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The Gedcom parser library (release 0.90.0)

The Gedcom parser library is a C library that provides an API to applications to parse, process and write arbitrary genealogy files in the standard gedcom format.

Its main features are:

portable to any POSIX systems (libiconv is needed on systems that lack glibc 2.2, see below)
strict callback-based parser written in C (using lex/yacc), a C object model is also available (compare to the difference between SAX and DOM in XML).
supports the Gedcom 5.5 standard fully
supports the standard encoding formats (ASCII, ANSEL, UNICODE), but extensible (via a configuration file) to other encoding formats; by default ANSI is also supported.
all strings passed from callbacks to the using program are in UTF-8 format
internationalization of the error and warning messages
specific parsing of date values to a calendar-neutral date system (Julian days aka serial day numbers); the date parser can be called separately and dates can be manipulated
specific parsing and checking of cross-references
specific parsing of age values
support for writing Gedcom files (both in line-by-line format, or via the Gedcom object model)
"compatibility-mode" parsing, to allow for not-exactly-standard syntaxes used by other genealogy programs; currently, compatibility is added for (not necessarily complete):
- ftree
- Lifelines 3.0.2
- Personal Ancestral File (PAF), version 2, 4 and 5
- Family Origins
- EasyTree
  
  NOTE
NO BACKWARD COMPATIBILITY is guaranteed for 0.x releases !

To do list:

specific parsing of other special values
compatibility with other genealogy programs
older/newer Gedcom standards ?
writing GEDML files
C++ object model
...

For more information, refer to the documentation in the doc subdirectory, or to the SourceForge project web site and summary page: http://gedcom-parse.sourceforge.net
http://sourceforge.net/projects/gedcom-parse

Also, have a look at the 'Genes' program, from which this library is a spin-off, and which uses this library:
http://genes.sourceforge.net
http://sourceforge.net/projects/genes

Requirements

For using the library:

either glibc 2.2 or higher, or libiconv

Note

The official libiconv package doesn't have ANSEL support, and is not extensible except by modifying its source code.

There is a modified libiconv package available on the SourceForge project page, which is called 'libiconv-gedcom-1.8.x', based on libiconv 1.8. Install this if you need ANSEL support and you don't have glibc 2.2.

To compile the package, you'll need:

To compile from the CVS sources, you'll need in addition:

autoconf
automake
flex
bison (won't work with plain yacc)
perl

Installation

This is simply:
./configure make make install

If libiconv is not automatically found, you can give its path to configure, for example, if the library lives in /home/mydir/lib:

./configure --with-libiconv-prefix=/home/mydir

You can also run some tests via:
make check

############################################################################### # $Id: README,v 1.13 2003/02/02 15:43:13 verthezp Exp $ # $Name: R0_90_0 $