Re: xproc, csv, lqraps...?

Dan Brickley <danbri@danbri.org> writes:
> (copying www-archive... why not..?)
>
> Well I finally decided to learn what XProc does. I think I'm getting
> the idea. But one thing caught my eye,
>
> 	5.10 Read/Write Non-XML File
> 	Read a CSV file and convert it to XML.
> 	Process the document with XSLT.
> 	Convert the result to a CSV format using text serialization.
[...]
>
> ...in the requirements and use-cases doc. Also the main spec has a
> brief mention of a CSV scenario. But I can't really find much more
> detail on what can be done with CSV.

I think that example should probably be reworded to make it clear(er)
that it's only hypothetical. The XProc spec doesn't provide any
builtin steps that perform any sort of non-XML-to-XML transformations
(beyond some unescape markup cruft).

That part of the spec is simply observing that one could, if one
wished, define an extension step that transformed arbitrary data into
XML. The requirement that XML flows between steps doesn't place any
other limits on what a step can do.

> ...and it occured to me that maybe xproc is a nice environment for
> such things if there will ever be a standard set of CSV handlers (in
> xslt or native code).
>
> Thinking out loud...

If you've got an idea about what a CSV-to-XML step could/should do,
I'd be happy to implement it for you and add it to the exproc.org site
as an (interoperable) extension.

                                        Be seeing you,
                                          norm

-- 
Norman Walsh <ndw@nwalsh.com> | Time wounds all heels.
http://nwalsh.com/            |