XML Hacks

Create Well-Formed XML with Genx

If you prefer the C language, Genx provides a fast, efficient C library for generating well-formed and canonical XML. On top of that, it’s well documented and a real pleasure to use.

Genx (http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2004/02/20/GenxStatus) is an easy-to-use C library for generating well-formed XML output. In addition to its output being well-formed, Genx writes all output in canonical form. It was created by Tim Bray with help from members of the xml-dev mailing list (http://xml.org/xml/xmldev.shtml) over the first few months of 2004. Some of the benefits of Genx include size, efficiency, speed, and the integrity of its output. Genx is well documented (http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/genx/docs/Guide.html) and it’s fairly easy to figure out what’s going on just by looking at the well-commented source code.

This hack shows you how to download, install, and compile Genx, then walks you through two example programs. The hack assumes that you are familiar the C programming language, and that you have a C compiler and the make build utility available on your system. The example programs in this hack have been tested under Version beta5 of Genx.

Setting Up Genx

The first thing you have to is download Genx. It comes in a tarball only. After you download it to the working directory for the book, you need to extract the files. While at a shell or command prompt in the working directory, if you are on a machine that runs a Unix operating system, decompress ...