Service » Input » textarea

This is not the recommended way to use the checker as a Web service. Instead, you probably want to check documents by POSTing them as the entity bodies of requests.

However, if for some reason you want to emulate a browser form-based textarea submission, you can do so by following these requirements:

• Issue an HTTP request to an existing checker instance such as https://validator.nu/ or http://validator.w3.org/nu/.
• For the request, use the POST method with an multipart/form-data entity body (application/x-www-form-urlencoded is not supported).
• Encode common parameters as form fields.
• Include the document to check as the value of a form field named content.
• You must ensure that the content field is the last field in the submission.

The request should explicitly set either the parser parameter or the css parameter. Content-Type is synthesized by selecting text/css if the value of the css parameter is yes, and otherwise selecting text/html or application/xml depending on the parser value. For all cases, the charset MIME type parameter is clamped to utf-8.

All field values including the document source must decode as UTF-8.

Examples

The following are simple examples using the curl command.

To check the file FILE.html and get the checker results in GNU error format:

curl -F out=gnu -F "content=<FILE.html" http://validator.w3.org/nu/

To check the file /Users/foo/FILE.html and get the checker results as JSON:

curl -F out=json -F "content=</Users/foo.FILE.html" \
  http://validator.w3.org/nu/

See also: Service » HTTP interface