sets of parsing rules

["Nathan Young -X \(natyoung - Artizen at Cisco\)" <natyoung@cisco.com>]

Hi.

I have seen parts of this question addressed but I think it's worth
asking the whole question anyway, since I'm sure others have run into
this problem but I haven't been able to dig up any best practices in my
searching so far.  I may just need to search with the right terminology,
in which case this should be any easy one for someone who already
knows...

I have an application that parses a large number of HTML pages.  A few
of them are well formed XHTML but that's the exception rather than the
rule.  By grabbing pages, manipulating them a bit (regexps have been
sufficient here so far), then tidying them I can get them to a state
where they are parsable XML.  From there I can use XSL to get them the
rest of the way (although I have a process that allows me to run regexps
here too, supplementing XSLT 1.0).

The wrinkle is that I have several kinds of pages, each one requiring a
distinct set of steps in order to parse it.  I'm starting down the road
of modularizing the transforms so that I can handle more page types over
time in a way that's transparent to the rest of my application.

I've been exposed XML only pipelines, are there pipeline tools that
allow for non-XML steps?

------------>Nathan





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Nathan Young
Cisco.com->Interface Development
A: ncy1717
E: natyoung@cisco.com