SgmlReader

SgmlReader is an XmlReader API over any SGML document (including built in support for HTML).  A command line utility is also provided which outputs the well formed XML result.

Download the zip file including the standalone executable and the full source code: SgmlReader.zip

See online demo at demo.aspx.
See also online source.

Command Line Usage

The command line executable version has the following options:

 sgmlreader <options> [InputUri] [OutputFile]

-e "file"	Specifies a file to write error output to.  The default is to generate no errors.  The special name "$stderr" redirects errors to stderr output stream.
-proxy "server"	Specifies the proxy server to use to fetch DTD's through the fire wall.
-html	Specifies that the input is HTML.
-dtd "uri"	Specifies some other SGML DTD.
-base	Add an HTML base tag to the output.
-pretty	Pretty print the output.
-encoding name	Specify an encoding for the output file (default UTF-8)
-noxml	Stops generation of XML declaration in output.
-doctype	Copy <!DOCTYPE tag to the output.
InputUri	The input file name or URL. Default is stdin.  If this is a local file name then it also supports wildcards.
OutputFile	The optional output file name. Default is stdout.  If the InputUri contains wildcards then this just specifies the output file extension, the default being ".xml".

Examples

sgmlreader -html *.htm *.xml

Converts all .htm files to corresponding .xml files using the built in HTML DTD.

sgmlreader -html http://www.msn.com -proxy myproxy:80 msn.xml

Converts all the MSN home page to XML storing the result in the local file "msn.xml".

sgmlreader -dtd ofx160.dtd test.ofx ofx.xml

Converts the given OFX file to XML using the SGML DTD "ofx160.dtd" specified in the test.ofx file.

SgmlReader Usage

The SgmlReader is an implementation of the XmlReader API so the only thing you really need to know is how to construct it. SgmlReader has a default constructor, then you need to set some of the following properties. To load a DTD you must specify DocType="HTML" or you must provide a SystemLiteral. To specify the SGML document you must provide either the InputStream or Href. Everything else is optional.

SgmlDtd Dtd

Specify the SgmlDtd object directly. This allows you to cache the Dtd and share it across multipl SgmlReaders. To load a DTD from a URL use the SystemLiteral property.

string DocType

The name of root element specified in the DOCTYPE tag. If you specify "HTML" then the SgmlReader will use the built-in HTML DTD. In this case you do not need to specify the SystemLiteral property.

string PublicIdentifier

The PUBLIC identifier in the DOCTYPE tag. This is optional.

string SystemLiteral

The SYSTEM literal in the DOCTYPE tag identifying the location of the DTD.

string InternalSubset

The DTD internal subset in the DOCTYPE tag. This is optional.

TextReader InputStream

The input stream containing SGML data to parse. You must specify this property or the Href property before calling Read().

string Href

Specify the location of the input SGML document as a URL.

string WebProxy

Sometimes you need to specify a proxy server in order to load data via HTTP from outside the firewall. For example: "itgproxy:80".

string BaseUri

The base Uri is used to resolve relative Uri's like the SystemLiteral and Href properties.

TextWriter ErrorLog

DTD validation errors are written to this stream.

string ErrorLogFile

DTD validation errors are written to this log file.

Then you can read from this reader like any other XmlReader class.

Features

SGML CDATA to XML <![CDATA[...]]> conversion

SGML DTD's describe a special DTD element type named "CDATA".  This is used in HTML for <SCRIPT> for example and the contents of the script block can be any text terminated by </SCRIPT> including script code containing "<" symbol and so forth, but this would not be well formed in an XML document so the contents of the script block are automatically converted to an XML CDATA block.

Support

Please email bugs, feedback and/or feature requests to Chris Lovett.

Change History