Question

I’m looking do some sort of transform from INI to XML, the INI syntax is simple. I’m not looking to sed/awk/grep, this really should be done in XML tools.

Can this be done with regular XSL?
I have heard of Xflat, but can I do that from tools compiled in C? Such as xsltproc or xmlstarlet.

Generic INI syntax is like this…

[section]
option = values

which would be in xml like this…

<section>
<option>values</option>
</section>

Any help would be very appreciated.

Answer 1

Can this be done with regular XSL?

Yes, and XSLT 2.0 provides more facilities than XSLT 1.0 for processing text. Very complex text processing has been implemented in XSLT, including a general LR(1) parser, used for building parsers for specific grammars, such as JSON and XPath.

In particular, learn about unparsed-text(), the various string functions, including the ones that allow using regular expressions (matches(), tokenize() and replace()) and also the <xsl:analyze-string> instruction.

XSLT 1.0 also has string functions (as provided by XPath 1.0), however it lacks the regular expressions capabilty/functions and there is nothing such as the XSLT 2.0 function unparsed-text(). Among the most useful XPath 1.0 string functions are: substring(), substring-before(), substring-after(), starts-with(), string-length(), concat(), and especially the translate() function.

One can “read” a file by using an entity in a DTD, as Mads Hansen has explained in his answer. Another way is to read the file in the program that initiates the transformation, then to pass the file’s content as a string parameter to the transformation.

Update: The OP has now provided specific data, so that a complete solution is possible:

<xsl:stylesheet version="2.0"
 xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"
 xmlns:xs="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema">
 <xsl:output omit-xml-declaration="yes" indent="yes"/>

 <xsl:variable name="vText" select=
 "unparsed-text('file:///c:/temp/delete/test.ini')"/>

 <xsl:variable name="vLines" as="xs:string*" select=
   "tokenize($vText, '&#xD;?&#xA;')[.]"/>

 <xsl:variable name="vLineCnt" select="count($vLines)"/>

 <xsl:variable name="vSectLinesInds" as="xs:integer*" select=
  "for $i in 1 to $vLineCnt
     return
       if(starts-with(normalize-space($vLines[$i]), '['))
         then $i
         else ()
  "/>

 <xsl:variable name="vSectCnt" select="count($vSectLinesInds)"/>

 <xsl:template match="/">
  <xsl:for-each select="$vSectLinesInds">
    <xsl:variable name="vPos" select="position()"/>
    <xsl:variable name="vInd" as="xs:integer" select="."/>

     <xsl:variable name="vthisLine" as="xs:string"
          select="$vLines[$vInd]"/>

    <xsl:variable name="vNextSectInd" select=
     "if($vPos eq $vSectCnt)
        then
          $vLineCnt +1
        else
          $vSectLinesInds[$vPos +1]
     "/>

   <xsl:variable name="vInnerLines" select=
   "$vLines
       [position() gt current()
      and
        position() lt $vNextSectInd
       ]

   "/>

   <xsl:variable name="vName" select=
    "tokenize($vthisLine, '\[|\]')[2]"/>

   <xsl:element name="{$vName}">
    <xsl:for-each select="$vInnerLines">
      <xsl:variable name="vInnerParts" select=
      "tokenize(., '[ ]*=[ ]*')"/>

      <xsl:element name="{$vInnerParts[1]}">
        <xsl:value-of select="$vInnerParts[2]"/>
      </xsl:element>
    </xsl:for-each>
  </xsl:element>
  </xsl:for-each>
 </xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>

when this transformation is applied on any XML document (not used) and if the file at C:\temp\delete\test.ini has the following content:

[section1]
option1 = values1
option2 = values2
option3 = values3
option4 = values4
option5 = values5

[section2]
option1 = values1
option2 = values2
option3 = values3
option4 = values4
option5 = values5

[section3]
option1 = values1
option2 = values2
option3 = values3
option4 = values4
option5 = values5

the wanted, correct result is produced:

<section1>
   <option1>values1</option1>
   <option2>values2</option2>
   <option3>values3</option3>
   <option4>values4</option4>
   <option5>values5</option5>
</section1>
<section2>
   <option1>values1</option1>
   <option2>values2</option2>
   <option3>values3</option3>
   <option4>values4</option4>
   <option5>values5</option5>
</section2>
<section3>
   <option1>values1</option1>
   <option2>values2</option2>
   <option3>values3</option3>
   <option4>values4</option4>
   <option5>values5</option5>
</section3>