RE: xslt and edi question

Thanks !

 -----Original Message-----
From: 	Michael Kay [mailto:mhkay@xxxxxxxxxxxx] 
Sent:	Wednesday, August 01, 2001 12:53 PM
To:	xsl-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject:	RE:  xslt and edi question

> Is my assumption correct, that non-XML "data" documents can
> be converted
> using XSLT. Any clarification, or additional advice would be greatly
> appreciated.

The input to an XSLT conversion has to be a data structure that conforms
to
the XPath data model: typically this means it has to be something like a
DOM
or a SAX event stream. If you can massage the input data into this form,
you
can use XSLT to transform it.

However, a word of warning. Just putting a begin and end tag around a
complex ASCII file isn't going to help very much. XSLT isn't good at
handling implicit structure in the data, it likes the structure to be
explicit in the markup. So you should do all the parsing that's
necessary
before the data hits the stylesheet, using tools like Perl or JavaCC,
rather
than trying to use XSLT for parsing text.

Mike Kay
Software AG


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