Ubuntu Manpage: xmlwf — Determines if an XML document is well-formed

Provided by: expat_2.1.0-4ubuntu1.4_amd64

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]
       [-v]  [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 standard input.

WELL-FORMED DOCUMENTS

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

          •  The file  begins  with  an  XML  declaration.   For  instance,  <?xml  version="1.0"
             standalone="yes"?>.   NOTE:           xmlwf does not currently check for a valid XML
             declaration.

          •  Every start tag is either empty (<tag/>) or has a corresponding end tag.

          •  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 separately ("-d
output") or concatenated with the option ("-doutput"). xmlwf supports both.

-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 "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, xmlwf 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 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 supports 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; this can result in
faster parsing on many platforms. -r turns off memory-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 substantially higher
memory usage for xmlwf, but this appears to be a matter of the operating system
reporting memory in a strange way; there is not a leak in xmlwf.

-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, ...).

-v Prints the version of the Expat library being used, including some information
on the compile-time configuration of the library, and then exits.

-w Enables support for 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:

<!ENTITY vers '1.0.2'>

And here are some examples of external entities:

<!ENTITY header SYSTEM "header-&vers;.xml"> (parsed)
<!ENTITY logo SYSTEM "logo.png" PNG> (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 xmlwf on the file -myfile.xml.

Older versions of xmlwf do not support reading from standard input.

OUTPUT

       If an input file is not well-formed, xmlwf prints a single line describing the problem  to
       standard  output.   If a file is well formed, xmlwf outputs nothing.  Note that the result
       code is not set.

BUGS

       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 standard
       output.

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

       There should be a way to get -d 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 -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

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.

                                                                                         XMLWF(1)