W3C Validators Ruby Gem

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.

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Installation

  gem install w3c_validators

You can also download the gem from RubyForge.

Documentation

See the W3C Validators Ruby Gem documentation.

Usage

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

Each validator has offers three different validation methods.

validate_text methods take a string
validate_file methods take a path to a file
validate_uri methods take a published URL

In addition, the 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

The source code is available at http://code.dunae.ca/svn/w3c_validators/.

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 and Jonathan Julian and Sylvain LaFleur for creating the 0.9.3 update.