Hi there
At the moment I have a VB executable that reads a text file in speacific format and then loads the data contained in it into a database.
My problem is we will now have files with the same information but in different formats (some tab delimited, some comma delimited, some with fields in different order and with different lengths etc.) arriving that must be processed by the executable so I need a way to to transform the different files into a single format for the program to read.
Can anyone point me in the right direction of how to do this using XML in some way. I thought I could use XSLT to transform the different files from one format to another but the original files will not be in XML so will need a 2 step process
step 1 to process file into XML and step 2 to process XML file into required text file format. Has anyone done anything like
this before or can offer any advice on the best way to achieve it?
Many thanks
Sam
Sam
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actually you can easily parse such kinds of not-xml datafiles with RegularExpressions.
And keeping in mind that XSLT 2.0 has build-in support for regexes, you can use XSLT to read and parse non-structured data files, and output XML. I can guess it will be rather easy to implement, check Saxon.NET XSLT 2.0 realease.
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by: b1xml2Posted on 2005-05-23 at 05:37:00ID: 14059636
Why dont you have a mapping file that tells you what the format is for a certain file or go one further, files in particular folders. That way your VB code can be generic. If you can use the .NET Framework, then you could write the DLL in VB.NET/C#, us regasm to register it so that it looks and quacks like a COM object and thus is usable in VB6. If you can do this, you have a very powerful way of writing and reading XML documents using the XmlTextWriter and XmlTextReader respectively. As far as XSLT transforms are concerned, the fastest still is MSXML4.0 (10 times faster than MSXML.NET for 500K documents!?). However, the XmlTextReader performs far better than MSXML4 since it is utilises the pull model, where it pulls data in and one can navigate through out the document.
I think XSLT is better utilised to handle XML documents. It would be wasteful to use XSLT to do text recursions. That is best left to VB/VB.NET/C#