NAME

WebService::Validator::HTML::W3C - Access the W3Cs online HTML validator

SYNOPSIS

    use WebService::Validator::HTML::W3C;

    my $v = WebService::Validator::HTML::W3C->new();

    if ( $v->validate("http://www.example.com/") ) {
        if ( $v->is_valid ) {
            printf ("%s is valid\n", $v->uri);
        } else {
            printf ("%s is not valid\n", $v->uri);
            foreach $error ( @{$v->errors} ) {
                printf("%s at line %d\n", $error->msg,
                                          $error->line);
            }
        }
    } else {
        printf ("Failed to validate the website: %s\n", $v->validator_error);
    }

DESCRIPTION

WebService::Validator::HTML::W3C provides access to the W3C's online Markup validator. As well as reporting on whether a page is valid it also provides access to a detailed list of the errors and where in the validated document they occur.

METHODS

new

    my $v = WebService::Validator::HTML::W3C->new();

Returns a new instance of the WebService::Validator::HTML::W3C object.

There are various options that can be set when creating the Validator object like so:

    my $v = WebService::Validator::HTML::W3C->new( http_timeout => 20 );

validator_uri

The URI of the validator to use. By default this accesses the W3Cs validator at http://validator.w3.org/check. If you have a local installation of the validator ( recommended if you wish to do a lot of testing ) or wish to use a validator at another location then you can use this option. Please note that you need to use the full path to the validator cgi.

http_timeout

How long (in seconds) to wait for the HTTP connection to timeout when contacting the validator. By default this is 30 seconds.

detailed

This fetched the XML response from the validator in order to provide information for the errors method. You should set this to true if you intend to use the errors method.

validate

    $v->validate( 'http:://www.example.com/' );

Validate a URI. Returns 0 if the validation fails (e.g if the validator cannot be reached), otherwise 1.

validate_file

    $v->validate_file( './file.html' );

Validate a file by uploading it to the W3C Validator. NB This has only been tested on a Linux box so may not work on non unix machines.

validate_markup

    $v->validate_markup( $markup );

Validate a scalar containing HTML.

is_valid

    $v->is_valid;

Returns true (1) if the URI validated otherwise 0.

uri

    $v->uri();

Returns the URI of the last page on which validation succeeded.

num_errors

    $num_errors = $v->num_errors();

Returns the number of errors that the validator encountered.

errors

    $errors = $v->errors();
    
    foreach my $err ( @$errors ) {
        printf("line: %s, col: %s\n\terror: %s\n", 
                $err-line, $err->col, $err->msg);
    }

Returns an array ref of WebService::Validator::HTML::W3C::Error objects. These have line, col and msg methods that return a line number, a column in that line and the error that occurred at that point.

Note that you need XML::XPath for this to work and you must have initialised WebService::Validator::HTML::W3C with the detailed option. If you have not set the detailed option a warning will be issued, the detailed option will be set and a second request made to the validator in order to fetch the required information.

validator_error

    $error = $v->validator_error();

Returns a string indicating why validation may not have occurred. This is not the reason that a webpage was invalid. It is the reason that no meaningful information about the attempted validation could be obtained. This is most likely to be an HTTP error

Possible values are:

You need to supply a URI to validate

You didn't pass a URI to the validate method

You need to supply a URI with a scheme

The URI you passed to validate didn't have a scheme on the front. The W3C validator can't handle URIs like www.example.com but instead needs URIs of the form http://www.example.com/.

Not a W3C Validator or Bad URI

The URI did not return the headers that WebService::Validator::HTML::W3C relies on so it is likely that there is not a W3C Validator at that URI. The other possibility is that it didn't like the URI you provided. Sadly the Validator doesn't give very useful feedback on this at the moment.

Could not contact validator

WebService::Validator::HTML::W3C could not establish a connection to the URI.

Did not get a sensible result from the validator

Should never happen and most likely indicates a problem somewhere but on the off chance that WebService::Validator::HTML::W3C is unable to make sense of the response from the validator you'll get this error.

validator_uri

    $uri = $v->validator_uri();
    $v->validator_uri('http://validator.w3.org/check');

Returns or sets the URI of the validator to use. Please note that you need to use the full path to the validator cgi.

http_timeout

    $timeout = $v->http_timeout();
    $v->http_timeout(10);

Returns or sets the timeout for the HTTP request.

OTHER MODULES

Please note that there is also an official W3C module that is part of the W3C::LogValidator distribution. However that module is not very useful outside the constraints of that package. WebService::Validator::HTML::W3C is meant as a more general way to access the W3C Validator.

HTML::Validator uses nsgmls to validate against the W3Cs DTDs. You have to fetch the relevant DTDs and so on.

There is also the HTML::Parser based HTML::Lint which mostly checks for known tags rather than XML/HTML validity.

IMPORTANT

This module is not in any way associated with the W3C so please do not report any problems with this module to them. Also please remember that the online Validator is a shared resource so do not abuse it. This means sleeping between requests. If you want to do a lot of testing against it then please consider downloading and installing the Validator software which is available from the W3C. Debian testing users will also find that it is available via apt-get.

BUGS

While the interface to the Validator is fairly stable it may be updated. I will endeavour to track any changes with this module so please check on CPAN for new versions if you find things break. Also note that this module is only guaranteed to work with the currently stable version of the validator. It will most likely work with any Beta versions but don't rely on it.

If in doubt please try and run the test suite before reporting bugs.

That said I'm very happy to hear about bugs. All the more so if they come with patches ;).

THANKS

To the various people on the code review ladder mailing list who provided useful suggestions.

SUPPORT

author email or via http://rt.cpan.org/.

AUTHOR

Struan Donald <struan@cpan.org>

http://www.exo.org.uk/code/

COPYRIGHT

Copyright (C) 2003 Struan Donald. All rights reserved.

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.

SEE ALSO

perl(1).

cpanm WebService::Validator::HTML::W3C

perl -MCPAN -e shell
install WebService::Validator::HTML::W3C