XSLT with SGML files??

Daedalus · November 16th, 2012, 06:36 AM

Hi,

Can anybody please tell me if it's possible to run XSLT on non-XML files such as SGML?

I appreciate that XML is just a sub-set of SGML and therefore i would imagine it can be done, but I'm not sure if the XML declaration is required at the top of the file(s), or if there is any other reason why it wouldn't be possible without first converting to XML.

Thanks.

Martin Honnen · November 16th, 2012, 06:39 AM

There are converters like http://www.jclark.com/sp/sx.htm that you can use to convert the SGML documents to XML first, then you can feed the XML documents to any XSLT processor.

Daedalus · November 16th, 2012, 06:41 AM

Thanks. So i take it that's a no then, without first converting to XML.

Martin Honnen · November 16th, 2012, 06:54 AM

Well depending on the platform or XSLT processor there might be an SGML parser you can simply plug into the chain of processing, for instance for .NET there was or might still be an SgmlReader class implementing the XmlReader API that is central to all other XML APIs in .NET so there you could use XslCompiledTransform for XSLT 1.0 or probably even Saxon 9 .NET for XSLT 2.0 and feed an SGML document to the XSLT processor, with a few lines of .NET code running the transformation.

Similar solutions might exist in the Java world, like there are ways to feed SGML based HTML 4 to XSLT with APIs like TagSoup.

But the primary input for XSLT is XML, not SGML. I think there is also a transformation language for SGML documents but I am not familiar with that.