Requirements
To use XIST you need the following software packages:
Python Imaging Library (if you want to use automatic image size calculation);
libxml2 and its Python wrapper (if you want to parse "broken" HTML);
elinks (if you want want to use the function
ll.xist.ns.html.astext);cx_Oracle (if you want to use
ll.orasql);setuptools (if you want to install this package as an egg);
py.test (if you want to run the test suite; at least version 1.3.2)
execnet (if you want to use ssh URLs)
and a C compiler supported by distutils, if you want to install the source distribution.
Installation
setuptools is used for installation so you can install this package with the following command:
$ easy_install ll-xist
If you want to install from source, you can download one of the distribution archives, unpack it, enter the directory and execute the following command:
$ python setup.py install
This will copy *.py files, compile *.c files and install everything in
the site-packages directory as the ll and ll.xist packages.
For Windows a binary distribution is provided. To install it, double click it, and follow the instructions.
Character encoding
When you pass an 8bit string in the constructor of an XIST element, these strings have to be converted to Unicode. XIST assumes that these 8bit strings are in the system default encoding, which normally is ASCII.
If your strings contain non-ASCII characters you must pass them as unicode strings to the XIST constructors and you must specify the encoding you're using in your source code in the first or second line of your script (see PEP 263 for a detailed description).
IPython display hooks
If you're using XIST in an IPython shell, XIST allows you to browse through your trees using any of the browsers provided by IPython's ipipe module.
You can specify which format gets used by changing the value of the
defaultpresenter variable in the module ll.xist.present:
from ll.xist import present present.defaultpresenter = present.TreePresenter
Setting this value to None turns the display hook off.