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Re: Another lookup problem (well-formed vs. valid)

2003-05-13 13:56:12
Hi Chris,

At 03:48 PM 5/13/2003, you wrote:
I'm thinking I could use document('....') to pull in the other data,
and I could use <xsl:key> to access the data, but I'm concerned
that the other data doesn't conform to the same DTD as the rest.

It shouldn't be a problem. Whether the data is any good is a separable question from whether it conforms to a particular (or any) DTD. :->

I hope (not yet proven) that the other data source is at least well-
formed -- my validating parser hasn't shown me any well-formedness
errors. (By the way, this is off-topic, but does anybody happen to
know how I can just call a non-validating parser to confirm that a
document is well-formed? I have access to xalan/xerces and expat
(nee nsgmls) -- probably some others but not immediately to hand)
Will I be able to just call in the other document without worrying about
its validity?

If it's truly well-formed, yes. (Again, you still might have to worry about the quality of the data.)

All XML parsers do wf-checking; most validating parsers have a switch to allow you to turn validation off. For tasks such as you're looking at, I like the RXP parser (google XML RXP parser), which is fast and conformant and runs from a command line, with various switches including this one. I know for sure that Xerces has such a switch: in its docs you want to look at "SAXCount" or some other mini-application.

One more complication: the additional source document is in 27 pieces,
so I was combining them using the internal subset on the DOCTYPE
line, like so:

<!DOCTYPE OPR PUBLIC "-//xxx/DTD xxx//" "Oro-v315.dtd" [
<!ENTITY efa SYSTEM "./ef/xmlout/efa.xml">
...]
>
&efa;
...

An old SGML trick which is still very handy, but here I'm concerned
that I'm no longer in pure well-formedness once I've put that DOCTYPE
line in there.

You're still well-formed: not to worry. (You're not "standalone" though.) This won't be an issue until you run into some tool that doesn't conform to the Rec in this respect.

Cheers,
Wendell


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Wendell Piez                            
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