Hi Bob--
As others have pointed out, there are a number of ways to skin this cat. For an Arbortext-specific solution, ACL gives a fairly direct method. You could use code that looks something like this:
# function to dump specific text to a message window for subsequent copying/pasting into
# another app (e.g. Word)
function dumptext() {
# define an array indicating what elements we want to dump text from
local elems[];
elems["title"]=1;
elems["para"]=1;
elems["trim.para"]=1;
# walk through document, check each element, and dump content
# if it's one of the flagged entries
goto_oid(oid_root(),0);
oid = oid_root();
while (oid_valid(oid)) {
oid = oid_forward(oid);
if (elems[oid_name(oid)]) {
eval oid_content(oid) output=>*;
}
}
}
Just load the document you want to dump, call the dumptext() function (using the Command Window), and it should pop up a new window containing all the text you want to dump.
You could also do this easily with XSLT, using a very simple stylesheet something like this:
<xsl:stylesheet version="2.0" xmlns:xsl="<a" style="COLOR:" blue;=" text-decoration:=" underline"=" target="_BLANK" href="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">">http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
<xsl:output method="text" version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"/">
<xsl:template match="title" |=" para=" |=" trim.para"=">
<xsl:value-of select="."/">
<xsl:text>
</xsl:text>
</xsl:template>
<xsl:template match="text()"/">
</xsl:stylesheet>
To apply this, you could load the document in Arbortext, select "Publish->Using XSL...", and select that stylesheet. This will produce a text file containing the content you want to dump.
These are only two approaches, you could also use just about any pure programming environment (Python, Perl, Ruby, Java, C++, etc. etc.) to do this. I wouldn't recommend trying to use regular expressions, however, because regex has known problems handling recursive structures such as the angle bracket element tags in XML.
--Clay
Clay Helberg
Senior Consultant
TerraXML
