Tim Arnold wrote:
Hi, I have some html files that I want to validate by using an external script 'validate'. The html files need a doctype header attached before validation. The files are in utf8 encoding. My code:
---------------
import os,sys
import codecs,subprocess
HEADER = '<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">'

filename  = 'mytest.html'
fd = codecs.open(filename,'rb',encoding='utf8')
s = HEADER + fd.read()
fd.close()

p = subprocess.Popen(['validate'],
                    stdin=subprocess.PIPE,
                    stdout=subprocess.PIPE,
                    stderr=subprocess.STDOUT)
validate = p.communicate(unicode(s,encoding='utf8'))
print validate
---------------

I get lots of lines like this:
Error at line 1, character 66:\tillegal character number 0
etc etc.

But I can give the command in a terminal 'cat mytest.html | validate' and get reasonable output. My subprocess code must be wrong, but I could use some help to see what the problem is.

python2.5.1, freebsd6
thanks,
--Tim


============================
If you search through the recent Python-List for UTF-8 things you might get the same understanding I have come to.

the problem is the use of python's 'print' subcommand or what ever it is. It 'cooks' things and someone decided that it would only handle 1/2 of a byte (in the x'00 to x'7f' range) and ignore or send error messages against anything else. I guess the person doing the deciding read the part that says ASCII printables are in the 7 bit range and chose to ignore the part about the rest of the byte being undefined. That is undefined, not disallowed. Means the high bit half can be used as wanted since it isn't already taken. Nor did whoever it was take a look around the computer world and realize the conflict that was going to be generated by using only 1/2 of a byte in a 1byte+ world.

If you can modify your code to use read and write you can bypass print and be OK. Or just have python do the 'cat mytest.html | validate' for you. (Apply a var for html and let python accomplish the the equivalent of Unix's:
   for f in *.html; do cat $f | validate; done
                        or
    for f in *.html; do validate $f; done  #file name available this way

If you still have problems, take a look at os.POPEN2 (and its popen3)
Also take look at os.spawn.. et al

HTH

Steve
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