NAME

XML::Validate::Xerces - Interface to Xerces validator

SYNOPSIS

        my $validator = new XML::Validate::Xerces(%options);
        if ($doc = $validator->validate($xml)) {
                ... Do stuff with $doc ...
        } else {
                print "Document is invalid\n";
        }

DESCRIPTION

XML::Validate::Xerces is an interface to the Xerces parser which can be used with the XML::Validate module.

METHODS

new(%options): Returns a new XML::Validate::Xerces instance using the specified options. (See OPTIONS below.)
validate($xml): Returns a true value if $xml could be successfully parsed, undef otherwise.
last_dom(): Returns the Xerces DOM object of the document last validated.
last_error(): Returns the error from the last validate call. This is a hash ref with the following fields:

message
line
column

Note that the error gets cleared at the beginning of each "validate" call.

version(): Returns the version of the XML::Xerces module that is installed

OPTIONS

XML::Validate::Xerces takes the following options:

strict_validation: If this boolean value is true, the document will be validated during parsing. Otherwise it will only be checked for well-formedness. Defaults to true.
base_uri: Since the XML document is supplied as a string, the validator doesn't know the document's URI. If the document contains any components referenced using relative URI's, you'll need to set this option to the document's URI so that the validator can retrieve them correctly.

ERROR REPORTING

When a call to validate fails to parse the document, the error may be retrieved using last_error.

On errors not related to the XML parsing, these methods will throw exceptions. Wrap calls with eval to catch them.

DEPENDENCIES

XML::Xerces

BUGS

XML::Xerces contains an INIT block that doesn't get run because we load the module in an eval. This causes a warning message to be printed. We then run the code in XML::Xerces ourselves, but this is fragile because XML::Xerces might change. We need to keep an eye on this.

XML::Xerces reacts badly to code which does "use UNIVERSAL" (see <http://issues.apache.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=25788>). XML::Validate::Xerces inherits this bug. Modules that are known to cause problems include Time::Piece and versions of XML::Twig prior to April 2005).

VERSION

$Revision: 1.21 $ on $Date: 2005/09/06 11:05:09 $ by $Author: johna $

AUTHOR

Nathan Carr, Colin Robertson

COPYRIGHT

(c) BBC 2005. This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the GNU GPL. See the file COPYING in this distribution, or http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.txt