Re: [xml-dev] Standard means to convert text to XML?

["Bryce K. Nielsen" <bryce@sysonyx.com>]

> While it is great to be able to transparently handle conversion FROM XML, 
> it'd be nice to be able to transparently convert non-XML INTO XML (which 
> could ideally use the same schema to round-trip back into the original)...
>

XSLT 2.0 has this ability, though I found it had a steep learning curve. The 
biggest problem is that there are no standards for text documents, so it's 
rather tricky to create a standard dealing with a non-standard device. When 
we wrote xmlLinguist (which does bi-directional translation, btw), we tried 
to think of the various proprietary oddities in text documents, and believe 
me there were a few. One of the strangest was a header line that had an 
"end" line that wasn't a line, was just the text "END". So we had to treat 
the header as a normal line and then watch for the occurrence of an "END" 
later in the document. And child lines also had this "END". It was a rather 
odd document. At any rate, even with the knowledge we had, there were still 
exceptions cropping up on various conversions.

A standard could be started, but it would quickly grow to be a rather messy 
piece of work. I suspect this is why it's never really been attempted and 
the job of easily converting Text-to-XML has been left to the 3rd party 
world.

Bryce K. Nielsen
SysOnyx, Inc. (www.sysonyx.com)
Makers of xmlLinguist, the Text-to-XML Translator
http://www.sysonyx.com/products/xmllinguist