RE: Converting a Batch File to XML

> From: gfranco [mailto:garvin_franco@xxxxxxxxxxx] 

> We want to be able to write the style sheet once 
> and use in other places across the organization, and this is 
> why a style sheet, rather than a proprietary tool is more 
> appealing to us.  So if anyone else has any other ideas, I 
> would really appreciate your thoughts....

you want to maximize the work you do in XML.

Convert the text into some simple XML format, such as

<root>
<H>A-HEADER<H>
<I>AN-ITEM-1</I>
<S>A-SUMMARY-1</S>
...
</root>

then use XSLT 1.0 grouping techniques to do the rest of the work.

Fortunately, your text file looks straightforward to parse.

For text to XML, I use perl as it's open, compact and runs well on Unix
and Windows.

#!perl -w
print "<root>\n";
while (<>) {
  chomp();
  $tag = substr($_, 0, 1);
  print "<$tag>", substr($_, 2), "</$tag>\n";
}
print "</root>\n";

I saved this in a file called t.pl and ran it like this:

perl t.pl input.txt

Best Wishes,
James

--
"Be excellent to each other", Bill & Ted