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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-17T15:09:21+00:00

I have an xml document which is produced by a process which I cannot

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I have an xml document which is produced by a process which I cannot change. It looks a little like this:

<root>
  <foo bar="..." baz="..."/>
  <foo bar="..." baz="..."/>
  <foo bar="..." baz="..."/>
  <foo/>
  <foo/>
</root>

I’ve got a schema set up to require attributes baz and bar on a foo element, because they’re required for the program which reads the file to run correctly. However, the program generating the xml sometimes adds one or more empty foo elements to the end, as shown above. This causes the schema validation to fail, but I don’t want to relax the schema to allow empty foo elements as this could cause the program to fail.

Does anyone have a suggestion of what the best approach to solving this problem is? The only solution I’ve thought of so far is to pre-process the xml, removing any empty foo elements, but it’s a bit hideous.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    There’s no way in XSD 1.0 of saying that some of the foo elements have different validation rules applied from other foo (sibling) elements. You could do it in XSD 1.1 with an assertion.

    Transforming before validating is not actually such a bad thing to do. If you know what noise you need to remove from a document before validating it and then doing the real processing, then inserting a transformation step into the pipeline before the validation can be a very effective technique.

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