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<title>
	<tt/Edi2SGML/ - an approach towards <tt>XML/EDI</> as a prototype in perl
<subtitle>
	release 0.1 - about the beauty of plain text
<author>
	Michael Koehne, <tt/kraehe@bakunin.north.de/
<date>
	v0.1, Thu Dec 10 05:49:59  1998
<abstract>
	Edi2SGML is a set of perl scripts, hopefully becoming a module,
	that is translating EDIFACT into SGML. This 0.1 version neither
	contains a document type definition for the produced SGML, nor
	does it contain a SGML parser to translate its documents back
	to EDI. Its intended as a working horse, and I hope that some
	diesel or expat, will be able to translate my Edi2SGML to XML/EDI
	and vice versa, once we have a standard.
</abstract>
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<sect>
	Introduction
<p>
   <tt/EDIFACT/ often called " nightmare of paper less office " once you
   show a programmer the standard draft. Those 2700 pages of horror full
   advisory board English has cursed many programmers with headaches.
<p>
   EDIFACT is trying the impossible: a single form for the real world.
<p>
   Orders, invoices, fright papers, ..., always look different, if they
   come from different companies. EDIFACT tries to fulfill all needs of
   commercial messages regardless of branch and origin. Of course those
   99% real world is neither simple nor complete.  Nevertheless its
   important for the top companies and their suppliers, you know those
   who can pay a mainframe and a pack of gurus, and in use since 1995.
<p>
   <tt>XML/EDI</> is trying to provide a simpler (KISS) format that can be
   translated from and into EDI, to allow smaller companies to avoid
   slaughtering forests and retyping stupid lines into a computer
   keyboard printed by other computers.
<p>
   This is <tt/NOT/ XML/EDI, its certainly not KISS. I would prefer
   a <tt>&lt;isbn/1565921879/</> for <tt>PIA+5+1565921879:IB</>, but
   not 
<tscreen><verb>

&lt;additional.product.id>
  &lt;product.id.function.qualifier coded="5"/Product identification/
  &lt;item.number.identification>
    &lt;item.number/1565921879/
    &lt;item.number.type coded="IB"/ISBN (International Standard Book Number)/
  &lt;/item.number.identification>
&lt;/additional.product.id>

</verb></tscreen>

<sect>
	About the beauty of plain text
<p>
   Standards should be based on standards. EDIFACT is based on ASCII and
   documentation is available from Premenos as plain text. Well they contain
   some funny characters. I took the freedom, to replace them with ASCII
   in this distribution to improve readability. I don't talk about human
   readability here. A friend at SAP joked that plain paper is the only
   platform independent format in that case. But I disliked to retype
   them. And plain text is more flexible, as I'm a programmer.

   I've included those modified documents, so others can be able to rebuild
   the tables also included in this distribution. You may need a Unix like
   system because of newline conventions. This current 0.1 version is not
   intended to become "installed", just run everything from this path.

<tscreen><verb>
	% perl bin/create_codes.pl
	% perl bin/create_composite.pl
	% perl bin/create_segment.pl
	% perl bin/edi2sgml.pl examples/nad_buyer.edi
</verb></tscreen>

   You can try other example files, and I really want to read how your
   EDI messages look like. Think about the <tt/O'Reilly/ invoice or the
   <tt/Dubbel:Test/ and you should catch the clue. I've tried to implement
   the <tt/UNA/ right, but this may need some additional debugging. Take
   a look at the difference between the edi.tst files from Frankfurt
   and the Springer message. The last one is using newline as a 9th
   character in UNA, so its nearly human readable.

<sect>
	Roadmap
<p>
   I plan to use even and odd numbering, so a 0.2 version will be
   more debugged, better documented and more looking like a module,
   while the 0.3 will contain the next features.
<p>
   I plan to add SDBM for faster access on the tables, and some other
   minor improvement. The next important step will be a reverse
   engineering of the document type definition of the original EDI
   standard draft. And of course a DTD for my Edi2SGML also, after
   I have looked at those _d.96b files more closely.
<sect>
	Download
<p>
   I just got a message from PAUSE that I can upload it to :

<tscreen><verb>
   	$CPAN/authors/id/K/KR/KRAEHE
</verb></tscreen>

   You may also get it from my homepage. Try something like:

<tscreen><verb>
	http://human.is-bremen.de/~kraehe/pub/Edi2SGML-?.?.tgz
</verb></tscreen>

   Be warned its a bit over a megabyte, as it includes the Premenos files
   also. The main script is only about 300 lines, so <tt/first dont panik/.

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