With a DTD, there are very few ways to constrain the textual content of an
element (you can constrain it to be EMPTY, but not to be non-empty).

In XML Schema, you can declare the element to be of type my:non-empty-string
where my:non-empty-string is a simple type derived from xs:string using the
facet <minLength value="1"/>

Michael Kay
http://www.saxonica.com/

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Sudheshna Iyer [mailto:sudheshnaiyer@h...] 
> Sent: 03 April 2006 15:59
> To: xml-dev@l...
> Subject: [xml-dev] Validation of missing elements in xml:
> 
> Team,
> 
> I have the simple following xml and dtd:
> 
> <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
> <!DOCTYPE Person SYSTEM "Person.dtd">
> <Person>
> 	<name>aaa</name>
> 	<email>aaa.bbb@x...</email>
> </Person>
> 
> DTD:
> 
> <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
> <!ELEMENT Person (name, email)>
> <!ELEMENT email (#PCDATA)>
> <!ELEMENT name (#PCDATA)>
> 
> As per the DTD,  please note that "name"and "email" elements 
> are required 
> and if I validate the above with xmlspy
> xml is valid and wellformed.
> 
> But I want to catch the empty element scenario. for eg, if I 
> remove the 
> value of the "name" element from person.xml:
> 
> <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
> <!DOCTYPE Person SYSTEM "Person.dtd">
> <Person>
> 	<name></name> -----> see this.
> 	<email>aaa.bbb@x...</email>
> </Person>
> 
> and validate the xml through xmlspy, xml is still valid and 
> wellformed.
> 
> How do I catch these empty element problems through DTD? or 
> is it possible 
> through xsd? What is that I need to include
> in dtd or xsd to validate empty elements in dtd or xsd?
> 
> Thanks for your help.
> 
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