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Xml2rfc generates RFCs and IETF drafts from document source in XML according to the dtd in RFC2629.

Project description

Introduction

The IETF uses a specific format for the standards and other documents it publishes as RFCs, and for the draft documents which are produced when developing documents for publications. There exists a number of different tools to facilitate the formatting of drafts and RFCs according to the existing rules, and this tool, xml2rfc, is one of them. It takes as input an xml file which contains the text and meta-information about author names etc., and transforms it into suitably formatted output. The input xml file should follow the DTD given in RFC2629 (or it’s inofficial successor).

The current incarnation of xml2rfc provides output in the following formats: Paginated and unpaginated ascii text, html, nroff, and expanded xml. Only the paginated text format is currently (January 2013) accepable as draft submissions to the IETF.

Installation

System Install

To install a system-wide version of xml2rfc, download and unpack the xml2rfc distribution package, then cd into the resulting package directory and run:

$ python setup.py install

Alternatively, if you have the ‘pip’ command (‘Pip Installs Packages’) installed, you can run pip to download and install the package:

$ pip install xml2rfc

User Install

If you want to perform a local installation for a specific user, you have a couple of options. You may use python’s default location of user site-packages by specifying the flag --user. These locations are:

  • UNIX: $HOME/.local/lib/python<ver>/site-packages

  • OSX: $HOME/Library/Python/<ver>/lib/python/site-packages

  • Windows: %APPDATA%/Python/Python<ver>/site-packages

You can additionally combine the flag --install-scripts with --user to specify a directory on your PATH to install the xml2rfc executable to. For example, the following command:

$ python setup.py install --user --install-scripts=$HOME/bin

will install the xml2rfc library and data to your local site-packages directory, and an executable python script xml2rfc to $HOME/bin.

Custom Install

The option --prefix allows you to specify the base path for all installation files. The setup.py script will exit with an error if your PYTHONPATH is not correctly configured to contain the library path the script tries to install to.

The command is used as follows:

$ python setup.py install --prefix=<path>

For further fine-tuning of the installation behavior, you can get a list of all available options by running:

$ python setup.py install --help

Usage

xml2rfc accepts a single XML document as input and outputs to one or more conversion formats.

Basic Usage: xml2rfc SOURCE [options] FORMATS...

Options

The following parameters affect how xml2rfc behaves, however none are required.

Short

Long

Description

-C

--clear-cache

purge the cache and exit

-h

--help

show the help message and exit

-n

--no-dtd

disable DTD validation step

-N

--no-network

don’t use the network to resolve references

-q

--quiet

dont print anything

-v

--verbose

print extra information

-V

--version

display the version number and exit

-b BASENAME

--basename=BASENAME

specify the base name for output files

-c CACHE

--cache=CACHE

specify an alternate cache directory to write to

-D DATE

--date=DATE

run as if todays date is DATE (format: yyyy-mm-dd)

-d DTD

--dtd=DTD

specify an alternate dtd file

-o FILENAME

--out=FILENAME

specify an output filename

Formats

At least one but as many as all of the following output formats must be specified. The destination file will be created according to the argument given to –filename. If no argument was given, it will create the file(s) “output.format”. If no format is specified, xml2rfc will default to paginated text (--text).

Command

Description

--raw

outputs to a text file, unpaginated

--text

outputs to a text file with proper page breaks

--nroff

outputs to an nroff file

--html

outputs to an html file

--exp

outputs to an XML file with all references expanded

Examples
xml2rfc draft.xml
xml2rfc draft.xml --dtd=alt.dtd --basename=draft-1.0 --text --nroff --html

Dependencies

xml2rfc depends on the following packages:

Changelog

Version 2.8.3 (04 Jan 2018)

  • Changed the python 3 code that reads in an xml file to read as binary, in order to not run into issues with unicode conversion before we have had time to look at the encoding attribute of the <xml/> element.

Version 2.8.2 (23 Sep 2017)

  • Modified the V2v3 conversion writer to work with generic lxml.etree instances.

  • Fixed a failure that could occur for hanging style lists without hangText attributes.

  • Tweaked mkrelease to work without the old tools control files and tools feeds being present.

Version 2.8.1 (18 Sep 2017)

This release improves the v2 to v3 conversion of <artwork/> elements which contains <CODE BEGINS>; these are now converted to <sourcecode/> elements.

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This version

2.8.3

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