Perl access to local install of the W3C CSS validator

The W3C CSS validator is an online service for checking a stylesheet for standards compliance.  This service can be accessed in Perl via the WebService::Validator::CSS::W3C module, which is handy for automating validation.  However, for checking a large number of stylesheets, it is better to run a local install of the validator so as not to abuse the public service.  A local install also has a higher availability than an online service.  Unfortunately, the perl module does not support a local install out of the box.

To deal with this, I did the following:

1. Download and install the CSS validator locally.  Note that the raw installation directory is quite large.  However, only the css-validator.jar file, and the lib and org directories produced by the installation are needed to run it, which makes it much smaller.
2. Install the WebService::Validator::CSS::W3C module.
3. Override the WebService::Validator::CSS::W3C::validate() method provided by the module using the code below.  This uses the local installation instead of the remote service for running the validation.

# Override default $v->validate() method to use local installation:
sub WebService::Validator::CSS::W3C::validate
{
  my $self = shift; my %opt = ( @_ );
  my $file = "/tmp/check.$$.css";
  my $validator = "/usr/local/bin/css-validator";

  open ( my $CSS, ">$file" );
  print $CSS $opt{string};
  close ( $CSS );

  chdir ( $validator );
  my $data = `java -jar css-validator.jar --output=soap12 --profile=$opt{profile} file:$file`;
  unlink ( $file );
  $data =~ s/^.+\n//m;

  my $u = URI->new ( "data:" );
  $u->data ( $data );
  my $req = HTTP::Request->new ( GET => $u );

  # Copied from original:
  $self->{'success'} = 0;
  my $res = $ua->simple_request($req);
  $self->{'response'} = $res;
  return $self->_handle_response($res);
}

Then the module may be used more or less as usual:

use WebService::Validator::CSS::W3C;
my $v = WebService::Validator::CSS::W3C->new();
$v->validate ( string => $css, profile => "css3" );