RUNSP2 is designed to let you run the NSGMLS parser in a Windows environment. It provides standard Windows facilities for opening a file to be parsed and running the parser, but goes beyond that by 'reading' the error messages, and providing a helpful editing environment in which the user can correct the errors found.
The original idea was to support all the command-line options of NSGMLS via menu options or a dialog box, and I will go on to do this if the basic idea works well enough to justify the effort.
At present this program just runs the parser (NSGMLS) and the simple normalizer (SGMLNORM). Later, I may extend it to run all the programs in the SP suite.
This program is heavily dependent on the user having the latest version of NSGMLS (V1.1 for Windows 3.1; V1.1.1 for Windows 95). Note that this is a potential weakness in the approach: if James Clark changes the message format in future releases of NSGMLS, my program will need to track these changes or die!
I have developed this program to work with the messages produced by the latest version of NSGMLS (SP1_1 or SP1_1_1 release), and one tester has already found that it will not work with earlier versions. You can (should!) download the latest version from James Clark's site. It has run successfully under both Windows 3.1 and Windows 95, although there is no particular support for Win 95's long filenames.
The file RUNSP2.ZIP contains the program RUNSP2.EXE. If you unzip the file and copy RUNSP2.EXE to the directory in which you have installed NSGMLS.EXE, it should then 'find' NSGMLS when asked to do so. (Note that you can choose to install it elsewhere, and then tell RUNSP2 where to find the parser.)
You will have to set up your own short-cut or icon for this program. (I may get around to providing a proper installation procedure if it transpires that more than one person wants to use it!)
I offer no guarantees that RUNSP2 will work, and accept no responsibility for any damage caused. (Having said that, I don't foresee any problems worse than having it fail to work for you.)
RUNSP2 is being made available on the understanding that it is at an early stage of testing and should not be passed on to unwary third parties without a suitable health warning. I hope that you will report all problems and lacunae to me, and in return I will do my best to sort them out and post updated versions of the software at this site.
RUNSP2 lets you open the file you want to check/parse, and puts it into an editor window. You can do this either by the File - Open menu option, or by dragging the file's icon onto the program window or icon.
If you then press the 'run parser' button (or <F9>), a little batch file runs the parser in a separate window. Alternatively, there is an 'Auto-run parser' toggle in the Options menu. If this option is checked (before you open a file!), RUNSP2 will run the parser immediately.
I have provided a .PIF file for Windows 3.1 which causes this window (a) not to take up the whole screen and (b) to close itself when its job is done. If running it under Win 95 you can edit the properties of the DOS window so that it behaves itself in a similar manner. You should only have to do this once.
When the parser has finished running, RUNSP2 analyses the log file it has produced, and loads all the files containing errors. (Yes, this includes files from your DTD if it is faulty!) It then places the cursor at the position of the first error, and displays the error message in a box at the bottom of the screen. There are buttons to let you move through the errors (first, next, previous, last error). Each time you are placed at an error, you can use the editing facilities to correct it straight away. If you run the parser again after making some corrections, all your edits are automatically saved first.
If there are no errors, it tells you so, and an extra button appears which runs the normalizer program SGMLNORM on the current document.
The editor used should have sufficient capacity to deal with large files (16MB in theory: over 1MB, anyway) and with very long lines (up to 32767 characters). (The second aspect is important: some SGML utilities output byte streams with very few carriage returns. If there are none, the editor will effectively have a file size limit of 32K.)
The editor uses standard Windows conventions: I haven't spent any time investigating or documenting it. It does its work with the NSGMLS error messages by a combination of bookmarks (which should stay in the right place when you edit the text) and word wrap (without which you might never see many of the errors!).
Note that the error message itself is actually contained in a read-only 'memo' window, which means that you can highlight and copy phrases from it to your document via the clipboard (Ctrl-Ins to copy; Shift-Ins to paste). This is particularly useful where the error message contains a list of legal values (element names or attribute values).
The Options menu item includes the possibility of setting the SGML Declaration and SGML Catalog files: once you have done this, the program remembers these settings and you shouldn't have to do it again unless you have multiple declarations or catalogs for different purposes. You will need a catalog file if there are any PUBLIC identifiers in the files you want to parse.
One thing you need to watch is that the cursor isn't always visible when moving to an error. This can usually be cured either by scrolling down a few lines and back, by moving to the next error and then back, or in extremis by minimizing the window and then restoring it to full size.
It is quite possible that you will get error messages which are not dealt with sensibly. Please report these to me and I will try to cope with them. Remember that some messages do not give a filename, or do not give a specific position within a file: I clearly cannot point to the relevant part of the source in such cases!
At present, the editor used doesn't deal correctly with files that use Line Feed only as their 'record end' symbol.
RUNSP2 doesn't yet cope nicely with more than one 'main file'.
Let me know how you get on!
Improvement:
Bug fixes:
Bug fixes:
While I was at it, I have changed the logfile suffix to 'LG$' to try to avoid name clashes.
I have also added an option so that you can have the whole log file in its own child window. (This is useful for tracking messages that can't be linked to a specific point in the source, and for working out why RUNSP has failed to interpret the log correctly!)
Richard Light, last updated 4 September 1997