Onixcheck - Book Trade Metadata Validation

Introduction

ONIX for Books is an international XML standard for the publishing and book trade industry.

onixcheck is a Python library and command line tool for validating ONIX metadata. It allows you to validate ONIX versions 2.1, 3.0, and 3.1 against the official XML Schema.

• Free software: Apache License 2.0

Installation

Using uv (Recommended)

For the fastest and most reliable installation, we recommend using the uv tool:

uv tool install onixcheck

Using pip

If you have Python or PyPy installed on your system:

pip install onixcheck

Quickstart

Command line usage examples

Validate all .xml, .onx, .onix files in current directory:

onixcheck

Validate a single onix file:

onixcheck myonixfile.xml

Validate all .xml files in /onixdata and its subdirectories:

onixcheck --path /onixdata --ext xml --recursive

Enable debug information (more detailed error output):

onixcheck myonixfile.xml --debug

Show help:

onixcheck -h

Using onixcheck as a Python library

Simple usage with onixcheck.validate:

import onixcheck
errors = onixcheck.validate('src/onixcheck/data/invalid_onix3_ref.xml')
print(errors[0].short)

ERROR - SCHEMASV - invalid_onix3_ref.xml:4:0 - Element 'SentDateTime': This element is not expected. Expected is ( Sender ).

errors is either a list of Message objects (INVALID file) or an empty list (VALID file)

Custom schema validation

You can specify custom schema types for validation:

import onixcheck
errors = onixcheck.validate('myfile.xml', schemas=('xsd', 'rng', 'google'))

Contributions and suggestions are welcome. Please feel free to open issues or pull requests on GitHub.