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XMLWF !!!XMLWF NAME SYNOPSIS DESCRIPTION WELL-FORMED DOCUMENTS OPTIONS OUTPUT BUGS ALTERNATIVES SEE ALSO AUTHOR ---- !!NAME xmlwf -- Determines if an XML document is well-formed !!SYNOPSIS __xmlwf__ [[__-s__] [[__-n__] [[__-p__] [[__-x__] [[__-e__ ''encoding] [[''__-w__''] [[''__-d__ ''output-dir] [[''__-c__''] [[''__-m__''] [[''__-r__''] [[''__-t__''] [[file ...]'' !!DESCRIPTION __xmlwf__ uses the Expat library to determine if an XML document is well-formed. It is non-validating. If you do not specify any files on the command-line, and you have a recent version of xmlwf, the input file will be read from stdin. !!WELL-FORMED DOCUMENTS A well-formed document must adhere to the following rules: The file begins with an XML declaration. For instance, __ __. ''NOTE:'' xmlwf does not currently check for a valid XML declaration. Every start tag is either empty ( There is exactly one root element. This element must contain all other elements in the document. Only comments, white space, and processing instructions may come after the close of the root element. All elements nest properly. All attribute values are enclosed in quotes (either single or double). If the document has a DTD, and it strictly complies with that DTD, then the document is also considered ''valid''. xmlwf is a non-validating parser -- it does not check the DTD. However, it does support external entities (see the -x option). !!OPTIONS When an option includes an argument, you may specify the argument either separate ( __-c__ If the input file is well-formed and xmlwf doesn't encounter any errors, the input file is simply copied to the output directory unchanged. This implies no namespaces (turns off -n) and requires -d to specify an output file. __-d output-dir__ Specifies a directory to contain transformed representations of the input files. By default, -d outputs a canonical representation (described below). You can select different output formats using -c and -m. The output filenames will be exactly the same as the input filenames or cat in most shells). Two structurally equivalent XML documents have a byte-for-byte identical canonical XML representation. Note that ignorable white space is considered significant and is treated equivalently to data. More on canonical XML can be found at http://www.jclark.com/xml/canonxml.html . __-e encoding__ Specifies the character encoding for the document, overriding any document encoding declaration. xmlwf has four built-in encodings: __US-ASCII__, __UTF-8__, __UTF-16__, and __ISO-8859-1__. Also see the -w option. __-m__ Outputs some strange sort of XML file that completely describes the the input file, including character postitions. Requires -d to specify an output file. __-n__ Turns on namespace processing. (describe namespaces) -c disables namespaces. __-p__ Tells xmlwf to process external DTDs and parameter entities. Normally xmlwf never parses parameter entities. -p tells it to always parse them. -p implies -x. __-r__ Normally xmlwf memory-maps the XML file before parsing. -r turns off memory-mapping and uses normal file IO calls instead. Of course, memory-mapping is automatically turned off when reading from STDIN. __-s__ Prints an error if the document is not standalone. A document is standalone if it has no external subset and no references to parameter entities. __-t__ Turns on timings. This tells Expat to parse the entire file, but not perform any processing. This gives a fairly accurate idea of the raw speed of Expat itself without client overhead. -t turns off most of the output options (-d, -m -c, ...) __-w__ Enables Windows code pages. Normally, xmlwf will throw an error if it runs across an encoding that it is not equipped to handle itself. With -w, xmlwf will try to use a Windows code page. See also -e. __-x__ Turns on parsing external entities. Non-validating parsers are not required to resolve external entities, or even expand entities at all. Expat always expands internal entities (?), but external entity parsing must be enabled explicitly. External entities are simply entities that obtain their data from outside the XML file currently being parsed. This is an example of an internal entity: And here are some examples of external entities: __--__ For some reason, xmlwf specifically ignores __ Older versions of xmlwf do not support reading from STDIN. !!OUTPUT If an input file is not well-formed, xmlwf outputs a single line describing the problem to STDOUT. If a file is well formed, xmlwf outputs nothing. Note that the result code is ''not'' set. !!BUGS According to the W3C standard, an XML file without a declaration at the beginning is not considered well-formed. However, xmlwf allows this to pass. xmlwf returns a 0 - noerr result, even if the file is not well-formed. There is no good way for a program to use xmlwf to quickly check a file -- it must parse xmlwf's STDOUT. The errors should go to STDERR, not stdout. There should be a way to get -d to send its output to STDOUT rather than forcing the user to send it to a file. I have no idea why anyone would want to use the -d, -c and -m options. If someone could explain it to me, I'd like to add this information to this manpage. !!ALTERNATIVES Here are some XML validators on the web: http://www.hcrc.ed.ac.uk/~richard/xml-check.html http://www.stg.brown.edu/service/xmlvalid/ http://www.scripting.com/frontier5/xml/code/xmlValidator.html http://www.xml.com/pub/a/tools/ruwf/check.html (on a page with no less than 15 ads! Shame!) !!SEE ALSO The Expat home page: http://expat.sourceforge.net/ The W3 XML specification: http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml !!AUTHOR This manual page was written by Scott Bronson bronson@rinspin.com for the __Debian GNU/Linux__ system (but may be used by others). Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.1. ----
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