Querying the CTAN Database with XML – List of Authors

The list of authors can be obtained under the URL

http://www.ctan.org/xml/1.0/authors

The result is an XML file as in the following listing:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE authors SYSTEM 'http://www.ctan.org/xml/1.0/catalogue.dtd'>
<authors>
  <author key="aakerlund" givenname="Johan" familyname="Aakerlund" />
  <author key="aas" givenname="American Astronomical Society" familyname="" />
  <author key="aavatsmark" givenname="Ivar" familyname="Aavatsmark" />
  <author key="abhinandan" givenname="S. P." familyname="Abhinandan" />
  <author key="abraham" givenname="Paul" familyname="Abraham" />
  <author key="abrahams" givenname="Paul W." familyname="Abrahams" />
  <author key="abrahamsen" givenname="Per" familyname="Abrahamsen" />
  <author key="adobe" givenname="Adobe Systems Incorporated" familyname="" />
  …
</authors>  

The list has the outer tag <authors>. The authors contained in this list are ordered ascending on the key of the author.

<author>

Each author in contained within the tag <author>. This tag has several attributes:

key

This attribute contains the key of the author. This attribute is mandatory.

givenname

This attribute contains the given name. It is optional and can be empty.

familyname

This attribute is the family name. It is optional and can be empty.

Note that the authors information does not contain the email address of the author to protect the privacy.

Selecting

The list can be restricted to contain part of the authors only. The condition is that the key starts with a given string. This string is specified with the parameter key.

http://www.ctan.org/xml/1.0/authors?key=knuth

The following example extracts all authors for which the key starts with the letter n:

http://www.ctan.org/xml/1.0/authors?key=n

Omitting Or Enforcing the Doctype Declaration

The list of licenses may include a doctype declaration. This declaration can be suppressed with the URL parameter no-dtd which should be set to true as in

http://www.ctan.org/xml/1.0/licenses?no-dtd=true

A doctype declaration can be enforced with the URL parameter no-dtd which should be set to false in this case.

The default is no-dtd=false.

Omitting the XML Declaration

The list of licenses starts with an XML declaration. This declaration can be suppressed with the URL parameter no-xml which should be set to true as in

http://www.ctan.org/xml/1.0/licenses?no-xml=true