Re: Tool converts records to XML

On Wed, Nov 16, 2022 at 7:41 PM C. M. Sperberg-McQueen <
[email protected]> wrote:

>
> Roger L Costello <[email protected]> writes:
>
> > Michael Kay wrote:
> >
> >> the "Barnes & Noble" problem. The number #1 blunder
> >> when writing XML is not to bother escaping `<` and `&`
> >> if they happen to occur in your input.
> >
> > Ouch!
> >
> > You are right Michael.
> >
> > Upon reflection, I realized that there is an even nastier problem
> > lurking than the problem of converting & and < in the input record
> > data into &amp; and &lt; in the output XML.
> >
> > ...
> >
> > To implement the character conversions in AWK would be a monumental task.
> >
> > Eeeeeeek!
> >
> > Lesson Learned: Don't use AWK to convert records to XML.
>
> Well, you may be right, and I believe many on this list share my
> preference for performing such conversions in XSLT and/or XQuery, but I
> have to say that the lesson you suggest seems a slightly broader
> conclusion than is warranted by the experience you describe.
>
>
Agreed.


> A couple points of detail:
>
>   - Your downstream tools are likely to be somewhat happier if you
>     convert the data to UTF-8 or UTF-16, but unless I am mistaken you
>     are not in fact required to do so, in order to turn the data into
>     XML.  XML does allow encoding declarations.
>
>   - If you do want to convert the encoding it would surprise me a bit if
>     awk had no constructs suitable for the work.  It would surprise me
>     even more if a system with awk did not have the iconv utility for
>     converting textual data from one encoding to another.
>
>         iconv --from-code=WINDOWS-1252 --to-code=UTF-8 < myinput >
> output.utf8
>
>
awk does not need such a construct. iconv and awk are part of a unix like
shell ecosystem so iconv can pre or post process an awk conversion using
normal shell scripting piping