Summary

This chapter presented several methods of converting from various data formats to XML. The input data formats that I discussed were CSV and Microsoft Excel spreadsheet files. These are two popular formats for exchanging data. Other data formats (for example, text files using other delimiters, such as spaces, tabs, or pipes) can easily be converted to CSV, so the examples discussed in this chapter would still be applicable .

The next chapter, Chapter 8, "XML Transformation and Filtering," will also discuss the conversion between formats. However, the major difference is that in Chapter 9, "AxKit," we'll start with an XML file and convert it to different formats using XSLT. I'll provide several examples to illustrate the different Perl modules available for these tasks .