• From: "bryan rasmussen" <rasmussen.bryan@g...>
• To: "Brett Zamir" <brettz9@y...>
• Date: Wed, 15 Aug 2007 11:47:05 +0200

Well if this is the kind of thing you want you should probably look at
www.program-transformation.org.
In the context of php there is
http://www.program-transformation.org/PHP/PhpFront

This is more specific than you originally discussed though.

Cheers,
Bryan Rasmussen

On 8/15/07, Brett Zamir <brettz9@y...> wrote:
> Hello, thanks for all your responses...
>
> It is not so much specific tools that I'm interested in, but rather a
> W3C standard which might be implemented in browsers like Firefox, etc.
> It sounds like XSLT 2.0 might be the closest thing.
>
> To give an example usage, I imagine if PHP wanted to provide some kind
> of regular expressions stylesheet to express the syntax of PHP, they
> could just post it at their own site (assuming an open means was offered
> to them or they developed it themselves). Then, one could take some
> sample PHP code (saved as a regular text file that is) and attach to it
> a stylesheet which had the simpler task of say producing syntax-colored
> HTML output of the PHP code. I've even wondered whether one could
> perform crude PHP <-> Java, etc. translations in this way (I know, I
> know, computer languages such as these are vastly different, but I think
> it could be a lot easier to attempt if XML were used as the medium of
> exchange...)
>
> Brett
>
>
> Bryce K. Nielsen wrote:
> >> While it is great to be able to transparently handle conversion FROM
> >> XML, it'd be nice to be able to transparently convert non-XML INTO
> >> XML (which could ideally use the same schema to round-trip back into
> >> the original)...
> >>
> >
> > XSLT 2.0 has this ability, though I found it had a steep learning
> > curve. The biggest problem is that there are no standards for text
> > documents, so it's rather tricky to create a standard dealing with a
> > non-standard device. When we wrote xmlLinguist (which does
> > bi-directional translation, btw), we tried to think of the various
> > proprietary oddities in text documents, and believe me there were a
> > few. One of the strangest was a header line that had an "end" line
> > that wasn't a line, was just the text "END". So we had to treat the
> > header as a normal line and then watch for the occurrence of an "END"
> > later in the document. And child lines also had this "END". It was a
> > rather odd document. At any rate, even with the knowledge we had,
> > there were still exceptions cropping up on various conversions.
> >
> > A standard could be started, but it would quickly grow to be a rather
> > messy piece of work. I suspect this is why it's never really been
> > attempted and the job of easily converting Text-to-XML has been left
> > to the 3rd party world.
> >
> > Bryce K. Nielsen
> > SysOnyx, Inc. (www.sysonyx.com)
> > Makers of xmlLinguist, the Text-to-XML Translator
> > http://www.sysonyx.com/products/xmllinguist
> >
> >
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• References:
  • Standard means to convert text to XML?
    • From: Brett Zamir <brettz9@y...>
  • Re: Standard means to convert text to XML?
    • From: "Bryce K. Nielsen" <bryce@s...>
  • Re: Standard means to convert text to XML?
    • From: Brett Zamir <brettz9@y...>