sgml to xml conversion

Question

I have a following sample sgml data from my .sgm file and I want convert this in to xml

xyz
<         


        

Answer 1

Others have already given some good advice. Here's one way of putting it all together by first converting the input SGML to well-formed XML and then using XSLT to transform that to the exact format you need.

Converting your SGML to well-formed XML

The osx tool from the OpenSP package suggested by mzjn is a good tool for this. Since your SGML markup omits end tags, you need to have a DTD from which the correct nesting of elements can be determined. If you don't have a DTD, you need to create one. For your example input, it could be as simple as this:

You also need to add a proper doctype declaration to the beginning of your SGML file. Assuming you have your DTD in file viewed.dtd.

With this addition, you should now be able use osx to convert the SGML to XML. (It won't be able to convert the processing instructions which start with a / as those are not allowed in XML, and will emit a warning about them.)

osx input.sgm > input.xml

Transforming the resulting XML to your desired format

For the above case, you could use something like the following XSLT stylesheet: