Validate OSIS or TEI text
An OSIS or TEI test is an XML Document that must be:
- Well formed, it means that its syntax must conforms to the XML specs. An XML file that is not well formed is not an XML file.
- Valid. A valid XML document is well-formed and conforms to the formal definition provided in a schema (or DTD). A document cannot have elements, attributes, or entities not defined in the schema. A schema can also define how entities may be nested, the possible values of attributes, etc.
Contents
Bible Technologies Group
The BTG that sponsored the OSIS committee and hosted the OSIS schema no longer exists. The schema location therefore now needs to be for a local copy on your computer or to a copy hosted by CrossWire or elsewhere.
For more up to date details, see OSIS 211 CR which includes CrossWire's own updated schema.
Schema
Before validating XML files, we first need to download a schema. At Crosswire, we use: - For OSIS encoded source files: osisCore.2.1.1-cw-latest.xsd - For TEI encoded source files: teiP5osis.2.5.0.xsd
You have to download these files here from Crosswire: https://www.crosswire.org/~dmsmith/osis/osisCore.2.1.1-cw-latest.xsd http://www.crosswire.org/OSIS/teiP5osis.2.5.0.xsd
Online validators
The first and simpliest option for checking an XML file is to use online validators. They will check if your XML is both well-formed and valid.
Here are two websites, there are others on the Internet.
- Core Filing XML Schema Validator
https://www.corefiling.com/opensource/schemaValidate/ Accept huge files (tested with a 5.5MB file)
- FreeFormatter Validator
https://www.freeformatter.com/xml-validator-xsd.html The maximum size limit for file upload is 2MB
With these validators, you have to upload the XML File and the schema (.xsd) file before validating.
I think we shouldn't recommend online validation, it may raises privacy concerns with copyright texts, moreover if it's fine for a one shot validation task, it becomes quickly boring when you're editing and working on a text.
CLI Validators
When you're editing a text, one of the fastest option for checking your XML is to use a CLI tool.
xmllint
The simplest way is to use the xmllint program included with libxml2. For Mac and Linux users, you likely already have xmllint installed. Windows users willing to try xmllint will find interesting instructions here: https://techrina.net/2019/01/25/using-xmllint-program-for-windows-7/
To validate an OSIS xml file enter:
xmllint --noout --schema osisCore.2.1.1-cw-latest.xsd test.osis.xml
To validate a TEI xml file enter:
xmllint --noout --schema teiP5osis.2.5.0.xsd test.tei.xml
xmlstarlet
XMLStarlet is an open source XML toolkit that you can use with Linux, Mac or Windows. XMLStarlet is linked statically to both libxml2 and libxslt, so generally all you need to process XML documents is one executable file, it may be a better option for Windows users.
On Linux, xmlstarlet is available as a regular package.
For Mac or Windows, the download page is at: http://xmlstar.sourceforge.net/download.php
To validate a TEI XML file enter:
xmlstarlet val --xsd ../../schemas/teiP5osis.2.5.0.xsd test.tei.xml
Xerces
Xerces is Apache's collection of software libraries for parsing, validating, serializing and manipulating XML. The implementation is available in the Java, C++ and Perl programming languages, the Java version having the most features.
On Ubuntu/debian, you can install xerces-c tools:
apt install libxerces-c-samples
To validate an OSIS XML file enter:
StdInParse -v=always -n -s < test.osis.xml.
You'll find the full syntax here: https://xerces.apache.org/xerces-c/stdinparse-3.html
xsd-validator by Adrian Mouat
There isn’t a simple way to immediately run the Xerces validator in Java from the command line. For that reason, Adrian Mouat wrote a Java program to solve this issue.
It's called 'xsd-validator', for installing it:
Either clone the git repository at: https://github.com/amouat/xsd-validator.git or download xsd-validator zip from: https://github.com/amouat/xsd-validator/releases/download/v1.0/xsdv-1.0.zip
To validate an OSIS XML file enter:
cd xsd-validator ./xsdv.sh osisCore.2.1.1-cw-latest.xsd test.osis.xml
There is also a cmd file that you can use to run xsdv from a windows Command Prompt.
For installing xsd-validator, run:
sudo ant install
Editors Supporting Validation
The final choice is to use an editor with validation on the fly. If you’re doing a lot of XML editing and validation it may well be worth looking into one of the following:
Notepad++
With XML Tools plugin for Notepad++, Notepad++ will allow you to clean up unformatted files, check XML syntax function if you want just to check your existing XML file for errors, or use Enable Auto Validation for automatic validation of code as it is being written among other features.
Go to the “Plugins” menu, then to “Plugin Manager”, then “Show Plugin Manager”. Look for XML Tools in the opened window, set the checkbox, and click the button “Install”.
You must restart Notepad ++ after installation.
Emacs
It's a little bit tricky, but you can configure Emacs to provide the following features:
- Easy navigation - Validation on the fly - Auto completion
- Use nxml-mode for editing XML
The first thing to do is to force Emacs to use nxml mode instead of xml mode when editing XML files. nxml-mode uses the nXML extension to provide automatic validation and lots of other helpful functions for editing XML files.
Add the following lines to your ~/.emacs file:
(setq auto-mode-alist (cons '("\\.xml$" . nxml-mode) auto-mode-alist)) (setq auto-mode-alist (cons '("\\.xsl$" . nxml-mode) auto-mode-alist)) (setq auto-mode-alist (cons '("\\.xhtml$" . nxml-mode) auto-mode-alist)) (setq auto-mode-alist (cons '("\\.page$" . nxml-mode) auto-mode-alist))
(autoload 'xml-mode "nxml" "XML editing mode" t)
(eval-after-load 'rng-loc '(add-to-list 'rng-schema-locating-files "~/.schema/schemas.xml"))
If you are using Emacs 24 or higher, you will also need this line that will give you auto-completion:
(global-set-key [C-return] 'completion-at-point)
- Set-up Crosswire Schemas
nxml-mode validates XML files using schemas in relaxng compact format (.rnc). We have to convert our files from .xsd format to .rnc.
We use Sun RELAX NG Converter, nowadays bundled with the (Sun) 'Multi-Schema Validator' to convert .xsd to .rng, then we use trang to convert .rng to .rnc:
Install on Fedora:
# sudo dnf install msv-rngconv trang
- Convert from .xsd to .rng:
rngconv osisCore.2.1.1-cw-latest.xsd > osisCore.2.1.1-cw-latest.rng
- Convert from .rng to .rnc
trang -I rng -O rnc osisCore.2.1.1-cw-latest.rng osisCore.2.1.1-cw-latest.rnc
It's a little bit tedious to convert these files. I think you'll be
pleased to find these 2 .rnc files attached.
- Tell nxml where to find our schemas
We have already (see above) set the variable rng-schema-locating-files to "~/.schema/schemas.xml
Now, we have to copy our new .rnc schemas in the .schema dir
mkdir -p ~/.schema cp osisCore.2.1.1-cw-latest.rnc teiP5osis.2.5.0.rnc ~/.schema
and create ~/.schema/schemas.xml:
<locatingRules xmlns="http://thaiopensource.com/ns/locating-rules/1.0">
<namespace ns="http://www.crosswire.org/2013/TEIOSIS/namespace" uri="teiP5osis.2.5.0.rnc"/> <namespace ns="http://www.bibletechnologies.net/2003/OSIS/namespace" uri="osisCore.2.1.1-cw-latest.rnc"/>
</locatingRules>
- Auto-completion
Type a < character and hit Ctrl+Enter for a list of valid tags. You can type a few letters and hit Tab to use auto-completion. Hit Enter to insert the given tag. This also works with attributes: simply add a space after the tag, and hit Ctrl+Enter for attribute auto-completion.
- links
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/How_to_use_Emacs_for_XML_editing https://lgfang.github.io/mynotes/emacs/emacs-xml.html#sec-9 https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/NxmlMode
Validating from Windows Explorer
Here is a simple application for validating XML files from within Windows Explorer.
https://www.codeproject.com/Articles/8431/A-Simple-XML-Validator
Python
It's relatively straighforward to validate a file with Python:
Let's create simplest validator.py
from lxml import etree
def validate(xml_path: str, xsd_path: str) -> bool:
xmlschema_doc = etree.parse(xsd_path) xmlschema = etree.XMLSchema(xmlschema_doc)
xml_doc = etree.parse(xml_path) result = xmlschema.validate(xml_doc)
return result
then write and run main.py
from validator import validate
if validate("path/to/file.xml", "path/to/scheme.xsd"): print('Valid! :)') else: print('Not valid! :(')
So it should be relatively easy to create a 'Crosswire XML validator' Nautilus extension to help us validate TEI and OSIS files directly from the file manager in Fedora/CentOS/Red Hat/Ubuntu.