strainer 0.1

Tools to allow developers to cleanup web serialization objects (HTML, JSON, XHTML)

Provides middleware for detecting and correcting errors in web pages that are served via the standard WSGI protocol used by most Python web frameworks. By default, validation errors are logged to the “strainer.middleware” channel using the standard Python logging module.

You should read the documentation for your web framework to find out how to get the “WSGI application” that is responsible for serving your web site. In Pylons, for example, the following code could be added in the config/middleware.py file.

To add HTML/XHTML/XML well-formedness validation to your WSGI app:

>>> from strainer.middleware import WellformednessCheckerMiddleware
>>> app = WellformednessCheckerMiddleware(app)

This uses the expat parser to detect most syntax errors and mismatched tags, but it won’t perform stricter checks that the document structure matches the XHTML DTD, such as detecting disallowed child tags or attributes. For that you should install a recent version of lxml (e.g. “easy_install lxml”) and use XHTMLValidatorMiddleware instead, with code such as:

>>> from strainer.middleware import XHTMLValidatorMiddleware
>>> app = XHTMLValidatorMiddleware(app)

To add JSON validation to your WSGI app:

>>> from strainer.middleware import JSONValidatorMiddleware
>>> app = JSONValidatorMiddleware(app)

If your web framework doesn’t provide an alternative handler for the error messages that are logged to the “strainer.middleware” channel, you can have them printed to sys.stderr with:

>>> import logging
>>> logging.basicConfig()

To add automatic correction of common HTML and XHTML errors to your WSGI app:

>>> from strainer.middleware import XHTMLifyMiddleware
>>> app = XHTMLifyMiddleware(app)

This is somewhat experimental, but it will improve faster if people use it and email us bug reports…

As with all (or at least most) WSGI middleware, you can also combine them:

>>> app = XHTMLifyMiddleware(app)
>>> app = XHTMLValidatorMiddleware(app)
>>> app = JSONValidatorMiddleware(app)

The middleware in this package buffer the output internally (this violates the PEP 333 specification, but it seems unavoidable), so it is best to use them near the top of the middleware stack.