Terminal.app

As written on all the good practice books about development, I write my applications ready for localization. To do that in WebObjects, one should put all the localizable strings in a strings file. In WebObjects applications, a strings file may be written in two formats: the Apple’s weird .plist format and XML. I use XML, because it looks more… well… I don’t really know, but I prefer it.

Anyway, some days ago I did a mistake in one of those files. I did something like: <string>Some String/string>. As you can see, I forgot the < character in the closing tag. When I run the application, all I got was this:


The element type "string" must be terminated by the matching end-tag "“.: Parsing failed in line 1155, column 3


This is totally useless, as the line 1155 is actually the line before the last one in the file (the one that closes the “dict” entity). And yes, it’s a big file. Obviously, checking all the lines manually in undoable, even if I only checked the modified ones after the last commit (I added/changed many strings since then). So, the easiest way was to find a XML validator on the web, and hope it would point me the error.

How surprised I was when all the validators I found in the first two result pages pages of Googling for “XML Validator” reported exactly the same error as WebObjects itself. Great. Just great. And finally, I found one validator that saved the day. This guy, although a bit slow, showed me the exact line where the error was. So, bookmark this. Really. It’s the best XML validator around! And yes, just so that you don’t forget the link, let’s just mention it one more time!

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 20th, 2008 at 12:18 pm and is filed under WebObjects. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.