[XML-SIG] Help

[Martin v. Loewis]

> 	I just downloaded BeOpen-Python-2.0.exe and installed it.

That is a good starting point.

> 	I then downloaded PythonXML.exe and installed that.

I don't know what that is - where did you get it?

> 	Then I downloaded PyXML-0.6.4.win32-py2.0.exe and installed it also.

That is also a good thing.

> My query is,  what now?   

You now need to write a Python program that makes use of the packages.

> How do I get the XML parser to run?  I read in the docs that
> Python/XML has three(3) parsers.  How do I run them?

That is a somewhat surprising request. Why do you want to run the
parsers? An XML parser, when run, typically does not do much (*).

To write a program that is a simple XML parser, please try

import sys, xml.sax
parser = xml.sax.parse(sys.argv[1], xml.sax.ContentHandler())

>  Can I make them into an EXE for Windows?   How can I do this?

There is a number of ways to make a Python program into an
executable. These are independent from PyXML; please see the Python
FAQ for details.

> How can I get an EXE to look at an XML file and its DTD and say if
> it is well-formed and all those other XML parsing tools?

The script above invokes a non-validating parser, so it will only tell
you if it is well-formed, not whether it is valid. To run a validating
parser, you need to instantiate xmlproc. The next release of PyXML
will actually include two command line utilities to run xmlproc; they
offer a few more features, though (such as outputting ESIS) -
i.e. they offer some specific processing.

Regards,
Martin

(*) It does perform the well-formedness check, and might even perform
validation. So all you get out of it are ill-formedness and invalidity
errors. If that is all you need PyXML might not be the appropriate
choice of tool.