<?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="file:/home/ser/Work/documentation/documentation.xsl"
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<!DOCTYPE documentation SYSTEM "../documentation/documentation.dtd">
<documentation>
  <head>
    <title>REXML</title>

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

    <version>2.3.0</version>

    <date>*2002-131</date>

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

    <base>rexml</base>

    <archive type="unix" version="2.2.1">Stable release</archive>

    <archive type="dos" version="2.2.1">Stable release</archive>

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

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

    <language>ruby</language>

    <author href="http://www.germane-software.com/~ser"
    email="ser@germane-software.com" jabber="ser@jabber.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 obfuscated 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 is available 
				<link href="http://www.germane-software.com/software/rexml_doc">on-line</link>,
				or it can be downloaded as an archive
				<link href="http://www.germane-software.com/software/archives/rexml_api.tbz2">in tbz2 format (~40Kb)</link>, 
				<link href="http://www.germane-software.com/software/archives/rexml_api.tgz">in tgz format (~70Kb)</link>, 
				or (if you're a masochist) <link href="http://www.germane-software.com/software/archives/rexml_api.zip">in zip format (~280Kb)</link>.
				The best solution is to download and install Dave Thomas&#39; most excellent
				<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.</p>
		<p>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. The documentation unpacks into <link href="doc/index.html"><code>rexml/doc</code></link>.</p>
    </subsection>
  </operation>

  <status>
    <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="RSS">
      <p>An <link
      href="http://www.germane-software.com/software/rexml/rss.xml">RSS file</link>
      for REXML is now being generated from the change log. This allows you to
      be alerted of upgrades via &#39;pull&#39; as they become available, if
      you have an RSS browser. This is an abuse of the RSS mechanism, which
      was intended to be a distribution system for headlines linked back to
      full articles, but it works. The headline for REXML is the version
      number, and the description is the change log. The links all link back
      to the REXML home page. The URL for the RSS itself is
      http://www.germane-software.com/software/rexml/rss.xml</p>
    </subsection>

    <subsection title="Applications that use REXML">
      <list>
        <item>Hiroshi NAKAMURA&#39;s <link
        href="http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/raa-list.rhtml?name=SOAP4R">SOAP4R</link>
        package can use REXML as the XML processor.</item>

        <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>
        site is generated with scripts that use REXML. RubyXML is a great
        place to find information about th intersection between 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>

    <changelog>
			<item version='2.3.0'>Internal entities are now
				handled<footnote>Please note that entity handling complicates text
					manipulation.  See the note in the tutorial</footnote>.  Speed has 
				been further improved for most operations, but especially for stream
				parsing, writing, and large document parsing.
			</item>
			<item version="2.2.1">Fixed a bug in benchmark/bench.rb that kept it
				from running.  Added stand_alone?() to XMLDecl as an alias for the
				standalone accessor.  Improvements to the streaming API; in
				particular, pulling data from non-closing streams doesn't require
				passing a block size of 1 to the IOSource class any longer; in
				fact, the block size is ignored.  Added a user-supplied patch
				to fix the fact that not all of the DTD events were getting
				passed to the listener.  Improved entity parsing.  Better test suite;
				you can now pass <code>--help</code> to the main test suite to get a
				list of the new options, which include listing the available suites
				and listing methods in the suites, as well as instructions on how to
				run only certain suites or methods in suites.
			</item>
      <item version="2.1.3">Fixed broken links in documentation. Added new
      documentation layout; the old format -- everything on one page -- was
      getting a bit overwhelming. Added RSS for changelog. Bugfix for element
      cloning namespace loss. The Streaming API wasn&#39;t normalizing input
      strings; this has been fixed. Added support for deep cloning via
			Parent.deep_clone().  Fixed some streaming issues for SOAP4RUBY. In
			particular, text normalization is now also done for the Streaming API.
			'\r' handling is now correct, as per the XML spec, and entities are 
			handled better.  &amp;#13; is now converted to '\r' internally, and then
			translated back to '\r' on output.  All other numeric entities
			(&amp;#nnn; and &amp;#xnnn;) are now converted to unicode on input,
			but are only converted back to entities if they don't fit in the 
			requested encoding.</item>

      <item version="2.1.2">Fixed a bug with reading ISO-8859-1 encoded
      documents, and Document now includes Output, which it always should
      have.</item>

      <item version="2.1.1">Forgot to add output.rb to the repository.</item>

      <item version="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>.</item>

      <item version="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 :-/</item>

      <item version="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.</item>

      <item version="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.</item>

      <item version="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.</item>

      <item version="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.</item>

      <item version="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.</item>

      <item version="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.</item>

      <item version="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().</item>

      <item version="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.</item>

      <item version="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.</item>
    </changelog>

    <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>I've had a report that xpaths such as '//foo|//bar' doesn't work.
			</item>

      <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>
    </bugs>

    <todo lang="en">
			<item>Entity in doctype handling</item>

			<item>Change the stream listener API, (1) to look more like SAX, and
				(2) to allow filtering.</item>
			
      <item>True DTD handling</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>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">Deep clone for elements</item>

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

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

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

  <faq>
    <q>Hey! REXML is untainting my strings!</q>

    <a>Yes, it is, but not intentionally. REXML relies on String.unpack() and
    Array.pack() to do encoding conversions, and in this process, tainting is
    lost. If you have a <em>really</em> good reason why REXML should preserve
    this attribute, at the cost of some speed, let me know and I&#39;ll
    consider your argument.</a>

    <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>

  <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>Michael Granger supplied a patch for REXML that make the unit
      tests pass under Ruby 1.7.</item>

      <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/exml/index.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>
