<?xml version='1.0' encoding='UTF-8'?>
<?xml-stylesheet type="text/css"
href="file:/home/ser/Work/documentation/documentation.css"
?>
<?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl"
href="../documentation/documentation.xsl"
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<!DOCTYPE documentation SYSTEM "../documentation/documentation.dtd">
<documentation>
  <head>
    <title>REXML</title>

    <banner href="img/rexml.png" />

    <version>2.1.2</version>

    <date>*2002-099</date>

    <home>http://www.germane-software.com/software/rexml</home>

    <base>rexml</base>

    <archive type="unix">Current release</archive>

    <archive type="dos">Current release</archive>

    <language>ruby</language>

    <author jabber="ser@jabber.com"
    href="http://www.germane-software.com/~ser"
    email="ser@germane-software.com">Sean Russell</author>
  </head>

  <overview>
    <purpose lang="en">
      <p>REXML is an XML processor for the language Ruby. REXML is conformant
      (passes 100% of the Oasis non-validating tests), and includes full XPath
      support. It is reasonably fast, and is implemented in pure Ruby. Best of
      all, it has a clean, intuitive API.</p>

      <p>This software is distribute under the <link href="LICENSE.txt">Ruby
      license</link>.</p>
    </purpose>

    <general>
      <p>Why REXML? There, at the time of this writing, already two XML
      parsers for Ruby. The first is a Ruby binding to a native XML parser.
      This is a fast parser, using proven technology. However, it isn&#39;t
      very portable. The second is a native Ruby implementation, and as useful
      as it is, it has (IMO) a difficult API.</p>

      <p>I have this problem: I dislike obscifucated APIs. There are several
      XML parser APIs for Java. Most of them follow DOM or SAX, and are very
      similar in philosophy with an increasing number of Java APIs. Namely,
      they look like they were designed by theorists who never had to use
      their own APIs. The extant XML APIs, in general, suck. They take a
      markup language which was specifically designed to be very simple,
      elegant, and powerful, and wrap an obnoxious, bloated, and large API
      around it. I was always having to refer to the API documentation to do
      even the most basic XML tree manipulations; nothing was intuitive, and
      almost every operation was complex.</p>

      <p>Then along came Electric XML.</p>

      <p>Ah, bliss. Look at the Electric XML API. First, the library is small;
      less that 500K. Next, the API is intuitive. You want to parse a
      document? <code>doc = new Document( some_file )</code>. Create and add a
      new element? <code>element = parent.addElement( tag_name )</code>. Write
      out a subtree?? <code>element.write( writer )</code>. Now how about DOM?
			To parse some file: 
<pre>parser = new DOMParser();
parser.parse( new InputSource( new FileInputStream( some_file ) ) )
</pre>
			Create a new
      element? First you have to know the owning document of the to-be-created
      node (can anyone say &#34;global variables, or obtuse, multi-argument
			methods&#34;?) and call 
<pre>element = doc.createElement( tag_name )
parent.appendChild( element )</pre>
			&#34;appendChild&#34;? Where did they
      get that from? How many different methods do we have in Java in how many
      different classes for adding children to parents? <code>addElement()</code>?
      <code>add()</code>? <code>put()</code>? <code>appendChild()</code>?
      Heaven forbid that you want to create an Element elsewhere in the code
      without having access to the owning document. I&#39;m not even going to
      go into what travesty of code you have to go through to write out an XML
      sub-tree in DOM.</p>

      <p>So, I use Electric XML extensively. It is small, fast, and intuitive.
      IE, the API doesn&#39;t add a bunch of work to the task of writing
      software. When I started to write more software in Ruby, I needed an XML
      parser. I wasn&#39;t keen on the native library binding,
      &#34;XMLParser&#34;, because I try to avoid complex library dependancies
      in my software, when I can. For a long time, I used NQXML, because it
      was the only other parser out there. However, the NQXML API can be even
      more painful than the Java DOM API. Almost all element operations
      requires accessing some indirect node access... you had to do something
      like element.node.attr[&#39;key&#39;], and it is never obvious to me
      when you access the element directly, or the node.. or, really, why
      they&#39;re two different objects, anyway. This is even more unfortunate
      since Ruby is so elegent and intuitive, and bad APIs really stand out.
      I&#39;m not, by the way, trying to insult NQXML; I just don&#39;t like
      the API.</p>

      <p>I wrote the people at TheMind (Electric XML... get it?) and asked
      them if I could do a translation to Ruby. They said yes. After a few
      weeks of hacking on it for a couple of hours each week, and after having
      gone down a few blind alleys in the translation, I had a working beta.
      IE, it parsed, but hadn&#39;t gone through a lot of strenuous testing.
      Along the way, I had made a few changes to the API, and a lot of changes
      to the code. First off, Ruby does iterators differently than Java. Java
      uses a lot of helper classes. Helper classes are exactly the kinds of
      things that theorists come up with... they look good on paper, but using
      them is like chewing glass. You find that you spend 50% of your time
      writing helper classes just to support the other 50% of the code that
      actually does the job you were trying to solve in the first place. In
      this case, the Java helper classes are either Enumerations or Iterators.
      Ruby, on the other hand, uses blocks, which is much more elegant. Rather
      than:</p>

      <example>for (Enumeration e=parent.getChildren(); e.hasMoreElements(); ) {
   Element child = (Element)e.nextElement();
   // Do something with child
}</example>

      <p>you get:</p>

      <example>parent.each_child{ |child| # Do something with child }</example>

      <p>Can&#39;t you feel the peace and contentment in this block of code?
      Ruby is the language Buddha would have programmed in.</p>

      <p>Anyhoo, I chose to use blocks in REXML directly, since this is more
      common to Ruby code than <code>for x in y ... end</code>, which is as
      orthoganal to the original Java as possible.</p>

      <p>Also, I changed the naming conventions to more Ruby-esque method
      names. For example, the Java method <code>getAttributeValue()</code>
      becomes in Ruby <code>get_attribute_value()</code>. This is a toss-up. I
      actually like the Java naming convention more<footnote>This is no longer
      true. I&#39;m a convert to the Ruby naming scheme, for Ruby. The reason
      being that Ruby does a superb job of hiding the difference between
      attributes and methods; in fact, for all intents and purposes, you
      <em>can&#39;t</em> access attributes directly; all attribute accessors
      are methods. What this means in the long run is that there is no reason
      to have different naming conventions for attributes and methods.</footnote>,
      but the latter is more common in Ruby code, and I&#39;m trying to make
      things easy for Ruby programmers, not Java programmers.</p>

      <p>The biggest change was in the code. The Java version of Electric XML
      did a lot of efficient String-array parsing, character by character.
      Ruby, however, has ubiquitous, efficient, and powerful regular
      expression support. All regex functions are done in native code, so it
      is very fast, and the power of Ruby regex rivals that of Perl.
      Therefore, a direct conversion of the Java code to Ruby would have been
      more difficult, and much slower, than using Ruby regexps. I therefore
      used regexs. In doing so, I cut the number of lines of sourcecode by
      half.</p>

      <p>Finally, by this point the API looks almost nothing like the original
      Electric XML API, and practically none of the code is even vaguely
      similar. However, even though the actual code is completely different, I
      did borrow the same process of processing XML as Electric, and am deeply
      indebted to the Electric XML code for inspiration.</p>

      <p>One last thing. If you use and like this software, and you feel
      compelled to make some contribution to the author by way of saying
      &#34;thanks&#34;, and you happen to know what a tea cozy is and where to
			get them, then you can send me one. Send those puppies to: 
<pre>Sean Russell
60252 Rimfire Rd.
Bend, OR 97702
USA</pre>
      If you&#39;re outside of the US, make sure you write &#34;gift&#34; on
      it to avoid the taxes. If you don&#39;t want to send a tea cozy, you can
      also send money. Or don&#39;t send anything. Offer me a job I can&#39;t
      refuse, in Western Europe somewhere.</p>
    </general>

    <features lang="en">
      <item>Simple API</item>

      <item>Both stream (SAX-like) and tree (DOM-like) parsing<footnote>Be
      aware, however, that REXML is neither DOM nor SAX compliant, and will
      never be. The DOM and SAX APIs are unwieldy.</footnote></item>

      <item>Small</item>

      <item>Reasonably fast</item>

      <item>Native Ruby</item>

      <item>Full XPath support</item>

      <item>Fully XML 1.0 conformant</item>

      <item>ISO-8859-1, UNILE, UTF-16 and UTF-8 input and output</item>

      <item>Documentation</item>
    </features>
  </overview>

  <operation lang="en">
    <subsection title="Installation">
      <p>Run <code>ruby bin/install.rb</code>. By the way, you really should
      look at these sorts of files before you run them as root. They could
      contain anything, and since (in Ruby, at least) they tend to be
      mercifully short, it doesn&#39;t hurt to glance over them. If you want
      to uninstall REXML, run <code>ruby bin/install.rb -u</code>.</p>
    </subsection>

    <subsection title="Unit tests">
      <p>If you have runit or Test::Unit installed (with the runit API), you
      can run the unit test cases. You can run both installed and not
      installed tests; to run the tests before installing REXML, run
      <code>ruby -I. bin/suite.rb</code>. To run them with an installed REXML,
      use <code>ruby bin/suite.rb</code>.</p>
    </subsection>

    <subsection title="Benchmarks">
      <p>There is a benchmark suite in <code>benchmarks/</code>. To run the
      benchmarks, change into that directory and run <code>ruby comparison.rb</code>.
      If you have nothing else installed, only the benchmarks for REXML will
      be run. However, if you have any of the following installed, benchmarks
      for those tools will also be run:</p>

      <list>
        <item>NQXML</item>

        <item>XMLParser</item>

        <item>Electric XML (you must copy <code>EXML.jar</code> into the
        <code>benchmarks</code> directory and compile <code>flatbench.java</code>
        before running the test)</item>
      </list>

      <p>The results will be written to <code>index.html</code>.</p>
    </subsection>

    <subsection title="General Usage">
      <p>Please see <link href="docs/tutorial.html">the Tutorial</link>.</p>

      <p>The API documentation can be downloaded from <link
      href="http://www.germane-software.com/software/archives/rexml_api.tgz">here</link>,
      82Kb, (or in <link
      href="http://www.germane-software.com/software/archives/rexml_api.zip">ZIP
      format</link>, 413Kb, if you&#39;re a masochist). A better solution for
      the documentation is to download and install Dave Thomas&#39; <link
      href="http://rdoc.sourceforge.net">rdoc</link> and generate the API docs
      yourself; then you&#39;ll be sure to have the latest API docs and
      won&#39;t have to keep downloading the doc archive. The unit tests in
      <code>test/</code> and the benchmarking code in <code>benchmark </code>provide
      additional examples of using REXML. The Tutorial provides examples with
      commentary.</p>
    </subsection>
  </operation>

  <status>
    <subsection title="Change Log">
			<p>2.1.2: Fixed a bug with reading ISO-8859-1 encoded documents, and
				Document now includes Output, which it always should have.</p>
			<p>2.1.1: Forgot to add output.rb to the repository.</p>
      <p>2.1.0: IO optimizations, and support for ISO-8859-1 output. Fixed up
      pretty-printing a little. Now, if pretty-printing is turned on, text
      nodes are stripped before printing. This, obviously, can mess up what
      you&#39;d expect from :respect_whitespace, but pretty printing, by
      definition, must change your formatting. Updated the tutorial a bit.
      Please see the section on adding text for a warning, if you&#39;re using
      a non-UTF-8 compatable encoding. Changed behavior of <code>Element.attributes.each</code>.
      It now itterates over key, value pairs, rather than attributes. This was
      a feature request. Expanded the unit tests and subsequently fixed a
      number of obscure bugs. I&#39;m distributing the API documentation
      seperately from the main distribution now, because the API docs
      constitute nearly 50% of the total distribution size. FIxed a bug in
      namespace handling in attributes. Completely updated the API
      documentation for Element, Element.Elements, and Element.Attributes; the
      rest of the classes to follow. I&#39;m seriously contemplating removing
      the examples from the API documentation, because most of them are
      practically duplicates of the unit tests in <code>test/</code>.</p>

      <p>2.0.4: 2.0 munged the encoding value in output. This is fixed. I left
      debugging turned on in XPath in 2.0.2 :-/</p>

      <p>2.0.2: Added grouping &#39;(...)&#39; and preceding:: and following::
      axis. This means that, aside from functional bugs, XPath should have no
      missing functionality bugs. Keep in mind that not all Functions are
      tested, though.</p>

      <p>2.0.1: Added some unit tests, and fixed a namespace XPath bug WRT
      attribute default NS&#39;s. Unicode support was screwing up the upper
      end of ASCII support; chars between 0xF0 and 0xFD were getting munged.
      This has been fixed, at the cost of a small amount of speed. Optimized
      the descendant axes of XPath; it should be significantly faster for
      &#39;//&#39; and other descendant operations. Added several user
      contributed unit tests. Re-added QuickPath, the old, non-fully-XPath
      compliant, yet much faster, XPath processor. Everything is being
      converted to UTF8 now, and the XML declaration reflects this. See the
      bugs for more information.</p>

      <p>2.0: True XPath support. Finally. XPath is fully implemented now, and
      passes all of the tests I can throw at it, including complex XPaths such
      as <code>&#39;*[* and not(*/node()) and not(*[not(@style)]) and
      not(*/@style != */@style)]&#39;</code>. It may be slower than it was,
      but it should be reasonably efficient for what it is doing. The XPath
      spec doesn&#39;t help, and thwarts most attempts at optimization. Please
      see the notes on XPath for more information. Oh, and some minor bugs
      were fixed in the XML parser.</p>

      <p>1.2.8: Fixed a bug pointed out by Peter Verhage where the element
      names weren&#39;t being properly parsed if a namespace was involved.</p>

      <p>1.2.7: Fixing problems with the 1.2.6 distribution :-/. Added an
      &#34;applications using REXML&#34; section in this document -- send me
      those links! Added rdoc documentation. I&#39;m not using API2XML
      anymore. I think API2XML was the right model, generating XML rather than
      HTML (which is what rdoc does), but rdoc does a much better job at
      parsing Ruby source, and I really didn&#39;t want to go there in the
      first place. Also, I had forgotten to generate the Tutorial HTML.</p>

      <p>1.2.6: Documentation fix (TR). Fixed a bug in Element.add (and,
      therefore, Element.add_element). Added Robert Feldt&#39;s terse xml
      constructor to contrib/ (check it out; it&#39;s handy). Tobias
      discovered a terrible bug, whereby ENTITY wasn&#39;t printing out a
      final &#39;&#62;&#39;. After a long discussion with a couple of users,
      and some review of the XML spec, I decided to reverse the default
      handling of whitespace and pretty printing. REXML now no longer defaults
      to pretty printing, and preserves whitespace unless otherwise directed.
      Added provisional namespace support to XPath. XPath is going to require
      another rewrite.</p>

      <p>1.2.5: Bug fixes: doctypes that had spaces between the closing ] and
      &#62; generated errors. There was a small bug that caused too many
      newlines to be generated in some output. Eelis van der Weegen (what a
      great name!) pointed out one of the numerous API errors. Julian
      requested that add_attributes take both Hash (original) and array of
      arrays (as produced by StreamListener). I killed the mailing list,
      accidentally, and fixed it again. Fixed a bug in next_sibling, caused by
      a combination of mixing overriding &#60;=&#62;() and using
      Array.index().</p>

      <p>1.2.4: Changes since 1.1b: 100% OASIS valid tests passed. UTF-8/16
      support. Many bug fixes. to_a() added to Parent and Element.elements.
      Updated tutorial. Added variable IOSource buffer size, for stream
      parsing. delete() now fails silently rather than throwing an exception
      if it can&#39;t find the elemnt to delete. Added a patch to support
      REXMLBuilder. Reorganized file layout in distribution; added a
      repackaging program; added the logo.</p>

      <p>1.1b: Changes since 1.1a: Stream parsing added. Bug fixes in entity
      parsing. New XPath implementation, fixing many bugs and making feature
      complete. Completed whitespace handling, adding much functionality and
      fixing several bugs. Added convenience methods for inserting elememnts.
      Improved error reporting. Fixed attribute content to correctly handle
      quotes and apostrophes. Added mechanisms for handling raw text. Cleaned
      up utility programs (profile.rb, comparison.rb, etc.). Improved speed a
      little. Brought REXML up to 98.9% OASIS valid source compliance.</p>
    </subsection>

    <subsection title="Speed and Completeness">
      <p>Unfortunately, NQXML is the only package REXML can be compared
      against; XMLParser uses expat, which is a native library, and really is
      a different beast altogether. So in comparing NQXML and REXML you can
      look at four things: speed, size, completeness, and API.</p>

      <p><link href="benchmarks/index.html">Benchmarks</link></p>

      <p>REXML is faster than NQXML in some things, and slower than NQXML in a
      couple of things. You can see this for yourself by running the supplied
      benchmarks. Most of the places where REXML are slower are because of the
      convenience methods<footnote>For example, <code>element.elements[index]</code>
      isn&#39;t really an array operation; index can be an Integer or an
      XPath, and this feature is relatively time expensive.</footnote>. On the
      positive side, most of the convenience methods can be bypassed if you
      know what you are doing. Check the <link href="benchmarks/index.html">
      benchmark comparison page</link> for a <em>general</em> comparison. You
      can look at the benchmark code yourself to decide how much salt to take
      with them.</p>

      <p>The sizes of the XML parsers are close<footnote>As measured with
      <code>ruby -nle &#39;print unless /^\s*(#.*|)$/&#39; *.rb | wc -l</code>
      </footnote>. NQXML 1.1.3 has 1580 non-blank, non-comment lines of code;
      REXML 2.0 has 2340<footnote>REXML started out with about 1200, but that
      number has been steadily increasing as features are added. XPath
      accounts for 541 lines of that code, so the core REXML has about 1800
      LOC.</footnote>.</p>

      <p>REXML is a mostly conformant XML 1.0 parser. It supports multiple
      language encodings, and internal processing uses the required UTF-8 and
      UTF-16 encodings. It passes 100% of the Oasis non-validating tests.
      Furthermore, it provides a full implementation of XPath.</p>

      <p>The last thing is the API, and this is where I think REXML wins. The
      core API is clean and intuitive, and things work the way you would
      expect them to. Convenience methods abound, and you can code for either
      convenience or speed. REXML code is terse, and readable, like Ruby code
      should be. The best way to decide which you like more is to write a
      couple of small applications in each, then use the one you&#39;re more
      comfortable with.</p>
    </subsection>

    <subsection title="XPath">
      <p>As of release 2.0, XPath 1.0 is fully implemented.</p>

      <p>I fully expect bugs to crop up from time to time, so if you see any
      bogus XPath results, please let me know. That said, since I&#39;m now
      following the XPath grammar and spec fairly closely, I suspect that you
      won&#39;t be surprised by REXML&#39;s XPath very often, and it should
      become rock solid fairly quickly.</p>

      <p>Check the &#34;bugs&#34; section for known problems; there are little
      bits of XPath here and there that are not yet implemented, but I&#39;ll
      get to them soon.</p>

      <p>Namespace support is rather odd, but it isn&#39;t my fault. I can
      only do so much and still conform to the specs. In particular, XPath
      attempts to help as much as possible. Therefore, in the trivial cases,
      you can pass namespace prefixes to Element.elements[...] and so on -- in
      these cases, XPath will use the namespace environment of the base
      element you&#39;re starting your XPath search from. However, if you want
      to do something more complex, like pass in your own namespace
      environment, you have to use the XPath first(), each(), and match()
      methods. Also, default namespaces <em>force</em> you to use the XPath
      methods, rather than the convenience methods, because there is no way
      for XPath to know what the mappings for the default namespaces should
      be. This is exactly why I loath namespaces -- a pox on the person(s) who
      thought them up!</p>
    </subsection>

    <subsection title="Namespaces">
      <p>Namespace support is now fairly stable. One thing to be aware of is
      that REXML is not (yet) a validating parser. This means that some
      invalid namespace declarations are not caught.</p>
    </subsection>

    <subsection title="Mailing list">
      <p>There is a low-volume mailing list dedicated to REXML. To subscribe,
      send an empty email to <link
      href="mailto:ser-rexml-subscribe@germane-software.com">ser-rexml-subscribe@germane-software.com</link>.
      This list is more or less spam proof. To unsubscribe, similarly send a
      message to <link
      href="mailto:ser-rexml-unsubscribe@germane-software.com">ser-rexml-unsubscribe@germane-software.com</link>.</p>
    </subsection>

    <subsection title="Applications that use REXML">
      <list>
        <item>Chris Morris&#39; <link href="http://clabs.org/clxmlserial.htm">XML
        Serializer</link>. XML Serializer provides a serialization mechanism
        for Ruby that provides a bidirectional mapping between Ruby classes
        and XML documents.</item>

        <item>Much of the <link href="http://www.rubyxml.com">RubyXML</link>
        is generated with scripts that use REXML. RubyXML is a great site for
        information about Ruby and XML.</item>

        <item><link href="http://www.pinkjuice.com/ruby/jelly/">Jelly</link>
        is a generic utility for generating Ruby libs (XML writers) from W3C
        XML schemas.</item>
      </list>
    </subsection>

    <faq>
      <q>Why is Element.elements indexed off of &#39;1&#39; instead of
      &#39;0&#39;?</q>

      <a>Because of XPath. The XPath specification states that the index of
      the first child node is &#39;1&#39;. Although it may be
      counter-intuitive to base elements on 1, it is more undesireable to have
      element.elements[0] == element.elements[ &#39;node()[1]&#39; ]. Since I
      can&#39;t change the XPath specification, the result is that
      Element.elements[1] is the first child element.</a>

      <q>Why isn&#39;t REXML a validating parser?</q>

      <a>Because validating parsers must include code that parses and
      interprets DTDs. I hate DTDs. REXML supports the barest minimum of DTD
      parsing, and even that isn&#39;t complete. There is DTD parsing code in
      the works, but I only work on it when I&#39;m really, really bored.
      Rumor has it that a contributor is working on a DTD parser for REXML;
      rest assured that any such contribution will be included with REXML as
      soon as it is available.</a>

      <q>I&#39;m trying to create an ISO-8859-1 document, but when I add text
      to the document it isn&#39;t being properly encoded.</q>

      <a>Regardless of what the encoding of your document is, when you add
      text programmatically to a REXML document you <em>must</em> ensure that
      you are only adding UTF-8 to the tree. In particular, you can&#39;t add
      ISO-8859-1 encoded text that contains characters above 0x80 to REXML
      trees -- you must convert it to UTF-8 before doing so. Luckily, this is
      easy: <code>text.unpack(&#39;C*&#39;).pack(&#39;U*&#39;)</code> will do
      the trick. 7-bit ASCII is identical to UTF-8, so you probably won&#39;t
      need to worry about this.</a>
    </faq>

    <bugs lang="en">
      <p>Please send me bug reports. If you really want your bug fixed fast,
      include an runit or Test::Unit method (or methods) that illustrates the
      problem. You don&#39;t have to send me an entire suite; all bug
      submissions go into test/contrib_test.rb. If you don&#39;t send me a
      unit test, I&#39;ll have to write one myself, which will mean that your
      bug will take longer to fix.</p>

      <p>When submitting bug reports, please include the version of Ruby and
      of REXML that you&#39;re using, and the operating system you&#39;re
      running on. Just run: <code>ruby -vrrexml/rexml -e &#39;p
      REXML::Version,PLATFORM&#39;</code> and paste the results in your bug
      report.</p>

      <item>Some of the XPath <em>functions</em> are untested. Any XPath
      functions that don&#39;t work are also bugs... please report them to me.
      Let me know if you find any bugs, and I&#39;ll fix them eventually. If
      you send me a unit test that illustrates the problem, I&#39;ll try to
      fix the problem within a couple of days (if I can) and send you a patch,
      personally.</item>

      <item>Sometimes the test suite hangs or segfaults the Ruby interpreter.
      If this is something that I can fix, then it is a bug, and I will fix
      it.</item>

      <item status="fixed">Although you may put in ISO-8859-1, <em>you&#39;ll
      get UTF-8 out!!</em> This isn&#39;t a new bug; I just never noticed it
      before. This won&#39;t affect you if your sources are 7-bit ASCII, but
      if your document contains any characters over 0x80, they&#39;ll be
      converted to UTF-8. Within a release or two, I&#39;ll try to respect
      encodings, and spew out what gets put in. For now, you&#39;ll have to
      live with it; this is the price of Unicode support.</item>

      <item status="fixed">Parenthetical phrasing (grouping) in XPath is not
      currently implemented. This is only because I&#39;m lazy; It&#39;ll be
      in the 2.1 or 2.2 release.</item>

      <item status="fixed">The XPath axes &#34;following&#34; and
      &#34;preceding&#34; do not work. Don&#39;t even bother trying. They
      will, soon. &#34;following-sibling&#34; and &#34;preceding-sibling&#34;
      <em>do</em> work, however.</item>
    </bugs>

    <todo lang="en">
			<item>Deep clone for elements</item>
			
      <item>True DTD handling</item>

      <item>Change Element.attributes.each to iterate over key,Attribute.value
      pairs, rather than key,Attribute pairs.</item>

      <item>Bug report submission mechanism</item>

      <item>Cause XPath to break when it finds the first real XPath match when
      the user has called first(). This will speed up XPath in some cases, but
      not all.</item>

      <item>With all of the added feature requests, REXML is losing its edge.
      It is time to go back and profile and speed optimize REXML again.</item>

      <item>RFC/RCR on the REXML page</item>

      <item>Add a default listener that constructs trees based on an event
				map. NQMXML does something like this:
<pre>nd = NQXML::Dispatcher.new(file) 
nd.handle(:start_element, %w(root level1 level2)) {| e | # do something with e } 
nd.handle(:text, %w(root level1 level2 level3)) {| e | # reads text inside &#60;level3&#62; tag }
nd.start() </pre> 
			I&#39;d want it to look similar; basically, the user
      passes a set of tags to the parser which instructs the Stream Listener
      to build sub-trees for. When a sub-tree is finished being built, some
      event is triggered.</item>

      <item>Allow the user to add entity conversions</item>

      <item>I&#39;d like to hack XMLRPC4R to use REXML, for my own purposes.</item>

      <item status="fixed">Upgrade documentation</item>

      <item status="fixed">Ruby&#39;s Regexp pattern &#39;\w&#39; doesn&#39;t
      like non-ASCII characters, except for Unicode, which you can force by
      hand. I&#39;m getting increasing reports about REXML breaking when it
      encounters characters with Umlauts and other things. I&#39;ve made it a
      priority to try and fix this, although it&#39;d be better if this sort
      of thing was fixed within Ruby itself.</item>

      <item status="fixed">Reverse handling of whitespace and pretty-printing.
      (Markus Jais, Tobias Reif)</item>

      <item status="fixed">ISO-8859-1 output support</item>

      <item status="request">Process entity declarations in DocType.</item>
    </todo>
  </status>

  <credits>
    <p>I&#39;ve had help from a number of resources; if I haven&#39;t listed
    you here, it means that I just haven&#39;t gotten around to adding you, or
    that I&#39;m a dork and have forgotten. In either case, feel free to write
    me and complain. I may ignore you, but at least you tried. (Actually, I
    don&#39;t conciously ignore anybody except spammers.)</p>

    <list>
			<item>Stefan Scholl, who provided a lot of feedback and bug reports while
				I was trying to get ISO-8859-1 support working.</item>

      <item>Steven E Lumos for volunteering information about XPath particulars.</item>

			<item>Erik Terpstra heard my pleas and submitted several logos for REXML. 
				After sagely avoiding
      choosing one for several weeks, I finally forced my poor slave of a wife
      to pick one (this is what we call &#34;delegation&#34;). She did, with
      caveats; Erik quickly made the changes, and the result is what you now
      see at the top of this page. He also supplied a <link
      href="img/rexml_50p.png">smaller version</link> that you can include
      with your projects that use REXML, if you&#39;d like.</item>

      <item>Bug fixes provided by Fumitoshi UKAI (CData metacharacter quoting bug)</item>

      <item>Oliver M . Bolzer is
      maintaining a Debian package distribution of REXML. He also has provided
      good feedback and bug reports about namespace support.</item>

      <item>Ernest Ellingson contributed the sourcecode for turning UTF16 and UNILE encodings into
      UTF8, which allowed REXML to get the 100% OASIS valid tests rating.</item>

      <item>TAKAHASHI Masayoshi, for information on UTF</item>

      <item>James Britt contributed code that makes using Document.parse_stream easier to use by
      allowing it to be passed either a Source, File, or String.</item>

      <item><link href="http://www.themindelectric.com/products/xml/xml.html">Electric
      XML</link>: This was, after all, the inspiration for REXML. Originally,
      I was just going to do a straight port, and although REXML doesn&#39;t
      in any way, shape or form resemble Electric XML, still the basic
      framework and philosophy was inspired by E-XML. And I still use E-XML in
      my Java projects.</item>

      <item>Tobias Reif: Numerous bug reports, and suggestions for improvement.</item>

      <item><link href="http://www.io.com/~jimm/downloads/nqxml/index.html">NQXML</link>:
      While I may complain about the NQXML API, I wrote a few applications
      using it that wouldn&#39;t have been written otherwise, and it was very
      useful to me. It also encouraged me to write REXML. Never complain about
      free software *slap*.</item>

      <item>Robert Feldt: Bug
      reports and suggestions/recommendations about improving REXML. Testing
      is one of the most important aspects of software development.</item>

      <item>Many, many other people who&#39;ve submitted bug reports,
      suggestions, and positive feedback. You&#39;re all co-developers!</item>
    </list>
  </credits>
</documentation>
