===== Converting XML to Another Format =====

InqScribe exports XML that looks like this:

  <transcript>
  <prologue>
  </prologue>
  <scene id="1" in="00:00:00.00" out="00:01:00.00">Line 1.</scene>
  <scene id="2" in="00:01:15.00" out="00:03:00.00">Line 2</scene>
  </transcript>

But sometimes you may want to convert this XML to another format, like this:

  <myformat>
    <transcript>
      <start>00:00:00.00</start>
      <end>00:01:00.00</end>
      <text>Line 1.</text>
    </transcript>
    <transcript>
      <start>00:01:15.00</start>
      <end>00:03:00.00</end>
      <text>Line 2.</text>
    </transcript>
  </myformat>

You can do this fairly easily using a technology called XSLT. We won't go into XSLT in depth here. If you want to read up on XSLT, try these starting points:

  * http://www.w3schools.com/xsl/xsl_intro.asp
  * http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2003/11/26/learnXSLT.html

Here are a couple of good, free XSLT processors you can use to do the actual conversion.

  * Mac OS X: http://www.entropy.ch/software/macosx/#testxslt
  * Windows: http://www.architag.com/xray

Now for the good stuff. Here's an example XSLT file that will convert the sample XML output above into the desired "myformat".

  <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
  <xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
  <xsl:template match="/">
  <myformat>
    <xsl:for-each select="//scene">
      <transcript>
        <start><xsl:value-of select="@in"/></start>
        <end><xsl:value-of select="@out"/></end>
        <text><xsl:value-of select="."/></text>
      </transcript>
    </xsl:for-each>
  </myformat>
  </xsl:template>
  </xsl:stylesheet>

A few comments about this example:

  * "//scene" means find every <scene> node in the XML file.
  * <xsl:value-of select="."/> means take the value of the current (.) node. Since we've looping over all scene nodes, that grabs the transcript text associated with each scene in the output.
  * Since "in" and "out" are XML attributes, not notes, you use the @ sign to refer to them.
  * Note that if you want to assign values to attributes of a note, you can use a slightly different notation. For example, if you want out that looks like ''<item a="00:00:00.00" b="00:01:00.00"/>'', you'd use this XSLT code: ''<item a="{@in}" b="{@out}"/>''. 

Hopefully this makes InqScribe's XML output even more useful to you.