href="http://www.gnome.org/">Gnome</a>project.</p>

<p>Before starting reading this document it is highly recommended to
getfamiliar with <a href="internals.html">the libxslt internals</a>.</p>

<p>Note: this documentation is by definition incomplete and I am not good
atspelling, grammar, so patches and suggestions are <a
href="mailto:veillard@redhat.com">really welcome</a>.</p>

<h3><a name="Basics">Basics</a></h3>

<p>The <a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xslt">XSLT specification</a>providestwo
<a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xslt">ways to extend an XSLT engine</a>:</p>
<ul>
  <li>providing <a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xslt">new
    extensionfunctions</a>which can be called from XPath expressions</li>
  <li>providing <a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xslt">new
    extensionelements</a>which can be inserted in stylesheets</li>
</ul>

<p>In both cases the extensions need to be associated to a new namespace,i.e.
an URI used as the name for the extension's namespace (there is no needto
have a resource there for this to work).</p>

<p>libxslt provides a few extensions itself, either in the libxslt
namespace"http://xmlsoft.org/XSLT/namespace" or in namespaces for other well
knownextensions provided by other XSLT processors like Saxon, Xalan or XT.</p>

<h3><a name="Keep">Extension modules</a></h3>

<p>Since extensions are bound to a namespace name, usually sets of
extensionscoming from a given source are using the same namespace name
defining inpractice a group of extensions providing elements, functions or
both. Fromthe libxslt point of view those are considered as an "extension
module", andmost of the APIs work at a module point of view.</p>

<p>Registration of new functions or elements are bound to the activation
ofthe module. This is currently done by declaring the namespace as an
extensionby using the attribute  <code>extension-element-prefixes</code>on
the<code><a
href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xslt">xsl:stylesheet</a></code>element.</p>

<p>An extension module is defined by 3 objects:</p>
<ul>
  <li>the namespace name associated</li>
  <li>an initialization function</li>
  <li>a shutdown function</li>
</ul>

<h3><a name="Registerin">Registering a module</a></h3>

<p>Currently a libxslt module has to be compiled within the application
usinglibxslt. There is no code to load dynamically shared libraries
associated toa namespace (this may be added but is likely to become a
portabilitynightmare).</p>

<p>The current way to register a module is to link the code implementing
itwith the application and to call a registration function:</p>
<pre>int xsltRegisterExtModule(const xmlChar *URI,
                          xsltExtInitFunction initFunc,
                          xsltExtShutdownFunction shutdownFunc);</pre>

<p>The associated header is read by:</p>
<pre>#include&lt;libxslt/extensions.h&gt;</pre>

<p>which also defines the type for the initialization and
shutdownfunctions</p>

<h3><a name="module">Loading a module</a></h3>

<p>Once the module URI has been registered and if the XSLT processor
detectsthat a given stylesheet needs the functionalities of an extended
module, thisone is initialized.</p>

<p>The xsltExtInitFunction type defines the interface for an
initializationfunction:</p>
<pre>/**
 * xsltExtInitFunction:
 * @ctxt:  an XSLT transformation context
 * @URI:  the namespace URI for the extension
 *
 * A function called at initialization time of an XSLT
 * extension module
 *
 * Returns a pointer to the module specific data for this
 * transformation
 */
typedef void *(*xsltExtInitFunction)(xsltTransformContextPtr ctxt,
                                     const xmlChar *URI);</pre>

<p>There are 3 things to notice:</p>
<ul>
  <li>The function gets passed the namespace name URI as an argument.
    Thisallows a single function to provide the initialization for
    multiplelogical modules.</li>
  <li>It also gets passed a transformation context. The initialization isdone
    at run time before any processing occurs on the stylesheet but itwill be
    invoked separately each time for each transformation.</li>
  <li>It returns a pointer.  This can be used to store module
    specificinformation which can be retrieved later when a function or an
    elementfrom the extension is used.  An obvious example is a connection to
    adatabase which should be kept and reused along with the
    transformation.NULL is a perfectly valid return; there is no way to
    indicate a failureat this level</li>
</ul>

<p>What this function is expected to do is:</p>
<ul>
  <li>prepare the context for this module (like opening the
    databaseconnection)</li>
  <li>register the extensions specific to this module</li>
</ul>

<h3><a name="Registerin1">Registering an extension function</a></h3>

<p>There is a single call to do this registration:</p>
<pre>int xsltRegisterExtFunction(xsltTransformContextPtr ctxt,
                            const xmlChar *name,
                            const xmlChar *URI,
                            xmlXPathEvalFunc function);</pre>

<p>The registration is bound to a single transformation instance referred
byctxt, name is the UTF8 encoded name for the NCName of the function, and
URIis the namespace name for the extension (no checking is done, a module
couldregister functions or elements from a different namespace, but it is
notrecommended).</p>

<h3><a name="Implementi">Implementing an extension function</a></h3>

<p>The implementation of the function must have the signature of a
libxmlXPath function:</p>
<pre>/**
 * xmlXPathEvalFunc:
 * @ctxt: an XPath parser context
 * @nargs: the number of arguments passed to the function
 *
 * an XPath evaluation function, the parameters are on the
 * XPath context stack
 */

typedef void (*xmlXPathEvalFunc)(xmlXPathParserContextPtr ctxt,
                                 int nargs);</pre>

<p>The context passed to an XPath function is not an XSLT context but an <a
href="internals.html#XPath1">XPath context</a>. However it is possible tofind
one from the other:</p>
<ul>
  <li>The function xsltXPathGetTransformContext provides this lookup facility:
    <pre>xsltTransformContextPtr
         xsltXPathGetTransformContext
                          (xmlXPathParserContextPtr ctxt);</pre>
  </li>
  <li>The <code>xmlXPathContextPtr</code>associated to
    an<code>xsltTransformContext</code>is stored in the
    <code>xpathCtxt</code>field.</li>
</ul>

<p>The first thing an extension function may want to do is to check
thearguments passed on the stack, the <code>nargs</code>parameter will tell
howmany of them were provided on the XPath expression. The macro valuePop
willextract them from the XPath stack:</p>
<pre>#include &lt;libxml/xpath.h&gt;
#include &lt;libxml/xpathInternals.h&gt;

xmlXPathObjectPtr obj = valuePop(ctxt); </pre>

<p>Note that <code>ctxt</code>is the XPath context not the XSLT one. It
isthen possible to examine the content of the value. Check <a
href="internals.html#Descriptio">the description of XPath
objects</a>ifnecessary. The following is a common sequence checking whether
the argumentpassed is a string and converting it using the built-in
XPath<code>string()</code>function if this is not the case:</p>
<pre>if (obj-&gt;type != XPATH_STRING) {
    valuePush(ctxt, obj);
    xmlXPathStringFunction(ctxt, 1);
    obj = valuePop(ctxt);
}</pre>

<p>Most common XPath functions are available directly at the C level and
areexported either in <code>&lt;libxml/xpath.h&gt;</code>or
in<code>&lt;libxml/xpathInternals.h&gt;</code>.</p>

<p>The extension function may also need to retrieve the data associated
tothis module instance (the database connection in the previous example)
thiscan be done using the xsltGetExtData:</p>
<pre>void * xsltGetExtData(xsltTransformContextPtr ctxt,
                      const xmlChar *URI);</pre>

<p>Again the URI to be provided is the one which was used when registeringthe
module.</p>

<p>Once the function finishes, don't forget to:</p>
<ul>
  <li>push the return value on the stack using
    <code>valuePush(ctxt,obj)</code></li>
  <li>deallocate the parameters passed to the function
    using<code>xmlXPathFreeObject(obj)</code></li>
</ul>

<h3><a name="Examples">Examples for extension functions</a></h3>

<p>The module libxslt/functions.c contains the sources of the XSLT
built-infunctions, including document(), key(), generate-id(), etc. as well
as a fullexample module at the end. Here is the test function implementation
for thelibxslt:test function:</p>
<pre>/**
 * xsltExtFunctionTest:
 * @ctxt:  the XPath Parser context
 * @nargs:  the number of arguments
 *
 * function libxslt:test() for testing the extensions support.
 */
static void
xsltExtFunctionTest(xmlXPathParserContextPtr ctxt, int nargs)
{
    xsltTransformContextPtr tctxt;
    void *data;

    tctxt = xsltXPathGetTransformContext(ctxt);
    if (tctxt == NULL) {
        xsltGenericError(xsltGenericErrorContext,
            "xsltExtFunctionTest: failed to get the transformation context\n");
        return;
    }
    data = xsltGetExtData(tctxt, (const xmlChar *) XSLT_DEFAULT_URL);
    if (data == NULL) {
        xsltGenericError(xsltGenericErrorContext,
            "xsltExtFunctionTest: failed to get module data\n");
        return;
    }
#ifdef WITH_XSLT_DEBUG_FUNCTION
    xsltGenericDebug(xsltGenericDebugContext,
                     "libxslt:test() called with %d args\n", nargs);
#endif
}</pre>

<h3><a name="Registerin2">Registering an extension element</a></h3>

<p>There is a single call to do this registration:</p>
<pre>int xsltRegisterExtElement(xsltTransformContextPtr ctxt,
                           const xmlChar *name,
                           const xmlChar *URI,
                           xsltTransformFunction function);</pre>

<p>It is similar to the mechanism used to register an extension
function,except that the signature of an extension element implementation
isdifferent.</p>

<p>The registration is bound to a single transformation instance referred
toby ctxt, name is the UTF8 encoded name for the NCName of the element, and
URIis the namespace name for the extension (no checking is done, a module
couldregister elements for a different namespace, but it is not
recommended).</p>

<h3><a name="Implementi1">Implementing an extension element</a></h3>

<p>The implementation of the element must have the signature of an
XSLTtransformation function:</p>
<pre>/** 
 * xsltTransformFunction: 
 * @ctxt: the XSLT transformation context
 * @node: the input node
 * @inst: the stylesheet node 
 * @comp: the compiled information from the stylesheet 
 * 
 * signature of the function associated to elements part of the
 * stylesheet language like xsl:if or xsl:apply-templates.
 */ 
typedef void (*xsltTransformFunction)
                          (xsltTransformContextPtr ctxt,
                           xmlNodePtr node,
                           xmlNodePtr inst,
                           xsltStylePreCompPtr comp);</pre>

<p>The first argument is the XSLT transformation context. The second andthird
arguments are xmlNodePtr i.e. internal memory <a
href="internals.html#libxml">representation of  XML nodes</a>. They
arerespectively <code>node</code>from the the input document being
transformedby the stylesheet and <code>inst</code>the extension element in
thestylesheet. The last argument is <code>comp</code>a pointer to a
precompiledrepresentation of <code>inst</code>but usually for an extension
functionthis value is <code>NULL</code>by default (it could be added and
associatedto the instruction in <code>inst-&gt;_private</code>).</p>

<p>The same functions are available from a function implementing an
extensionelement as in an extension function,
including<code>xsltGetExtData()</code>.</p>

<p>The goal of an extension element being usually to enrich the
generatedoutput, it is expected that they will grow the currently generated
outputtree. This can be done by grabbing ctxt-&gt;insert which is the
currentlibxml node being generated (Note this can also be the intermediate
valuetree being built for example to initialize a variable, the processing
shouldbe similar). The functions for libxml tree manipulation from <a
href="http://xmlsoft.org/html/libxml-tree.html">&lt;libxml/tree.h&gt;</a>canbe
employed to extend or modify the tree, but it is required to preserve
theinsertion node and its ancestors since there are existing pointers to
thoseelements still in use in the XSLT template execution stack.</p>

<h3><a name="Example">Example for extension elements</a></h3>

<p>The module libxslt/transform.c contains the sources of the XSLT
built-inelements, including xsl:element, xsl:attribute, xsl:if, etc. There is
a smallbut full example in functions.c providing the implementation for
thelibxslt:test element, it will output a comment in the result tree:</p>
<pre>/**
 * xsltExtElementTest:
 * @ctxt:  an XSLT processing context
 * @node:  The current node
 * @inst:  the instruction in the stylesheet
 * @comp:  precomputed informations
 *
 * Process a libxslt:test node
 */
static void
xsltExtElementTest(xsltTransformContextPtr ctxt, xmlNodePtr node,
                   xmlNodePtr inst,
                   xsltStylePreCompPtr comp)
{
    xmlNodePtr comment;

    if (ctxt == NULL) {
        xsltGenericError(xsltGenericErrorContext,
                         "xsltExtElementTest: no transformation context\n");
        return;
    }
    if (node == NULL) {
        xsltGenericError(xsltGenericErrorContext,
                         "xsltExtElementTest: no current node\n");
        return;
    }
    if (inst == NULL) {
        xsltGenericError(xsltGenericErrorContext,
                         "xsltExtElementTest: no instruction\n");
        return;
    }
    if (ctxt-&gt;insert == NULL) {
        xsltGenericError(xsltGenericErrorContext,
                         "xsltExtElementTest: no insertion point\n");
        return;
    }
    comment =
        xmlNewComment((const xmlChar *)
                      "libxslt:test element test worked");
    xmlAddChild(ctxt-&gt;insert, comment);
}</pre>

<h3><a name="shutdown">The shutdown of a module</a></h3>

<p>When the XSLT processor ends a transformation, the shutdown function (ifit
exists) for each of the modules initialized is called. 
ThexsltExtShutdownFunction type defines the interface for a
shutdownfunction:</p>
<pre>/**
 * xsltExtShutdownFunction:
 * @ctxt:  an XSLT transformation context
 * @URI:  the namespace URI for the extension
 * @data:  the data associated to this module
 *
 * A function called at shutdown time of an XSLT extension module
 */
typedef void (*xsltExtShutdownFunction) (xsltTransformContextPtr ctxt,
                                         const xmlChar *URI,
                                         void *data);</pre>

<p>This is really similar to a module initialization function except a
thirdargument is passed, it's the value that was returned by the
initializationfunction. This allows the routine to deallocate resources from
the module forexample close the connection to the database to keep the same
example.</p>

<h3><a name="Future">Future work</a></h3>

<p>Well, some of the pieces missing:</p>
<ul>
  <li>a way to load shared libraries to instantiate new modules</li>
  <li>a better detection of extension functions usage and their
    registrationwithout having to use the extension prefix which ought to be
    reserved toelement extensions.</li>
  <li>more examples</li>
  <li>implementations of the <a
    href="http://www.exslt.org/">EXSLT</a>commonextension libraries, Thomas
    Broyer nearly finished implementing them.</li>
</ul>

<p></p>

<h2><a name="Contributi">Contributions</a></h2>
<ul>
  <li>Bjorn Reese is the author of the number support and worked on
    theXSLTMark support</li>
  <li>William Brack was an early adopted, contributed a number of patches
    andspent quite some time debugging non-trivial problems in early versions
    oflibxslt</li>
  <li><a href="mailto:igor@zlatkovic.com">Igor  Zlatkovic</a>is now
    themaintainer of the Windows port, <a
    href="http://www.zlatkovic.com/projects/libxml/index.html">he
    providesbinaries</a></li>
  <li>Thomas Broyer provided a lot of suggestions, and drafted most of
    theextension API</li>
  <li>John Fleck maintains <a href="tutorial/libxslttutorial.html">a
    tutorialfor libxslt</a></li>
  <li><a
    href="http://mail.gnome.org/archives/xml/2001-March/msg00014.html">MattSergeant</a>developed
    <a href="http://axkit.org/download/">XML::LibXSLT</a>, a perl wrapper
    forlibxml2/libxslt as part of the <a href="http://axkit.com/">AxKit
    XMLapplication server</a></li>
  <li>there is a module for <a
    href="http://acs-misc.sourceforge.net/nsxml.html">libxml/libxslt
    supportin OpenNSD/AOLServer</a></li>
  <li><a href="mailto:dkuhlman@cutter.rexx.com">Dave
    Kuhlman</a>provideslibxml/libxslt <a
    href="http://www.rexx.com/~dkuhlman">wrappers forPython</a></li>
  <li><a href="mailto:Steve.Ball@explain.com.au">Steve Ball</a>,
    andcontributors maintain <a
    href="http://tclxml.sourceforge.net/">tclbindings for libxml2 and
    libxslt</a>, as well as <a
    href="http://tclxml.sf.net/tkxmllint.html">tkxmllint</a>a GUI forxmllint
    and <a href="http://tclxml.sf.net/tkxsltproc.html">tkxsltproc</a>a GUI
    for xsltproc.</li>
  <li>If you want to use libxslt in a Mac OS X/Cocoa or Objective-Cframework,
    Marc Liyanage provides <a
    href="http://www.entropy.ch/software/macosx/#testxslt">an
    applicationTestXSLT for XSLT and XML editing</a>including wrapper classes
    for theXML parser and XSLT processor.</li>
</ul>

<p></p>

<p><a href="mailto:daniel@veillard.com">Daniel Veillard</a></p>
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