RE: [xsl] Expanding Tabs

["Mario Madunic" <Mario_Madunic@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Alex,

Don't know if this will help but here are a couple of suggestions from my
experience. I've done quite a bit of this in the past and have found
preprocessing using ANT helps a lot before applying XSLTs. Using the
filterchain/tokenfilter/replaceregex tasks has made working with text files
easier. Hopefully you have at your disposal a tool similar to ANT. Second is
using a step process when applying templates and grouping things together. In
other words break down what you need down to small steps and parse your
content through each step till you are happy with the result, then move onto
the next. It's not elegant but have found it gets the job done and quite easy
to maintain if other rules need to be applied.

Marijan (Mario) Madunic
Publishing Specialist
New Flyer Industries

-----Original Message-----
From: Alex Muir [mailto:alex.g.muir@xxxxxxxxx]
Sent: Tuesday, March 30, 2010 7:30 AM
To: xsl-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: [xsl] Expanding Tabs

Okay I see,

What I'm doing is converting old text documents into XML. I feel like
the string length and position of the text is important given there
are tables represented in the text, section titles, subsection titles,
lists, footnotes, paragraphs,, new pages...

The length of a line, how much text follows one line to the next,
blank lines, the space between table columns will all be relevant for
determining what is what in the document and surrounding content with
xml tags.

I'll be using regex and analyze string for the majority of the process
so it may be that white space in general is all I need to match on
however it seemed that line length and position of text will be
relevant and so wanted to have every tab expanded to have the same
number of space so that counts are accurate,,, perhaps the logic would
have been easier for some aspects with expanded tabs.

Will see

Regards
Alex






On Mon, Mar 29, 2010 at 10:58 PM, Michael Kay <mike@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>>
>> I did come across something of interest when searching for
>> xsl expand tabs... in the XSL Working Draft 16-December-1998:
>>      http://www.w3.org/TR/1998/WD-xsl-19981216#expand-tabs
>>
>
> That's in the part of the spec that became XSL Formatting objects.
>
> This all raises the question of what you are trying to achieve. Generally,
> if your final output is HTML or XSL-FO, then replacing tabs by spaces isn't
> a very useful thing to do. It's not likely to be useful for most XML
> vocabularies either. I'm not sure it's all that useful even if you are
> producing old-fashioned ASCII text in a fixed-width font (like this email),
> unless whoever typed the text knows the old UNIX rules and used a text
> editor that respects them.
>
> Regards,
>
> Michael Kay
> http://www.saxonica.com/
> http://twitter.com/michaelhkay
>
>



--
Alex
https://sites.google.com/a/utg.edu.gm/alex

Some Good Music
http://sites.google.com/site/greigconteh/


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