Date: Wed, 25 Nov 1998 09:44:07 -0600 From: Gleason Sackman <gleason@rrnet.com> Subject: MISC - New Perl Module Enables Application Developers to Use XML From: Ellen Maremont Silver [mailto:silver@oreilly.com] Sent: Wednesday, November 25, 1998 9:00 AM
New Perl Module Enables Application Developers to Use XML. Expands Capabilities for Business-to-Business Communication of Data and Language.
Sebastopol, CA.
Perl is the language operating behind the scenes of most dynamic Web sites. XML (Extensible Markup Language) is emerging as a core standard for Web development. Now a new Perl module (or extension) known as XML::Parser allows Perl programmers building applications to use XML, and provides an efficient, easy way to parse (break down and process) XML document parts.
Perl is renowned for its superior text processing capabilities; XML is text that contains markup tags and structures. Thus Perl's support for XML offers a natural expansion of the capabilities of both.
XML::Parser is built upon a C library, expat, that is very fast and robust. Perl, expat and XML::Parser are all Unicode-aware; that is, they read encoding declarations and perform necessary conversions into Unicode, a system for "the interchange, processing, and display of the written texts of the diverse languages of the modern world" (http://www.unicode.org/). Thus a single XML document written in Perl can now contain Greek, Hebrew, Chinese and Russian in their proper scripts. Expat was authored by James Clark, a highly respected leader in the SGML/XML community.
For Windows, XML::Parser is available as part of the ActivePerl package at http://www.ActiveState.com. The XML::Parser package for Windows will be upgradeable when the next version comes out using Perl Package Manager, also included in ActivePerl. For UNIX, XML::Parser is available from the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network (CPAN) at http://www.perl.com/
Related information is available at http://perl.oreilly.com/ and http://www.xml.com/.
FURTHER INFORMATION CONTACT:
Ellen Maremont Silver
Tel: +1 (707) 829-0515 ext. 322
Email: silver@oreilly.com
WWW: http://www.oreilly.com
WWW: http://perl.oreilly.com