"Programming with libxml2 is like the thrilling embrace of an exotic stranger." Mark Pilgrim
Libxml2 is the XML C parser and toolkit developed for the Gnome project (but usable outside of the Gnome platform), it is free software available under the MIT License. XML itself is a metalanguage to design markup languages, i.e. text language where semantic and structure are added to the content using extra "markup" information enclosed between angle brackets. HTML is the most well-known markup language. Though the library is written in C a variety of language bindings make it available in other environments.
Libxml2 is known to be very portable, the library should build and work without serious troubles on a variety of systems (Linux, Unix, Windows, CygWin, MacOS, MacOS X, RISC Os, OS/2, VMS, QNX, MVS, VxWorks, ...)
Libxml2 implements a number of existing standards related to markup languages:
In most cases libxml2 tries to implement the specifications in a relatively strictly compliant way. As of release 2.4.16, libxml2 passed a