Managed to run validator on Windows system

Hi there,
I just installed the validator code on a Windows 2000 system, and finally it
runs...

I use an Apache 1.3.6, SP 1.3.4 for Windows, and ActivePerl 5.6.0.

After changing a lot of path/file names in httpd.conf and the check module I
ended up basically with two problems:

1. The rewrite rule in httpd.conf
   RewriteRule ^/$ /check [L,PT]
resulted in a endless loop of redirects between "/" and "/check". Since I didn't
understand its usefullness, I just disabled it.

2. The check-script contained a far bigger problem.
Somehow it thought the sgml parser wrote bad output.
I could narrow down the problem to the line where the nsgmls stderr output is
parsed with an regular expression to remove the parser file name.
The line looked like this: (line 495, version 1.64)
   s/^$sp:<OSFD>//g;
where $sp is the file name of the nsgml executable. The file name on windows
contains (of course) ugly backslashes. Since the name is not quoted, the
backslashes are interpreted as regexp special characters.
To allow them to be ignored by the regexp, I found the \Q\E quotes and changed
the line to look like this:
   s/^\Q$sp\E:<OSFD>//g;
It works. I don't know if that's a good way to do it - I'm no Perl expert.

After solving these problems, it seems to work fine. I only tested it with
HTML3.2 and HTML4.0 pages (with some errors of course... why didn't they like
the HEIGHT attribute in a TABLE-tag ;-) so far.

I would expect problems, if I used some Japanese encodings in the pages, since I
don't have that nkf-converter program the check-script uses. Due to my lack of
Japanese documents and the ability to understand them, I can live with that.

So, if anybody is interested in putting my code change in the "real" validator,
feel free to do so.

If any questions come up, just contact me directly via email (not the mailing
list, I'm not on it).

Thanks for making the code public,
   Lutz Latta

--
Lutz Latta
2L DIGITAL
http://www.2ld.de

Im Winkel 18
22880 Wedel
Germany

llatta@2ld.de

Received on Monday, 24 April 2000 16:37:59 UTC