xml-dev - Re: HTML to XML

[James Robertson <jamesr@steptwo.com.au>]

At 04:57 16/07/1998 , you wrote:

  | Sorry that I did not make the question clear.  What I am working on is to
  | retrieve some information, e.g. news articles, from the web and feed the
  | content to an application client which only knows application-specific
XML.
  | Therefore, I need to read the HTML file, analyze it, strip away all
  | presentation tags/contents, and convert the real content to the
  | application-specific XML.  Instead of writing my own HTML parser, I hope I
  | can find some tool to help me or hopefully one of the XML parser can do
the
  | job.  I prefer Java, but I'll consider anything available.

This sounds like a job for a custom-written translation.

In particular:

* You are only interested in a specific set of tags within the HTML, which
  you can convert to a particular "meaning". The rest you throw away, or
  convert to some standard form.

* You presumably have some XML DTD that you want to convert to, and it sounds
  like it is fairly specific for your needs.

I would recommend using a text processing environment like Perl, or
my preferred tool, Omnimark. Particularly if you want to do this
in a stable, ongoing fashion.

I would steer away from using an XML parser, and trying to build
a conversion package yourself. Let someone else do the hard work
for you ... ;-)

Cheers,

J


-------------------------
James Robertson
Step Two Designs Pty Ltd
SGML, XML & HTML Consultancy
http://www.steptwo.com.au/
jamesr@steptwo.com.au

"Beyond the Idea"
 ACN 081 019 623

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