Re: [xml] Extracting multiple XML fragments of the same type

[Daniel Veillard <veillard redhat com>]

On Fri, Aug 23, 2002 at 01:14:36PM +0200, Holger Rauch wrote:
> I *do* want to understand it, but the functionality that libxml2 offers
> can be overwhelming, especially if you are new to this lib (like I am).

  The API is huge, operation on trees are complex, the tree structure
is complex. Knowing it requires investment, knowing it well requires
reading at least part of the code. Avoiding that would mean to write a book,
and honnestly I don't have time for that ATM.

> > So please try to reuse the existing documentation,
> > agreed it's not perfect nor complete but I take patches !
>
> The problem I got with the existing libxml2 documentation is that the tree
> module offers a lot of functions, which are not alphabetically sorted. So,
> it's easy to overlook something. Also, contrary to other API documentation
> (like the one of glib, for instance), the documentation of libxml2
> contains very few examples. So, one is confronted with the following
> choices:
>
> 1. Read the tutorials, try to understand them, see whether one can find
> what he is looking for (I did that)
> 2. Search the mailing list archives (did that too)
> 3. Read the API docs which may be a very good reference, but make it can
> be really hard to find what you're looking for.

4. read the code, sorry for some fine grained analysis it's the reference,
   I tried to comment it also. yes it's a toolkit, so my users are mostly
   programmers, and I have no shame to require reading the code for precise
   understanding.

> 4. If 1-3 don't help, ask the mailing list
>
> I would be willing to contribute to the docs, but I simply do not have the
> libxml2 knowledge required to come up with good examples.

  One of the suggestion I provide frequently too is to read some of the
test code  testXXX.c in the distribution, but in your case it would not have
helped ...

Daniel

-- 
Daniel Veillard      | Red Hat Network https://rhn.redhat.com/
veillard redhat com  | libxml GNOME XML XSLT toolkit  http://xmlsoft.org/
http://veillard.com/ | Rpmfind RPM search engine http://rpmfind.net/