libSBML C API
libSBML 5.8.0 C API
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Methods for writing SBML to files and text strings.
This class of objects is defined by libSBML only and has no direct equivalent in terms of SBML components. This class is not prescribed by the SBML specifications, although it is used to implement features defined in SBML.
The SBMLWriter class is the converse of SBMLReader, and provides the main interface for serializing SBML models into XML and writing the result to files and text strings. The methods for writing SBML all take an SBMLDocument object and a destination. They return a boolean or integer value to indicate success or failure.
LibSBML provides support for writing (as well as reading) compressed SBML files. The process is transparent to the calling application—the application does not need to do anything deliberate to invoke the functionality. If a given SBML filename ends with an extension for the gzip, zip or bzip2 compression formats (respectively, ".gz"
, ".zip"
, or ".bz2"
), then the methods SBMLWriter::writeSBML() and SBMLReader::readSBML() will automatically compress and decompress the file while writing and reading it. If the filename has no such extension, it will be written and read uncompressed as normal.
The compression feature requires that the zlib (for gzip and zip formats) and/or bzip2 (for bzip2 format) be available on the system running libSBML, and that libSBML was configured with their support compiled-in. Please see the libSBML for more information about this. The methods SBMLWriter::hasZlib() and SBMLWriter::hasBzip2() can be used by an application to query at run-time whether support for the compression libraries is available in the present copy of libSBML.
Support for compression is not mandated by the SBML standard, but applications may find it helpful, particularly when large SBML models are being communicated across data links of limited bandwidth.