Question

I need to validate a multiple files produced by a third party against a DTD; The files don’t have dtd declaration and I can’t change this because I am not the owner,
Is there a way of validating them using dom4j by providing the DTD separately?

Thanks

Answer 1

You can always convert the DTD to a schema (using for example trang), and perform an in-memory validation against the schema for each document.

To do that, you would create one javax.xml.validation.ValidationHandler with the converted schema, and feed it to a DOM4J SAXWriter.

Another option is of course to

1. Parse each document without validation into a DOM4J Document
2. Add a DOM4j DefaultDocumentType to the parsed document
3. Write the document to a temporary string buffer
4. Parse again, but this time with a validating SAXReader