Manual Pages for UNIX Darwin command on man xmlwf

XMLWF(1) XMLWF(1)

NAME

xmlwf - Determines if an XML document is well-formed

SYNOPSIS

xxmmllwwff [ -ss] [ -nn] [ -pp] [ -xx] [ -ee encoding] [ -ww] [ -dd output-

dir] [ -cc] [ -mm] [ -rr] [ -tt] [ -vv] [ ffiillee ......]

DESCRIPTION

xxmmllwwff 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 xxmmllwwff, the input file will be read from standard input.

WWEELLLL-FFOORRMMEEDD DDOOCCUUMMEENNTTSS

A well-formed document must adhere to the following rules:

+o The file begins with an XML declaration. For instance, sion="1.0" standalone="yes"?>. NNOOTTEE:: xxmmllwwff does not currently check for a valid XML declaration. +o Every start tag is either empty () or has a corresponding end tag. +o There is exactly one root element. This element must contain all

other elements in the document. Only comments, white space, and pro-

cessing instructions may come after the close of the root element. +o All elements nest properly.

+o All attribute values are enclosed in quotes (either single or dou-

ble). If the document has a DTD, and it strictly complies with that DTD, then

the document is also considered vvaalliidd. xxmmllwwff is a non-validating

parser - it does not check the DTD. However, it does support external

entities (see the -xx option).

OOPPTTIIOONNSS When an option includes an argument, you may specify the argument

either separately ("-dd output") or concatenated with the option

("-ddoutput"). xxmmllwwff supports both.

-cc If the input file is well-formed and xxmmllwwff doesn't encounter any

errors, the input file is simply copied to the output directory

unchanged. This implies no namespaces (turns off -nn) and

requires -dd to specify an output file.

-dd oouuttppuutt-ddiirr

Specifies a directory to contain transformed representations of

the input files. By default, -dd outputs a canonical representa-

tion (described below). You can select different output formats

using -cc and -mm.

The output filenames will be exactly the same as the input file-

names or "STDIN" if the input is coming from standard input. Therefore, you must be careful that the output file does not go into the same directory as the input file. Otherwise, xxmmllwwff will delete the input file before it generates the output file (just like running cat < file > file 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 equiva-

lently to data. More on canonical XML can be found at http://www.jclark.com/xml/canonxml.html .

-ee eennccooddiinngg

Specifies the character encoding for the document, overriding

any document encoding declaration. xxmmllwwff supports four built-in

encodings: US-ASCII, UTF-8, UTF-16, and ISO-8859-1. Also see

the -ww option.

-mm Outputs some strange sort of XML file that completely describes

the the input file, including character postitions. Requires -dd

to specify an output file.

-nn Turns on namespace processing. (describe namespaces) -cc dis-

ables namespaces.

-pp Tells xmlwf to process external DTDs and parameter entities.

Normally xxmmllwwff never parses parameter entities. -pp tells it to

always parse them. -pp implies -xx.

-rr Normally xxmmllwwff memory-maps the XML file before parsing; this can

result in faster parsing on many platforms. -rr turns off mem-

ory-mapping and uses normal file IO calls instead. Of course,

memory-mapping is automatically turned off when reading from

standard input.

Use of memory-mapping can cause some platforms to report sub-

stantially higher memory usage for xxmmllwwff, but this appears to be a matter of the operating system reporting memory in a strange way; there is not a leak in xxmmllwwff.

-ss 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.

-tt 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.

-tt turns off most of the output options (-dd, -mm, -cc, ...).

-vv Prints the version of the Expat library being used, including

some information on the compile-time configuration of the

library, and then exits.

-ww Enables support for Windows code pages. Normally, xxmmllwwff will

throw an error if it runs across an encoding that it is not

equipped to handle itself. With -ww, xmlwf will try to use a

Windows code page. See also -ee.

-xx 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:

(parsed)

(unparsed)

-- (Two hyphens.) Terminates the list of options. This is only

needed if a filename starts with a hyphen. For example:

xmlwf - -myfile.xml

will run xxmmllwwff on the file -myfile.xml.

Older versions of xxmmllwwff do not support reading from standard input. OOUUTTPPUUTT

If an input file is not well-formed, xxmmllwwff prints a single line

describing the problem to standard output. If a file is well formed, xxmmllwwff outputs nothing. Note that the result code is nnoott set.

BUGS

According to the W3C standard, an XML file without a declaration at the

beginning is not considered well-formed. However, xxmmllwwff allows this to

pass.

xxmmllwwff returns a 0 - noerr result, even if the file is not well-formed.

There is no good way for a program to use xxmmllwwff to quickly check a file

- it must parse xxmmllwwff's standard output.

The errors should go to standard error, not standard output.

There should be a way to get -dd to send its output to standard output

rather than forcing the user to send it to a file.

I have no idea why anyone would want to use the -dd, -cc, and -mm options.

If someone could explain it to me, I'd like to add this information to this manpage. AALLTTEERRNNAATTIIVVEESS 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