It would still be pretty hard, though, given that there's no
support for matching nested structures. You can use the
regular expression support to tokenise a string (such as a
Cobol program) but getting from there to a parse tree is not
straight forward (and <xsl:for-each-group> won't help). Or
have I missed something?
It obviously depends how far you want to go. COBOL copy books, if I
remember correctly, are usually pretty simple: I would think that
picking out the level number, name, and picture of each field would be
fairly easy using regular expressions, and turning the hierarchy from a
flat list with level numbers into a true XML hierarchy shouldn't be too
hard using for-each-group. (One thing I've never done is to use
for-each-group recursively to handle infinite nesting of groups, but it
should be possible in theory!)
Michael Kay
Software AG
home: Michael(_dot_)H(_dot_)Kay(_at_)ntlworld(_dot_)com
work: Michael(_dot_)Kay(_at_)softwareag(_dot_)com
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