[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: editing XML with Spreadsheets, most likely Excel
On 03/12/2007, noah_mendelsohn@u... <noah_mendelsohn@u...> wrote: > There's another approach that can be ok for very simple scenarios, and > that's to put the tags directly in the spreadsheet and export as ascii or > unicode, using a PERL script or the like for final cleanup. This may seem > goofy, but it's pretty easy to make a sheet that looks like: > > <yourtag> | =refToFormulaForYourvalueHere | </yourtag> > > where the | are meant to represent cell boundaries. Copy those rows as > many times as you need and export as text and you'll get a run of text > that looks like > > <yourtag>123</yourtag> > <yourtag>456</yourtag> > > You can trivially wrap it in a document start/end tag, put on an XML > declaration if you like, use string concatenation functions to build up > attributes, etc. Definitely not for complex nestings or mappings to > elaborate existing XML schemas, but it's using the spreadsheet language in > a style that's pretty natural for a spreadsheet person. Depending on what > else is in the sheet and how you export, you may wind up with other stuff > before or after in the file, but it should be trivial to add marker lines > and use a PERL script or the like to clip out the part you need. Also, > once you've got that simple XML, it's really easy to transform it to > something more elaborate using XSLT or other XML tools. > > As I say, not the right approach for the most robust of complex cases, but > can be a really fine way to pull out simple information. Or save it out to csv and then use my csv-to-xml transform :) http://andrewjwelch.com/code/xslt/csv/csv-to-xml_v2.html Funnily enough it's the most popular page on my site and blog by 2 to 1 over the sudoku stuff (400+ views for November). I do get the odd email off people asking how to actually use it, so I should properly do a third version where it's wrapped in a function... -- Andrew Welch http://andrewjwelch.com Kernow: http://kernowforsaxon.sf.net/
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