NEWS

zuxml 0.1.0 (2026-10-27)

First release.

xml_parse() parses XML from a single string or a raw vector, and xml_read() from a file, a URL or a connection. Both build an immutable document tree. A character vector of another length is an error rather than being joined silently: join the lines of readLines() with "\n" first.
xml_read() streams: a string starting with http://, https://, ftp://, ftps:// or file:// is opened with url(), anything else with file(), and a connection (gzfile(), rawConnection(), a socket) is accepted as is. Bytes are fed to the parser as they are read through R's connection API, so the body is never held whole; only an encoding that must go through iconv() is read in full first. An unopened connection is opened in binary mode and closed afterwards; an open one must be binary and blocking, and is left open. A URL or file that cannot be opened is a zuxml: error naming the cause (HTTP status was '404 Not Found'), with no stray warning.
Encodings Expat handles natively are passed through, under any of their common spellings ("latin1", "UTF8", "ASCII"); anything else is transcoded with iconv(), after which the (now stale) encoding declaration is overridden so it cannot mislead the parser. A character string is already decoded, so encoding must be NULL or UTF-8 for one.

xml_root(), xml_parent(), xml_children(), xml_elements() and xml_find() walk the tree. xml_elements() and xml_find() take an optional name and namespace filter.
xml_find_first() returns one node per input: the first matching descendant, or a missing node where there is none. Every accessor gives NA for a missing node, so per-record lookups stay aligned when a field is absent, which a flat xml_find() cannot do.
xml_name(), xml_local(), xml_ns(), xml_prefix(), xml_attr(), xml_attrs(), xml_text() and xml_type() read node properties. All are vectorized over a nodeset, so n nodes give a result of length n.
Text nodes are maximal: adjacent character data is always one node, whatever the input chunk boundaries were and whether or not comments or pis dropped a node that sat in the middle of it.
Names are matched on (namespace, local name) only. Prefixes are retained for serialization and diagnostics but never decide identity, so two prefixes bound to one URI are the same name.
Nodesets behave like vectors: [, [[, c(), rev(), length() and format() methods are provided.
xml_version(), xml_encoding() and xml_standalone() read the XML declaration.

xml_table() turns table elements into data frames: rows from the table and its thead, tbody and tfoot, colspan and rowspan expanded, header detected from a row of th cells, every column character. The expanded size is bounded by max_cells, so a hostile span cannot become a huge allocation.
xml_list() turns ul and ol elements into lists, with nested lists as nested items.
Both read XML, XHTML included, and apply no HTML parsing rules.

xml_serialize() returns XML text and xml_write() sends it to a file. Order, attributes, text and namespace semantics round-trip; original formatting (quote style, inter-attribute whitespace, CDATA boundaries) does not.
Output is always UTF-8, and a prepended declaration says so whatever the source document declared. declaration = TRUE applies to a single node, so it cannot produce a file carrying one declaration per node.

Document type declarations are rejected by default. allow_doctype = TRUE accepts one, but still rejects an internal subset, which is the only place a document can declare entities.
External entity resolution is not compiled in at all, so no file or network access is reachable from a parse regardless of input or options.
max_depth, max_nodes, max_attrs, max_text and max_memory bound what a hostile document can cost. Each raises its own condition, and all of them inherit from zuxml_limit_error. A limit must be a positive whole number, or Inf for the largest the parser can represent; anything else, including a value above that, is an error, never replaced by the default.
Every error is a typed condition under a zuxml_error parent. Parse failures carry line, column, byte offset, the C status and Expat's error code; limit failures also name the limit and its value. Unusable arguments raise zuxml_invalid_argument. See ?"zuxml-conditions".
zuxml_info() reports the policy compiled into the installed build.

A registered C function table lets other packages parse XML without linking against Expat themselves: Imports: zuxml plus LinkingTo: zuxml, an importFrom(zuxml, ...) directive in NAMESPACE (without it zuxml's namespace is never loaded and the table is never registered), then zuxml_api_get() from <zuxml.h>. The header documents the string-lifetime contract and the versioning rules, and compiles cleanly as C and C++ under -Wall -Wextra -Werror.
Tree construction, traversal, text concatenation, serialization and freeing are all iterative, so arbitrarily deep documents cannot overflow the C stack.
An installed zuxml also ships lib${R_ARCH}/libzuxml.a (plain lib/ where R sets no architecture) together with Expat's expat.h and expat_external.h, so a package whose C code is written against Expat itself can link the parser statically through LinkingTo rather than being rewritten around the function table. The table remains the recommended interface; see "Using zuxml from C" in the README for the differences that come with the archive, the parser policy compiled into it among them.

Expat 2.8.4 is bundled under src/vendor/expat/, so no system XML library is required. One local patch removes a debug-only write to stderr that upstream compiles in; nothing else differs from the release. See LICENSE.note and inst/COPYRIGHTS.