> Thanks for your response, but I'm not looking for column and row > numbers in the XML document. I might have been a little ambiguous > in using the word "location". What I need is the reference to the > Node object in the DOM tree that caused the validation error. The > perfect solution would be for the SAXException to contain a > reference to that Node.
If you're working with SAX, there may not be any DOM nodes, of course... so I'd rather see a more general solution. Instead, I'd suggest reporting an XPath to the node in question. That will work against a DOM already in memory, but would also work for documents loaded later, including those loaded into an XML API... and it's human-readable enough to be chased down in a text editor or debugger if necessary. Generating an XPath to a node is fairly easy if you have an in-memory model of the document such as a DOM. (It's made a bit uglier by namespaces, but there are standard ways to handle that; I've written that code in both XSLT and Java.) In a SAX parser, where you can't necessarily chase back up the tree, it would require maintaining what amounts to a context stack with some counters... easy to do if you're willing to generate ugly paths like /node()[1]/node()[5]/@foo. Somewhat more expensive if you want that something more human-friendly like /baz/bar/@foo. Of course you probably wouldn't want to pay that overhead except when debugging; this might want to be an optional plug-in event filter layer.
