μXML (alternatively muXML) is a Fortran 95 library offering minimalistic support to read and process information from eXtensible Markup Language (XML) files. The functionality of μXML remains fairly basic at this stage. Any standard conforming XML document can be reliably read in. Currently only the most basic character encoding (US-ASCII) is supported, as this is the only one that every Fortran 95 compiler is guaranteed to process reliably. Standard conforming comments are correctly recognized and filtered out; syntax and nesting errors are detected. Attribute content can be delimited by simple or by double quotes. CDATA and PCDATA sections are recognized. Entity processing is, however, not yet supported, not even for the five predefined entities &quot; ("), &apos; (’), &amp; (&), &lt; (<) and &gt; (>). Entity processing in XML is unfortunately a recursive process requiring complicated overhead. Finally, μXML does not provide any XML writing functionality. μXML was initially developed as a prerequisite for the code generator that is part of the sediment model MEDUSA v. 2 (Model of Early Diagenesis in the Upper Sediment with Adaptable complexity, version 2). μXML is, however, entirely independent of that particular project.

Support for this work was provided by the Belgian Fund for Scientific Research F.R.S.-FNRS, with which Guy Munhoven is a Research Associate.