Word and XML (was: XML standards coherency and so forth)

[david at megginson.com]

Sean Mc Grath writes:

 > RTF doesn't map well to XML -- even very low level -- formatting
 > oriented XML -- because of the way RTF is structured.
 > 
 > It is stack based and allows structures to overlap:-
 > 
 > 	\b1 bold \i1 bold italic \b0 italic \i0 plain
 > 
 > Matching up the on/offs:-
 > 	<b> bold <i> bold italic </b> italic </i> plain
 > 
 > invalid XML (or indeed SGML) because of the overlaps.

This is actually quite simple to handle algorithmically by maintaining
a stack and doing a pushback when tags aren't nested:

RTF   Tags        Stack
------------------------        
\b1   <b>         (b)
\i1   <i>         (b i)
\b0   </i></b><i> (i)
\i0   </i>        ()

You'd need only four or five lines of code to handle it -- just walk
back on the stack to the nearest matching state (closing all open
tags), then reopen everything except what you just closed.  I'm not
saying that you'll always get valid HTML, but at least the tags will
be properly nested.


All the best,


David

-- 
David Megginson                 david at megginson.com
           http://www.megginson.com/

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