Re: [xml] Release of libxml2-2.7.1

[Rob Richards <rrichards ctindustries net>]

Colin Guthrie wrote:
> Hi Daniel,
>
> Daniel Veillard wrote:
> >   Python serialization code was broken in 2.7.0 so here is a new release
> > with a cleanup of that code, even more isolation of the new buffer type
> > from user code and a couple of fixes:
> >
> > * Portability fix:
> >  - Borland C fix (Moritz Both)
> > * Bug fixes:
> >  - python serialization wrappers
> >  - XPath QName corner case handking and leaks (Martin)
> > * Improvement:
> >  - extend the xmlSave to handle HTML documents and trees
> > * Cleanup:
> >  - python serialization wrappers
> >
> >   I hope that one is a good one !
>
> Not sure if this is the right avenue to report this bug but I'm having 
> some fairly serious regressions.
>
> I've not tested 2.7.0, but 2.7.1 is definitely affected.
>
> I noticed the problem in PHP parsing of XML, and have submitted a 
> bugreport and a test case to the following bug:
>
> https://qa.mandriva.com/show_bug.cgi?id=43486
>
> Essentially, when using PHPs older parsing functions (which I thought 
> were built on expat rather than libxml2 but it seems not), escaped 
> entities in cdata are completely ignored. i.e. > < etc.
>
> See the attachment on the above bug for a test case which requires PHP 
> to be installed.
>
> Hopefully someone can shed some light on the situation.
>
> Col

Can you report this as a PHP bug? It looks like some really old hack 
code in the PHP extension in order to mimic some specific expat 
functionality. The behavior change you see though resulting from a code 
changes in libxml2 is really due to the hackish code in the extension 
doing things it wasnt meant to be doing. You're better off using the 
xmlreader extension in PHP in any case as its simpler, faster, more 
powerful and doesn't have any legacy issues like the old xml extension.

Rob