xml-dev - Re: Need a tool that converts HTML into well-formed XML,and nothing more

[Matt Sergeant <matt@sergeant.org>]

On Thu, 21 Sep 2000, Christopher R. Maden wrote:

> At 15:20 21-09-2000 +0100, Dylan Walsh wrote:
> >Hi. I am working on preparing examples of HTML, created by professional web
> >designers, for use with XSL transformations. Obviously the markup needs to
> >be made well-formed for this purpose. I am familiar with Tidy from the W3C,
> >however that utility goes beyond what we need, as it makes changes to
> >conform to their standards. This unfortunately results in visual anomalies
> >in the output.
> >
> >I understand the arguements behind XHTML etc., however the markup we are
> >given is designed to work look good with older browsers, on different
> >platforms. Is there any software out there that converts HTML to be
> >well-formed XML, but does not make changes beyond that, e.g. to obey the
> >HTML or XHTML standards?
> 
> Is the HTML valid SGML (i.e., complies with one of the HTML DTDs)?  If so, 
> you can use James Clark's sx (<URL:http://www.jclark.com/sp/>), which will 
> do a straight SGML-to-XML translation with no knowledge of HTML's semantics.
> 
> If the HTML is tag soup, then you may be SOL; try Perl with the 
> HTML::Parser module, or something.

If HTML::Parser will work on the malformed HTML, you can use XML::PYX,
which comes with a pyxhtml script, so you can go:

pyxhtml <file> | pyxw > <newfile>

pyxhtml uses HTML::Parser (actually HTML::TreeBuilder, but ultimately
refers to HTML::Parser).

I believe the Python PYX tools have a similar facility too.

-- 
<Matt/>

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