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 install 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 and the source code are available at code.dunae.ca/w3c_validators.

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

Thanks to Ryan King (theryanking.com/) for creating the 0.9.2 update.

Thanks to Ryan King (theryanking.com/), Jonathan Julian (jonathanjulian.org/) and Sylvain LaFleur for creating the 0.9.3 update.