Re: XSL and entities

[Paul Prescod <papresco@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Elliotte Rusty Harold wrote:
> 
> Which begs the question: should there be some other technology which does
> allow fairly arbitrary conversions from XML->foo? Something easier than
> writing a Java program on top of SAX?  What would such a thing look like?
> I have a suspicion the pattern matching might look a lot like XSL, but the
> output flow objects would be very different.

I think that James' idea gets us pretty far towards using XSL as that
language. The biggest problem to me is escaping. How do I say in XSL that
I want "\" turned into "\\"? One way would be to make XSL have powerful
character matching rules. Another way would be to have some generalized
preprocessor that could do this sort of thing for you.

But then again, we could argue that "sed" is already that generalized
preprocessor. So what more do we need? Perhaps a structure-aware SED?
Perhaps a Java program that pipes certain constructs through SED depending
on their context?

The problem is so easy to solve locally (i.e. per language) the I'm not
sure that anyone will spend much effort solving it globally, though it
would make this mailing list less repetitive.

 Paul Prescod  - http://itrc.uwaterloo.ca/~papresco

It's such a 
Bore
Being always
Poor
LANGSTON HUGHES
http://www.northshore.net/homepages/hope/engHughes.html


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