W3C Command-line Validator

Forked from https://github.com/srackham/w3c-validator

A command-line script (written in Python) for validating HTML and CSS files and URLs using the WC3 validators. It can convert all the CSS files of a directory and subdirectories.

The w3c-validator.py script uses the curl(1) command to submit HTML files and URLs to the http://validator.w3.org/[W3C Markup Validation Service] and CSS files and URLs to the http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/[W3C CSS Validation Service]. The script parses and reports the JSON results returned by the validators.

NOTE: Currently the CSS validator's JSON output option is experimental and not formally documented.

Usage

The script command syntax is:

python w3c-validator.py [--verbose] [--cssonly] --file_url_or_directory=FILE|URL|DIRECTORY

• The optional --verbose option will print information about what is going on internally.
• The optional --cssonly option will retrieve only '*.css' extension files.
• Names with a .css extension are treated as CSS, all other names are assumed to contain HTML.
• Names starting with http:// are assumed to be publically accessible URLs, all other names are assumed to be local file names.
• Any mix of one or more local files or HTTP URLs can be specified.
• If one or more files fail validation then the exit status will be 1, if no errors occurs the exits status will be zero.

Examples (w3c-validator is just a convenient symbolic link in the shell 'PATH' to the executable w3c-validator.py script):

--------------------------------------------------------------
$ w3c-validator tests/css/common.css
validating: tests/css/common.css ...
| errors: 2
|-- Ligne 316 : “compact” is not a “display” value :
|       #search_s .submit
|-- Ligne 1321 : Parse Error
|
| warnings: 36
--------------------------------------------------------------

Resources

• http://validator.w3.org/docs/users.html[User's guide for the W3C Markup Validator].
• http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/manual.html[CSS Validator User's Manual].

Prerequisites

• Python.
• Curl (the curl(1) command must be in the shell 'PATH').
• An Internet connection.

Written and tested on ubuntu 16.04 with Python 2.7.12, should work on other Python platforms.