How do you change a TXT file to a XML?

Answer 1

An easy way would be to open the TXT file using Notepad or a comparable program, hit Ctrl+a to select all, Ctrl+c to copy, open up Microsoft Word 2007, hit Ctrl+v to paste, and save that as a XML doc.

An even easier way would be just to change the .txt extension to .xml, this should work as long as your etxt file has the correct xml syntaxt to denote an xml file eg

<xml> - denotes start of xml file

</xml> denotes end of xml file

Answer 2

A file containing XML markup and data isa text file, in the sense that it is stored in a plain file using a simple character encoding (often using UTF-8, also known as ASCII code). Such a file can be read using a typical "TXT" (or "ASCII") editor such as 'nano' on Linux or 'Notepad' on Windows. This process may be assisted by renaming the file, changing its file name extension from 'xml' to 'txt'. However, this file name change is not generally required.

However, viewing an XML file with a plain text editor presents the data and the meta data alike. Stripping the meta data (the XML markup) while preserving the content (the element values, the data) can be done through a process called transformation. Processing languages such as the XSLT language can be used to define the rules and automate the process of this conversion.

Answer 3

There is no general solution to convert data from an unstructured source (such as a plain text) into a structured form such as XML. The reason is that structured data contains structure, meta-datawhichdescribes data that follows.

For example, a plain text file might contain a title, followed by three paragraphs of text. A person might intuitively identify the title as the first, single, line of text, followed by a blank line, and might identify each paragraph as a portion of continuous text, separated by a blank line.

In a structured form, additional data is added to indicate the beginning and end of the title and each of the paragraphs. XML is one standard method of providing such additional data, which is often called 'meta-data' because it is data about data.

To convert unstructured data into structured data, one would generally require knowledge of the structure in order to define and apply suitable meta data. In the simplest form, such meta data could be a simple pair of "start of text" and "end of text" identifiers, although the usefulness of such an approach is generally questionable (as it doesn't add structure).