# Libxml on Windows?

**URL:** <https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/libxml-on-windows/61314>\
**Category:** Ruby\
**Created:** [May 23, 2006, 2:58am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/libxml-on-windows/61314 "2006-05-23T02:58:26Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 4\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![marcan](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/m/6bbea6/32.png) [@marcan](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/marcan)\
**Post date:** [May 23, 2006, 2:58am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/libxml-on-windows/61314/1 "2006-05-23T02:58:26Z")

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See it as a small echo to the performance thread…

I want to parse large XML documents. Doing it with REXML is  
(unacceptably) slow (more than a minute compared to Java with a couple  
of seconds which is perfectly ok). So I was thinking about doing it with  
libxml. Well, it seems I need to compile it from C myself etc etc etc…  
Is there a ready made gem that works with Windows that don’t require me  
to install a complete C development environment and build and compile a  
number of other libraries first?

I’ve googled but it’s kind of hard to find anything about it. Ends up  
with pages refering to Sam Ruby in a Python context (where there seems  
to be a perfectly fine .exe for installation of libxml bindings by the  
way…)

/Marcus

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**Author:** ![marcan](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/m/6bbea6/32.png) [@marcan](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/marcan)\
**Post date:** [May 23, 2006, 9:16am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/libxml-on-windows/61314/2 "2006-05-23T09:16:46Z")

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If you are using windows you can access MSXML via OLE

cheers

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![marcan](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/m/6bbea6/32.png) [@marcan](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/marcan)\
**Post date:** [May 23, 2006, 9:51am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/libxml-on-windows/61314/3 "2006-05-23T09:51:15Z")

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On Tue, 2006-05-23 at 09:57 +0900, Marcus A. wrote:

> I’ve googled but it’s kind of hard to find anything about it. Ends up  
> with pages refering to Sam Ruby in a Python context (where there seems  
> to be a perfectly fine .exe for installation of libxml bindings by the  
> way…)

There are pre-built libxml binaries available for libxml2 at:

```
http://www.zlatkovic.com/libxml.en.html

```

Unfortunately, that doesn’t free you from having to compile the  
libxml-ruby stuff. If anyone on Windows is willing to maintain  
precompiled binaries I think we’d be very happy to carry them, but  
no-one currently on the project is windows based.

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**Author:** ![marcan](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/m/6bbea6/32.png) [@marcan](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/marcan)\
**Post date:** [May 23, 2006, 11:11am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/libxml-on-windows/61314/4 "2006-05-23T11:11:48Z")

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Ross B. skrev:

> There are pre-built libxml binaries available for libxml2 at:  
> [zlatkovic.com - Libxml](http://www.zlatkovic.com/libxml.en.html)
> 
> Unfortunately, that doesn’t free you from having to compile the  
> libxml-ruby stuff. If anyone on Windows is willing to maintain  
> precompiled binaries I think we’d be very happy to carry them, but  
> no-one currently on the project is windows based.

Sigh, I guess I have to set up an environment then. I did it a couple of  
months ago on another computer and I think it barely worked. Is mingw  
the way to go or is there something better/simpler (where simple is  
something I really like, C compiling/building is something I did at  
university 10 years ago…)?

/Marcus