Displaying an user-friendly message while validating xml with dtd

[Vijay Chouhan]

Hi,

I have to validate a set of XML files against their DTD and print user-friendly error messages if validation fails.

I tried using popular parsers such as Xerces and the error message displayed is of the form:

 The content of element type "A" must match "(B|C|D|E)". 
   

Which unfortunately does not tell the user what is the offending element. I need to print something similar to error messages displayed on commercial tools like XMLSpy like:

 The element "A" disallows "X" here. 
   

The Apache Crimson Parser which was part of JDK 1.4 distribution prints messages pointing to the cause of error. However this parser is not used anymore (is obsolete?)
and JDK1.5 uses Xerces as the default parser. Hence I am not very confident on using Crimson.

Is there any other parser that would satisfy my requirement?

Thanks in advance for your help,
Vijay

[Vijay Chouhan]

Will appreciate any comments? Is there any other way out without depending on the Parser? I hope what I am saying makes sense..

TIA
Vijay

[Paul Clapham]

You can't tell the parser what error messages to use. So clearly if you want the error messages that a particular parser issues, you must use that parser.

You don't have to use the parser that's built into your version of Java. You can use a different parser if you like. (I don't recall the procedure for doing that but I'm sure it's documented somewhere.)