Re: A simple guy with a simple problem

[Paul T <paul@pault.com>]

> Hello, my name is Bob and I'm a programmer.

Hi Bob. Nice to see you on the list.
 
> I work for a B2B company. My task today is to process
> incoming XML documents that are known to be valid against the foo
> DTD and change all occurences of the word "STUFF" to "stuff".

Too bad your company is using DTDs.  
 
> How should I proceed to do my job?

I think the only way you have is to write a bunch of regular expressions.

Ideally,  I think you should wait until DTDs and entities will be removed 
from the XML. I think it may take a couple of years. 

In the meantime, try using only reasonable subset of XML 1.0 
Something like Common XML by SML-DEV may help you. 

I understand that if you tell to some of your managers that 
DTDs in XML 1.0 are flawed or something - he just tell you that 
you should be crazy to argue with SGML experts because 
you're just a B2B developer. Nobody. 

There is however, some subtile workaround for this. You may 
try collecting rare latters where SGML experts *themselvs* are 
saying that DTDs are better to be removed from XML 1.0

For smart manager this may click on something and he
may initiate the process of redesigning  the entity-dtd-based 
workflows into something better ( and your problems will be gone ).

In general, XSLT-based workflows should work better. 

I mean that Common XML + XSLT is less trouble than 
full-blown XML with DTDs and entities.

Rgds.Paul.