What's the best way to validate an XML file against an XSD file?

The Java runtime library supports validation. Last time I checked this was the Apache Xerces parser under the covers. You should probably use a javax.xml.validation.Validator.

import javax.xml.XMLConstants;
import javax.xml.transform.Source;
import javax.xml.transform.stream.StreamSource;
import javax.xml.validation.*;
import java.net.URL;
import org.xml.sax.SAXException;
//import java.io.File; // if you use File
import java.io.IOException;
...
URL schemaFile = new URL("http://host:port/filename.xsd");
// webapp example xsd: 
// URL schemaFile = new URL("http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/j2ee/web-app_2_4.xsd");
// local file example:
// File schemaFile = new File("/location/to/localfile.xsd"); // etc.
Source xmlFile = new StreamSource(new File("web.xml"));
SchemaFactory schemaFactory = SchemaFactory
    .newInstance(XMLConstants.W3C_XML_SCHEMA_NS_URI);
try {
  Schema schema = schemaFactory.newSchema(schemaFile);
  Validator validator = schema.newValidator();
  validator.validate(xmlFile);
  System.out.println(xmlFile.getSystemId() + " is valid");
} catch (SAXException e) {
  System.out.println(xmlFile.getSystemId() + " is NOT valid reason:" + e);
} catch (IOException e) {}

The schema factory constant is the string http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema which defines XSDs. The above code validates a WAR deployment descriptor against the URL http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/j2ee/web-app_2_4.xsd but you could just as easily validate against a local file.

You should not use the DOMParser to validate a document (unless your goal is to create a document object model anyway). This will start creating DOM objects as it parses the document - wasteful if you aren't going to use them.

Here's how to do it using Xerces2. A tutorial for this, here (req. signup).

Original attribution: blatantly copied from here:

import org.apache.xerces.parsers.DOMParser;
import java.io.File;
import org.w3c.dom.Document;

public class SchemaTest {
  public static void main (String args[]) {
      File docFile = new File("memory.xml");
      try {
        DOMParser parser = new DOMParser();
        parser.setFeature("http://xml.org/sax/features/validation", true);
        parser.setProperty(
             "http://apache.org/xml/properties/schema/external-noNamespaceSchemaLocation", 
             "memory.xsd");
        ErrorChecker errors = new ErrorChecker();
        parser.setErrorHandler(errors);
        parser.parse("memory.xml");
     } catch (Exception e) {
        System.out.print("Problem parsing the file.");
     }
  }
}

We build our project using ant, so we can use the schemavalidate task to check our config files:

<schemavalidate> 
    <fileset dir="${configdir}" includes="**/*.xml" />
</schemavalidate>

Now naughty config files will fail our build!

http://ant.apache.org/manual/Tasks/schemavalidate.html