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Using Expat

by Clark Cooper
September 01, 1999

What is expat?

Expat is a library, written in C, for parsing XML documents. It's the underlying XML parser for the open source Mozilla project, perl's XML::Parser, and other open-source XML parsers. As demonstrated in my benchmark article, it's very fast. It also sets a high standard for reliability, robustness and correctness.

This library is the creation of James Clark, who's also given us groff (an nroff look-alike), Jade (an implemention of ISO's DSSSL stylesheet language for SGML), XP (a Java XML parser package), and XT (a Java XSL engine). James was also the technical lead on the XML Working Group at W3 that produced the XML specification. Many of these packages are available from ftp://ftp.jclark.com/pub, including expat. There's also a test version , which has newer features, but which may not be as robust as the non-test version. This article is based on a test version, Version 19990709.

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