Service » Input » POST body

This method—POSTing a document as the HTTP entity body of a request—is the recommended way to use the checker as a Web service.

To use this method to check a document:

• Issue an HTTP request with a URL for an existing checker instance such as https://validator.w3.org/nu/ or https://validator.nu/.
• Use the POST method for the request.
• Include the document to check as as the entity body of the request.
• Include the Content-Type request header to communicate the MIME type of the entity body; e.g., Content-type: text/html; charset=utf-8.
• Encode common parameters as query-string parameters; that is, just as you would with a GET request.

Only "&" is supported as a query-parameter separator. ";" is not supported.

Percent-encoded octets in the query string must decode to UTF-8.

Examples

First, two simple examples using the curl command.

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

curl -H "Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8" \
    --data-binary @FILE.html \
    https://validator.w3.org/nu/?out=gnu

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

curl -H "Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8" \
    --data-binary @/Users/foo/FILE.html \
    https://validator.w3.org/nu/?out=json

The following example shows how to use the Unirest Library in Java to send a string as a document to a local instance of the checker running at http://localhost:8080/vnu and get the checker results in GNU error format

String response = null;
String source = "your html here";
HttpResponse<String> uniResponse = Unirest.post("http://localhost:8080/vnu")
    .header("User-Agent", "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/41.0.2272.101 Safari/537.36")
    .header("Content-Type", "text/html; charset=UTF-8")
    .queryString("out", "gnu")
    .body(source)
    .asString();
response = uniResponse.getBody();

See also: Service » HTTP interface