A while ago, for a client, I wrote a little utility that allowed you to
describe an Excel spreadsheet, and it generated XSLT code to extract an XML
representation of the selected data. This handled quite a large class of
tabular data - but it was very much an unproductised in-house tool.

Regards,

Michael Kay
http://www.saxonica.com/
http://twitter.com/michaelhkay  

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Vladimir Nesterovsky [mailto:vladimir@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] 
> Sent: 26 April 2010 12:51
> To: xsl-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Subject:  Parsing reports.
> 
> 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?
> --
> Vladimir Nesterovsky
> http://www.nesterovsky-bros.com/