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Asked: 2026-05-30T03:50:10+00:00

I am writing a parser to parse incoming text files. I have it to

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I am writing a parser to parse incoming text files. I have it to where it will parse everything accurately.

I have an option for it to output to text – this was done to check the accuracy of the parsing. I am currently implementing an option to write to a spreadsheet but it doesn’t output everything yet.

I have a request to output as static HTML. Is it worth outputting to XML and then generating HTML from that?

I see C# has the XMLTransform class which looks like it would do what I need. Is using the XML designer in VS and writing the XSLT file easier than hand-coding all of the HTML output? I know Excel will import XML files, but it is a little messy and I don’t get the formatting options I can get if I generate the .xls file directly

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  1. Editorial Team

    I would give you a qualified No.

    It is generally not worth building XML then running it through an XSLT transformation to build HTML.

    That said, I might consider such an option if I wanted to easily swap out transformations, such as if this is an app used by multiple clients and the generated HTML would be client dependent. Even then I’d investigate using a simple tokenized HTML template in which I just plugged in the data I wanted. However, if the transformation was sufficiently complex then, yes, I’d go the XSLT route.

    The reason for the No is that by the conversion adds such a level of complexity that it is usually not worth the time involved.

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