Re: [xml] xmllint as minimal non-validating parser?

[Daniel Veillard <veillard redhat com>]

On Thu, Sep 13, 2007 at 09:48:51PM -0400, Fred Drake wrote:
> On Sep 13, 2007, at 5:33 PM, Chuck Bearden wrote:
> > Is there a way to make xmllint do no more than check documents
> > against the well-formedness constraints, to emulate a minimal
> > non-validating processor?
> 
> I hate to sound like advertising for the competition, but  
> "xmlwf" (distributed with the Expat library) will handle this.

  Well, libxml2 behaviour is actually correct, and expat should also
signal this to applications. A missing entity may not be fatal for 
processing in some applications but a critical problem in others, basically
you have undefined results from a spec perspective. That's why 
libxml2 error API distinguish fatal errors from errors.

> What's interesting is that xmllint exits with a return code of 0,  
> though the man page claims that means no error (as expected),  

  no fatal error, i.e. the data could be delivered, and a tree was
built, maybe I could change the man page.

> suggesting that this message is just a warning.  Using --nowarning  
> doesn't suppress the message, however.  Perhaps this is a bug in the  
> --nowarning support?

  There is no notion of warning in the XML spec, I still delivers some
in libxml2, even in the parser there are places where I raise warnings
(for example if the namespace names don't follow the RFC 2396 for 
absolute URI c.f. a controversial decision a long long time ago).
But in that case it's reported as an error, as I think it should,

Daniel

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