Parsing Comma-Separated Values

By Doug Tidwell
2005-05-18

Converting the generated XML

Now that I had this XML-tagged data, I needed to write an XSLT style sheet that would convert the XML above into a more useful (and understandable) tag set. You can view the style sheet listing in a separate window, and you can also download it and view it locally.

To convert the generated XML document using the rules in the style sheet and then write the output to the file called employees.xml, I typed:

java org.apache.xalan.xslt.Process -in output.xml -xsl csv-stylesheet.xsl 

  -out employees.xml

If you want to run the transform code, you'll need the Xerces XML parser and version 1.0.0 of the Xalan style sheet processor (see Resources), both of which are free and available at xml.apache.org. The resulting XML looks like Listing 2. (You can also download employees.xml and employees.dtd.)

Listing 2. XML output of the document converted using csv-stylesheet.xsl



<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>

<!DOCTYPE employees SYSTEM "employees.dtd">

<employees>

  <employee sex="F">

    <serial_number>000010</serial_number>

    <name>

      <first_name>CHRISTINE</first_name>

      <middle_initial>I</middle_initial>

      <last_name>HAAS</last_name>

    </name>

    <department>A00</department>

    <phone>3978</phone>

    <date_of_hire year="1965" month="01" day="01"/>

    <job_title>PRES</job_title>

    <years_of_education>18</years_of_education>

    <date_of_birth year="1933" month="08" day="24"/>

    <salary>52750</salary>

    <bonus>1000</bonus>

    <commission>4220</commission>

  </employee>

  <employee sex="M">

  ...

  </employee>

</employees>

Figure 1. Excerpt of the HTML table converted from the CSV data via the style sheet employee-table.xsl

Employee	Sex	Serial Number	Department	Job Title	Date of Hire	Years of Education
Employee	Phone	Date of Birth	Salary	Bonus	Commission	Total Compensation
ADAMSON, BRUCE	M	000150	D11	DESIGNER	02/12/1972	16
ADAMSON, BRUCE	4510	05/17/1947	$25,280.00	$500.00	$2,022.00	$27,802.00
BROWN, DAVID	M	000200	D11	DESIGNER	03/03/1966	16
BROWN, DAVID	4501	05/29/1941	$27,740.00	$600.00	$2,217.00	$30,557.00
GEYER, JOHN B.	M	000050	E01	MANAGER	08/17/1949	16
GEYER, JOHN B.	6789	09/15/1925	$40,175.00	$800.00	$3,214.00	$44,189.00
GOUNOT, JASON R.	M	000340	E21	FIELDREP	05/05/1947	16
GOUNOT, JASON R.	5698	05/17/1926	$23,840.00	$500.00	$1,907.00	$26,247.00
HAAS, CHRISTINE I.	F	000010	A00	PRES	01/01/1965	18
HAAS, CHRISTINE I.	3978	08/24/1933	$52,750.00	$1,000.00	$4,220.00	$57,970.00

You can view the entire table in a separate window, and also view the HTML source.

I hope this helps. I've certainly learned some things along the way, and I hope you have too.

Tutorial Pages:
» Getting the data
» Parsing the comma-separated value (CSV) file
» Converting the generated XML
» Resources

First published by IBM DeveloperWorks

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