W3C Validators Gem README

W3C Validators is a Ruby wrapper for the World Wide Web Consortium’s online validation services.

It supports the markup validator, the feed validator and the CSS validator.

Installation

gem sources -a http://gems.github.com
gem install alexdunae-w3c_validators

Usage

There are three main validator classes available, the W3CValidators::MarkupValidator (used for HTML), the W3CValidators::FeedValidator and the W3CValidators::CSSValidator.

Each validator has offers three different validation methods.

• validate_text methods take a string

• validate_file methods take a path to a file or an IO object

• validate_uri methods take a published URL

In addition, the W3CValidators::MarkupValidator has a validate_uri_quickly method, which performs a HEAD request against the markup validation service. The Results of this call give an error count but no error details.

Using a local validator

Each of the three validators allows you to specify a custom path to the validator. You can set your own validator like this:

validator = MarkupValidator.new(:validator_uri => 'http://localhost/check')

Examples

Example #1: Markup validator, local file

require 'w3c_validators'

include W3CValidators

@validator = MarkupValidator.new

# override the DOCTYPE
@validator.set_doctype!(:html32)

# turn on debugging messages
@validator.set_debug!(true)

file = File.dirname(__FILE__) + '/fixtures/markup.html'
results = @validator.validate_file(fp)

if results.errors.length > 0
  results.errors.each do |err|
    puts err.to_s
  end
else
  puts 'Valid!'
end

puts 'Debugging messages'

results.debug_messages.each do |key, value|
  puts "#{key}: #{value}"
end

Example #2: Feed validator, remote file

require 'w3c_validators'

include W3CValidators

@validator = FeedValidator.new

results = @validator.validate_uri('http://example.com/feed.xml')

if results.errors.length > 0
  results.errors.each do |err|
    puts err.to_s
  end
else
  puts 'Valid!'
end

Example #3: CSS validator, text fragment

require 'w3c_validators'

include W3CValidators

@validator = CSSValidator.new

results = @validator.validate_text('body { margin: 0px; }')

if results.errors.length > 0
  results.errors.each do |err|
    puts err.to_s
  end
else
  puts 'Valid!'
end

Tests

Run unit tests using rake test. Note that there is a one second delay between each call to the W3C’s validators per their request.

Credits and code

Documentation is available at code.dunae.ca/w3c_validators.

Source is available on GitHub

Written by Alex Dunae (dunae.ca, e-mail ‘code’ at the same domain), 2007.

Thanks to Ryan King for creating the 0.9.2 update.

Thanks to Ryan King, Jonathan Julian and Sylvain LaFleur for creating the 0.9.3 update.