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

[Brett Zamir <brettz9@yahoo.com>]

Hello, thanks for all your responses...

It is not so much specific tools that I'm interested in, but rather a 
W3C standard which might be implemented in browsers like Firefox, etc.  
It sounds like XSLT 2.0 might be the closest thing.

To give an example usage, I imagine if PHP wanted to provide some kind 
of regular expressions stylesheet to express the syntax of PHP, they 
could just post it at their own site (assuming an open means was offered 
to them or they developed it themselves). Then, one could take some 
sample PHP code (saved as a regular text file that is) and attach to it 
a stylesheet which had the simpler task of say producing syntax-colored 
HTML output of the PHP code. I've even wondered whether one could 
perform crude PHP <-> Java, etc. translations in this way (I know, I 
know, computer languages such as these are vastly different, but I think 
it could be a lot easier to attempt if XML were used as the medium of 
exchange...)

Brett


Bryce K. Nielsen wrote:
>> 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
>
>
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