RE: questions about XSLT philosophy: how much is too m

> It would still be pretty hard, though, given that there's no 
> support for matching nested structures. You can use the 
> regular expression support to tokenise a string (such as a 
> Cobol program) but getting from there to a parse tree is not 
> straight forward (and <xsl:for-each-group> won't help). Or 
> have I missed something?

It obviously depends how far you want to go. COBOL copy books, if I
remember correctly, are usually pretty simple: I would think that
picking out the level number, name, and picture of each field would be
fairly easy using regular expressions, and turning the hierarchy from a
flat list with level numbers into a true XML hierarchy shouldn't be too
hard using for-each-group. (One thing I've never done is to use
for-each-group recursively to handle infinite nesting of groups, but it
should be possible in theory!)

Michael Kay
Software AG
home: Michael.H.Kay@xxxxxxxxxxxx
work: Michael.Kay@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx 



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