Re: Parsing reports.

On Mon, 26 Apr 2010 04:50:35 -0700
"Vladimir Nesterovsky" <vladimir@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> Hello!
> 
> I have many kinds of text reports that are output of some legacy
> programs. These are tabular reports: titles, headers, footers, pages,
> details, totals, subtotals, an so on.
> 
> My task is to transform these reports into a structured data, and
> then feed these data to
> a contemporary report engine.
> 
> I'm trying to understand now, if it's worth to approach to the task
> from the xslt side.
> Technically the task is solvable, however this would mean creation
> and support of many such 
> report parsers within xslt.
> 
> If anybody have already dealt with similar task?
> Any advices?
> Any xslt support libraries?
> Is it worth to deal with xslt here?

Depends how 'regular' the lines of text are?
XSLT can isolate lines of text and mark them up as XML.
Within each line, if the format is regular, regex can isolate
headers, footers etc. 

If the text is not regular, I'd suggest using a programming
language with good regexp support and finish manually if needed.

I've not seen any libraries that would help here.

Python or Perl would be good text handling tools 

HTH

-- 

regards 

-- 
Dave Pawson
XSLT XSL-FO FAQ.
http://www.dpawson.co.uk