Querying the CTAN Database with XML – Author

The information about a single author can be obtained under the URL like

http://www.ctan.org/xml/1.2/author/knuth

The last element in the URl is the key of the author as used by CTAN. Those keys are also listed in the list of 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/1.2/catalogue.dtd'>
<author key="knuth" givenname="Donald E." familyname="Knuth" />  

The entry has the outer 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.

female

This attribute is the boolean indicator that the author is female. It is optional and can be empty. The default is false.

died

This attribute is the indicator that the author is deceased. It is optional and can be empty. The default is empty.

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

References

You can request that more information about the authors is provided. This information is the list of packages in which the author is mentioned. This is accomplished with the parameter ref. It can be set to true as in the following example:

http://www.ctan.org/xml/author/knuth?ref=true

This results in an XML file like in the following listing;

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE author SYSTEM 'http://www.ctan.org/xml/1.2/catalogue.dtd'>
<author key="knuth" givenname="Donald E." familyname="Knuth">
  <package key="ada" />
  <package key="cmtest" />
  <package key="gkpmac" />
  <package key="graphbase" />
  …
</author  

In this case the <author> tag contains a list of inner tags for the packages. Each package is contained in the tag <package> which has the following attributes:

key

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

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/1.2/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/1.2/licenses?no-xml=true