How to translate a XML file with a specific syntax to another XML file respecting another syntax?

Question

Hello everybody,

I have an XML file, let's call it file A, and another XML file, B.

I need to make an import tool which will permit me to take the content of the file A, and put it in the file B. The two syntaxes are totally different. The file A is used in a web app, that will integrate an other tool which describe the same thing with the syntax of the B file. Converting the old file to the new format need to be done so it can still be read after integrating the new tool.

For exemple I would say that file A is like:

<house> <windows>3</windows> <doors>2</doors> </house>

And the file B is like:

<house windows="3" doors="2"/>

How could I handle this? There is even some attributes or tags that are in the first file and not in the other.

I thought about using something like ATL, that I used during my studies for a research program, I don't know if it is the best way to do this.

Please excuse my english, which is not very good, I am working on it.

Thank you

Answer 1

Look at XSL - it is designed exactly for this kind of scenario, translating one XML dialect to another.

Most platforms and modern languages have tools to load source XML and use an XSL file to transform it to another XML dialect.

Here is a tutorial for using XSLT in java.

Answer 2

XSLT should be able to help you here. The w3schools tutorial should give you a good start.

XSLT stands for XSL Transformations. In this tutorial you will learn how to use XSLT to transform XML documents into other formats, like XHTML.

Answer 3

This might help :

<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"&gt;
  <xsl:template match="/">
    <xsl:for-each select="house">
      <house windows="{windows}" doors="{doors}" />
    </xsl:for-each>
  </xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>