Cannot upload to Google Play Store, very frustrated

[Ravenswd]

I have a book which I created in html and then converted to mobi using Calibre and uploaded to Amazon. No problems.

I recently decided to expand my market, so I used Calibre to convert the book to an epub file, and attempted to upload it to the Google Play Store.

Google rejected the file with this very cryptic error message:

Error: Unable to sanitize epub

After a bit of searching, I discovered that the most likely cause was "errors" in the structure of the epub file, and I should run it through a validator.

I used an on-line validator and it gave me three errors (Well, it gave me a lot of errors, but they were all multiple copies of the same 3):

spaces in file names of images

images do not contain alt tags

value of attribute "name" is invalid; must be an XML NMTOKEN

The first two were easy enough to fix. The last one is puzzling, though.

By loading my epub file into Sigil, I can see that it is divided up into 22 separate html files. The validator flagged each one of them with this error.

The validator website had a page to help you decipher their error messages, but the one I'm getting doesn't seem to be listed.

I tried several others, including a couple that you download and run locally, but they all gave EXACTLY THE SAME results. Apparently, they ALL simply run epubcheck 3.0 . The epubcheck website doesn't do any better of a job explaining that error message either.

The exact error message it's giving me is:

ERROR: RelativityBook01.epub/relativity-book-01A-lost-and-found-kindle-hand-fixed_split_000.htm(7,60): value of attribute "name" is invalid; must be an XML NMTOKEN

One website said that when epubcheck finds an error, it will indicate what line the error is on after the filename. So, what does (7,60) mean then? I thought it might have been "line 7, column 60", but all of the files have fewer than 60 characters in line 7.

I haven't re-sent the file to the Google Play Store. That will be my next step after posting this message. Maybe fixing the image tags will be enough, but I doubt it. I have a feeling that Google is running epubcheck themselves, and they'll simply reject it again.

I'm completely at a loss on how to proceed. Any help would be appreciated. Thank you.

[Ravenswd]

Ha-ha. OF COURSE, immediately after I post this I get a flash of inspiration and look at line 7 of the *original* html file I created the epub from.

Line 7 is:

<meta name="Date of publication" content="2013-05-27" />

epubcheck was choking on the spaces in "Date of publication".

So I removed that line - it's not really necessary - and ran epubcheck again. No errors!

OK, *now* I'm posting to Google. I'll let you all know how it goes.

[mrmikel]

Name is not valid in epubs. Use id instead. You can do a simple search and replace for name= and replace it with id=.

[JSWolf]

Before you post to Google Play, please make the ePub code clean. It will work best with the cleanest possible code.