Title: Do I need XML parser ?



In many cases it's easy enough to generate XML just by 
writing it out directly as a print file. You can do this in any programming 
language. The only things you need to be a little careful about 
are:
 
(a) the character encoding of the text file that you write 
must be correctly described in the XML declaration at the head of the 
file
 
(b) special characters such as <, >, and & (and 
quotes in attribute values) need to be escaped using sequences such as 
&lt;
 
(c) some control characters are not permitted, and others 
such as newline may need to be escaped if you need to preserve them 
as-is.
 
If you're starting with a COBOL file on a mainframe this is 
probably the simplest approach. With an XML-aware language such as Java you have 
rather more choices; my own preference is usually to write "events" such as 
startElement, endElement etc to a SAX serializer.
 
An XML parser is needed only by an application that 
reads XML, not one that writes XML. 
 
Michael Kay
http://www.saxonica.com/


  
  
  From: Saha Rabindra N 
  [mailto:saha.rn@m...] 
Sent: 03 March 2005 19:50
To: 
  xml-dev@l...
Subject: [xml-dev] Do I need XML parser 
  ?
Importance: High


  
  <!---->
  Hello, 
 As I am new to this XML business so I 
  got a basic and simple question. 
Here it goes... 
I have one cobol data file (in ASCII format) and one cobol 
  record description file to describe the position/length of each field of data 
  file.
  I want to generate one XML file 
  out of that cobol data file. My question is 
1) Do I need any XML parser to just generate one XML file 
  from a data file ? Or a simple programming 
  logic can create the XML file ?
  2) While environment/programming 
  language would be best in this scenario ? 
        a) program written in cobol on Mainframe ? 
        b) to transfer the datafile to a Unix m/c and the generate the XML file 
  in C language ? 
        c) to transfer the datafile to a Unix m/c and the generate the XML file 
  using shell script ? 
  Any quick help would be highly 
  appreciated ! 
  Thanks in advance, 
  
  Regards 
Rabindra Nath Saha 
   
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