[xml] Problems when using several free functions

[Pinho external infineon com]

Hi There,

        First of all I'm new to the world of C and libxml, and due to my OO
background (mainly JAVA) I don't master the ways of pointers, and I'm having
a hard time to get some things right using libxml.

        The program that I'm developing is using xPath in a massive way,
it's a kind of XML document comparer, but, it doesn't care about the order
of it's elements, so with xPath it's very easy to compare two elements even
if thay have a different order in the XMLDocument.

        To get this done I'm using xPath API and some structs from tree API
like xmlDocPtr or xmlNode, etc...

        The program reads a XML document string and then parse it's
(xmlParseDoc(stringWithXmlDoc)), then, depending on the kind of structure
that I find (simple, complex, array, etc) I do diferent things. 
        I always use xmlXPathEvalExpression to get the node that I want and
then use the returned node to compare the values and the inner structure of
some xml elements to see if they are equal. To travel trough all the Xml
document I use a recursive function. 

        
        I have 2 problems:

        I wanted to initialize the context only once, outside that recursive
function, and then call the recursive function, when I do this, at the 2nd
or 3th level of recursion the xmlXPathEvalExpression returns null, just like
the context changed, this is strange because I've done nothing to the
context !?!? If I do the parsing of the string (call the xmlParseDoc
function again) and then create the context at each recursive call it's
works fine, if I try to initiate the context only once, I get the problem
described. 

        Another problem that I'm having is when I use the functions to free
the libxml objects, sometimes I get a invalid access error (before the call
to the xmlFreeXXXX I test the variable to see if it's null). Is there
another test I must do before calling the xmlFreeXXX functions? When must I
call the function xmlFreeXXX, only when the API tells me to?





Any help is very welcome,


Thank You

Luís Pinho