piping input to an external script

Tue May 12 00:49:51 EDT 2009

On May 11, 11:04 am, "Tim Arnold" <tim.arn... at sas.com> wrote:
> Hi, I have some html files that I want to validate by using an external
> script 'validate'. The html files need a doctype header attached before
> validation. The files are in utf8 encoding. My code:
> ---------------
> import os,sys
> import codecs,subprocess
> HEADER = '<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">'
>
> filename  = 'mytest.html'
> fd = codecs.open(filename,'rb',encoding='utf8')
> s = HEADER + fd.read()
> fd.close()
>
> p = subprocess.Popen(['validate'],
>                     stdin=subprocess.PIPE,
>                     stdout=subprocess.PIPE,
>                     stderr=subprocess.STDOUT)
> validate = p.communicate(unicode(s,encoding='utf8'))
> print validate
> ---------------
>
> I get lots of lines like this:
> Error at line 1, character 66:\tillegal character number 0
> etc etc.
>
> But I can give the command in a terminal 'cat mytest.html | validate' and
> get reasonable output. My subprocess code must be wrong, but I could use
> some help to see what the problem is.
>

Newline missing after the header is my guess.