Chapter Roadmap

This chapter discusses generating XML documents from various input data formats. The concept seems to be pretty simple; however, there is more to it than you might think. I'll also demonstrate the power of XML SAX technology when it is applied to other formats.You will see how the SAX interface can be implemented to process other data formats and how powerful this implementation can be. Although SAX stands for Simple API for XML, it's now becoming a lot more than that thanks to its well-defined standard and the generality of its implementation. SAX-like interfaces are now being implemented in other communities that deal with different data formats, so eventually the SAX acronym might stand for Simple API for X, with X being the unknown, and you fill in the blank.

Here is a quick summary of the topics discussed in this chapter.

• The section, "Why Convert Another Data Format to XML?" provides the answer to the question it poses.

• The section, "XML::SAXDriver::CSV Perl Module" covers XML generation based on the CSV (Comma Separated Value) input.

• The section, "XML::SAXDriver::Excel Perl Module" covers XML generation based on Microsoft Excel binary data.

• The section, "Developing a Custom Event Handler" goes over the concepts and contains an example of how to write a SAX driver for non-XML data.

To run the examples in this chapter, you will need to install the following Perl modules:

• XML::SAXDriver::CSV

• XML::SAXDriver::Excel

Note

If you have any questions about Perl modules (for example, where do you get them, how do you install them, and so forth), please refer to Appendix B, "Basic Perl Concepts."