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zuxml 0.1.0

First release.

Parsing

• xml_parse() parses XML from a single string or a raw vector, and xml_read() from a file, a URL or a connection. Both build an immutable document tree. A character vector of another length is an error rather than being joined silently: join the lines of readLines() with "\n" first.
• xml_read() streams: a string starting with http://, https://, ftp://, ftps:// or file:// is opened with url(), anything else with file(), and a connection (gzfile(), rawConnection(), a socket) is accepted as is. Bytes are fed to the parser as they are read through R’s connection API, so the body is never held whole; only an encoding that must go through iconv() is read in full first. An unopened connection is opened in binary mode and closed afterwards; an open one must be binary and blocking, and is left open. A URL or file that cannot be opened is a zuxml: error naming the cause (HTTP status was '404 Not Found'), with no stray warning.
• Encodings Expat handles natively are passed through, under any of their common spellings ("latin1", "UTF8", "ASCII"); anything else is transcoded with iconv(), after which the (now stale) encoding declaration is overridden so it cannot mislead the parser. A character string is already decoded, so encoding must be NULL or UTF-8 for one.

Navigation and accessors

• xml_root(), xml_parent(), xml_children(), xml_elements() and xml_find() walk the tree. xml_elements() and xml_find() take an optional name and namespace filter.
• xml_find_first() returns one node per input: the first matching descendant, or a missing node where there is none. Every accessor gives NA for a missing node, so per-record lookups stay aligned when a field is absent, which a flat xml_find() cannot do.
• xml_name(), xml_local(), xml_ns(), xml_prefix(), xml_attr(), xml_attrs(), xml_text() and xml_type() read node properties. All are vectorized over a nodeset, so n nodes give a result of length n.
• Text nodes are maximal: adjacent character data is always one node, whatever the input chunk boundaries were and whether or not comments or pis dropped a node that sat in the middle of it.
• Names are matched on (namespace, local name) only. Prefixes are retained for serialization and diagnostics but never decide identity, so two prefixes bound to one URI are the same name.
• Nodesets behave like vectors: [, [[, c(), rev(), length() and format() methods are provided.
• xml_version(), xml_encoding() and xml_standalone() read the XML declaration.

Extracting tables and lists

• xml_table() turns table elements into data frames: rows from the table and its thead, tbody and tfoot, colspan and rowspan expanded, header detected from a row of th cells, every column character. The expanded size is bounded by max_cells, so a hostile span cannot become a huge allocation.
• xml_list() turns ul and ol elements into lists, with nested lists as nested items.
• Both read XML, XHTML included, and apply no HTML parsing rules.

Writing

• xml_serialize() returns XML text and xml_write() sends it to a file. Order, attributes, text and namespace semantics round-trip; original formatting (quote style, inter-attribute whitespace, CDATA boundaries) does not.
• Output is always UTF-8, and a prepended declaration says so whatever the source document declared. declaration = TRUE applies to a single node, so it cannot produce a file carrying one declaration per node.

Security

• Document type declarations are rejected by default. allow_doctype = TRUE accepts one, but still rejects an internal subset, which is the only place a document can declare entities.
• External entity resolution is not compiled in at all, so no file or network access is reachable from a parse regardless of input or options.
• max_depth, max_nodes, max_attrs, max_text and max_memory bound what a hostile document can cost. Each raises its own condition, and all of them inherit from zuxml_limit_error. A limit must be a positive whole number, or Inf for the largest the parser can represent; anything else, including a value above that, is an error, never replaced by the default.
• Every error is a typed condition under a zuxml_error parent. Parse failures carry line, column, byte offset, the C status and Expat’s error code; limit failures also name the limit and its value. Unusable arguments raise zuxml_invalid_argument. See ?"zuxml-conditions".
• zuxml_info() reports the policy compiled into the installed build.

For package authors

• A registered C function table lets other packages parse XML without linking against Expat themselves: Imports: zuxml plus LinkingTo: zuxml, an importFrom(zuxml, ...) directive in NAMESPACE (without it zuxml’s namespace is never loaded and the table is never registered), then zuxml_api_get() from <zuxml.h>. The header documents the string-lifetime contract and the versioning rules, and compiles cleanly as C and C++ under -Wall -Wextra -Werror.
• Tree construction, traversal, text concatenation, serialization and freeing are all iterative, so arbitrarily deep documents cannot overflow the C stack.
• An installed zuxml also ships lib${R_ARCH}/libzuxml.a (plain lib/ where R sets no architecture) together with Expat’s expat.h and expat_external.h, so a package whose C code is written against Expat itself can link the parser statically through LinkingTo rather than being rewritten around the function table. The table remains the recommended interface; see “Using zuxml from C” in the README for the differences that come with the archive, the parser policy compiled into it among them.

Bundled software

• Expat 2.8.4 is bundled under src/vendor/expat/, so no system XML library is required. One local patch removes a debug-only write to stderr that upstream compiles in; nothing else differs from the release. See LICENSE.note and inst/COPYRIGHTS.

These binaries (installable software) and packages are in development.
They may not be fully stable and should be used with caution. We make no claims about them.