[SlugBug] a perl/xslt question. potentially inappropriate.

[Mike Dewar]

Hi all,

This might be an inappropriate place to ask these questions, so 
apologies in advance.

Context: I'm trying to set up a documentation wiki for an open-source 
program called Scilab, which is a sort-of alternative to Matlab. I'm an 
Engineering PhD student at the University. I'm doing this because... 
ermm... I don't know why I'm doing this. It's not part of my studies.

Problem (high-level): I need to automagically convert a bunch of XML 
files into wiki-readable entries so that I can populate the Wiki DB.

Potential Solution: I thought I could use an XSLT to transform the XML 
document into a wiki-document. I thought I could use Perl to do the 
transformation (and to interact with the DB and to do file-structure 
mapping and navigation etc...).

Problem (meta-level): I'm very new to Perl, XML/XSLT and MySQL and so 
am becoming quickly confused.

Problem (low-level): I'm using the Perl module XML::XSLT to try and do 
the conversion and, to make sure everything's hunky-dory, I'm using the 
XSLT stylesheet that already does the conversion between the XML and 
Scilab's existing (and bad) HTML online help. Nothing's hunky-dory, 
errors occur i think, within the module when I try and do the 
transform. I can't make the thing work.

Question 0: Is this an appropriate forum to discuss Perl and stuff like 
this? If not, can anyone give me any pointers to an appropriate (and 
local if poss) forum?

Question 1: Is my Potential Solution viable, or is there a better way? 
For ages I was trying to do screen-scraping stuff and only recently 
found out about XSLT. There is probably other solutions that I could be 
using that I've not heard about.

Question 2: Is there a different tool with which I can perform the 
transform, either a perl module or some other thing that I can call 
from within a perl script...?

OK, c'est tout. Sorry for such a long email, as you can see I'm casting 
about in the dark a bit... Oh yeah and by the way your/our wiki's 
security certificate thingy has expired and made Firefox a little 
worried.

Cheers,

Mike Dewar
www.mikedewar.org