Validating transfer files

A lot of language pairs contains errors which cant be found by apertium-validate-transfer, but which is found by the Bytecode for transfer compiler. This includes:

• Using an undefined variable, attribute or macro

e.g.: WARNING variable caseFirstWord doesent exist. Valid variables are: [number, case, genere]

e.g.: WARNING: Attribute a_np_acr is not defined. Valid attributes are: [a_nom, a_prp, a_adv, a_adj, a_vrb, a_vrb2...

e.g.: WARNING: Macro f_bcond is not defined. Ignoring call. Defined macros are: [prnagradar, f_comparativa, ...

• Clipping at an invalid position (e.g. <clip pos="5"> when there are only 4 words)

e.g.: WARNING clip pos=4 is out of range. Replacing with an empty TransferWord.

• Referencing a blank out of range (e.g. when there are only 4 words)

e.g.: WARNING blank pos=1 is out of range. Replacing with a zero-space blank.

• Invoking macros with wrong numer of parameters

e.g.: WARNING: Macro f_lexicadj is invoked with too few parameters. Adding blank parameters

• Invoking macros with an out-of-range parameter (e.g. <call-macro> <with-param pos="5"/> when there are only 4 words)

See Bytecode for transfer/Evaluation on all released language pairs for some examples of errors on existing released language pairs.

You can easily check yourself if your transfer file contains errors.

First, install lttoolbox-java. Then type

$ apertium-preprocess-transfer-bytecode-j your-file.t1x anything.class

Example finding an undefined attribute:

$ apertium-preprocess-transfer-bytecode-j apertium-eo-en.eo-en.t1x apertium_eo_en_eo_en_t1x.class
Parsing apertium-eo-en.eo-en.t1x
// WARNING: Attribute a_np_acr is not defined. Valid attributes are: [a_nom, a_prp, a_adv, a_adj, a_vrb, a_vrb2, a_det, a_ord, a_prn, a_tns, a_nepersonaj_tempoj, a_gen, a_prs, a_nbr, a_cas, lem, lemq, lemh, whole, tags, chname, chcontent, content]
// Replacing with error_UNKNOWN_ATTR - for <transfer default="chunk">/<section-def-macros>/<def-macro n="firstWord" npar="1">/<choose>/<when>/<test>/<equal>/<clip part="a_np_acr" pos="1" side="sl">
Compiling: javac -cp /usr/local/bin/../share/apertium/lttoolbox.jar ./apertium_eo_en_eo_en_t1x.java