Re: csv data to xml

On Tue, Jun 25, 2013 at 10:29:26AM -0400, Louis-Dominique Dubeau scripsit:
> I've written complex XSLT 1 and 2 stylesheets, mainly to process files
> encoded using TEI. I would not dream of using anything else than XSLT
> for these files. But I've also done conversion of the type Henry
> mentioned dozens of times. In my experience it is simpler to avoid XSLT
> for *this* kind of conversion.

In my experience, this is only true if the incoming CSV file is all of
clean, very simple, and highly infrequent.

If you're going to do a lot of whatever it is, XSLT 2 is nearly ideal;
you get your escaping for free, you can deal with the
never-to-be-sufficiently accursed quoted commas by tokenizing on "?,"?
after tokenizing on the newlines, the unparsed-text functions are very
handy things, matches, replace, and xsl:analyze-string really can do
about everything you'd want.

I realize it isn't a traditional way to think of XSLT, but, really, 2.0
is very nearly as good as perl for pure string handling tasks. _And_ it
won't let you commit some sin of omission with your character encoding.

-- Graydon