Does epubcheck produce an incomplete list of files for the same error?

Hello,

As I’m noodling through a few old and invalid EPUB2 files I noticed that epubcheck does not report errors (using --json) across all files. For example

Error while parsing file: element "col" not allowed here; expected the element end-tag or element "caption", "colgroup", "script", "tbody", "template", "tfoot", "thead" or "tr"

is reported for OEBPS/intro.xhtml and OEBPS/chap2.xhtml. After fixing these two files I expected the error gone, but on its next run epubcheck reports that same error for OEBPS/chap3.xhtml.

At first I thought that there might be a message limit per error, but I didn’t find that documented.

So… what’s going on here? Can somebody please shed some light on this behavior?

Thanks,
Jens

At first I thought that there might be a message limit per error, but I didn’t find that documented.

That might be the case; I know that there is a global limit, but there may be a per-error limit too (I did not personally implement that feature so I don't remember.). I'll have a look!

@rdeltour

That might be the case; I know that there is a global limit, but there may be a per-error limit too (I did not personally implement that feature so I don't remember.). I'll have a look!

Thank you, @rdeltour, that’d be great! Ideally I’d like that limit off but perhaps it makes sense for users to control it via the command line 🤔

Oh… I just noticed in another EPUB:

{
    "ID" : "HTM-004",
    "severity" : "ERROR",
    "message" : "Irregular DOCTYPE: found \"-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1//EN\", expected \"<!DOCTYPE html>\".",
    "additionalLocations" : 157,
    "locations" : [ ... ],
    "suggestion" : null
}

with 25 "locations" objects, plus 157 "additionalLocations"¹ makes a total of 182 errors… Which is more or less the number of HTML files in the EPUB.

Definitely looks like there’s a cap on verbose reporting. It’d be great to have a command line option to verbosely report everything, i.e. ensure that "additionalLocations" is always 0.

I came across an EPUB with 14444 additional locations… ↩

feat(CLI): new option `--maxOfEachMessage NUM|unlimited`

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Does epubcheck produce an incomplete list of files for the same error? #1666

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Does epubcheck produce an incomplete list of files for the same error? #1666

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rdeltour commented on Jun 26, 2026

jenstroeger commented on Jun 26, 2026

jenstroeger commented on Jun 27, 2026

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