Man page 1 : sgml2xml

sgml2xml - convert SGML to XML

An SGML System Conforming to International Standard ISO 8879 Standard Generalized Markup Language

sgml2xml [ -Cehilprvx ] [ \fB-bencoding\fB ] [ \fB-ccatalog\fB ] [ \fB-Ddir\fB ] [ \fB-ffile\fB ] [ \fB-iname\fB ] [ \fB-wwarning\fB ] [ \fB-xxml-output-option\fB ] \fBsysid\fB...

sgml2xml converts SGML to XML. sgml2xml parses and validates the SGML document contained in sysid... and writes an equivalent XML document to the standard output. sgml2xml will warn about SGML constructs which have no XML equivalent.

• \fB-bencoding\fB
      Use encoding for output. The default is UTF-8. See nsgmls(1) for the possible encoding types.
• \fB-ccatalog\fB
      Use the catalog entry file file.
• -C
      The filename... arguments specify catalog files rather than the document entity. The document entity is specified by the first DOCUMENT entry in the catalog files.
• \fB-Ddirectory\fB
      Search directory for files specified in system identifiers. Multiple -D options are allowed. See nsgmls(1) for more information about this option.
• -e
      Describe open entities in error messages.
• \fB-ffile\fB
      Redirect errors to file. This is useful only for shells that do not support redirection of stderr.
• \fB-iname\fB
      Pretend that <!ENTITY % name "INCLUDE"> occurs at the start of the document type declaration subset in the SGML document entity. Since repeated definitions of an entity are ignored, this definition will take precedence over any other definitions of this entity in the document type declaration. Multiple -i options are allowed. If the SGML declaration replaces the reserved name INCLUDE then the new reserved name will be the replacement text of the entity. Typically the document type declaration will contain <!ENTITY % name "IGNORE"> and will use %name; in the status keyword specification of a marked section declaration. In this case the effect of the option will be to cause the marked section not to be ignored.
• -v
      Print the version number.
• \fB-wtype\fB
      Control warnings and errors according to type. See nsgmls(1) for the allowed values of type.
• \fB-xxml-output-option\fB
      Control the XML output, according to the value of xml_output_option as follows:

• no-nl-in-tag
      Don't use newlines inside start-tags. Usually sgml2xml uses newlines inside start-tags so as to reduce the probability of excessively long lines.
• id
      Output attribute declarations for ID attributes.
• notation
      Output declarations for notations.
• ndata
      Output declarations for external data entities. XML requires these to be NDATA. sgml2xml will warn about CDATA and SDATA external data entities and output them as NDATA entities.
• cdata
      Use XML CDATA sections for CDATA marked sections and for elements with a declared content of CDATA.
• comment
      Output comment declarations. Comment declarations in the DTD will not be output.
• lower
      Prefer lower case. Names that were subjected to upper-case substitution by SGML will be folded to lower case. This does not include reserved names; XML requires these to be in upper-case.
• pi-escape
      Escape &<> in the contents of processing instructions using the amp, lt and gt entities. This allows processing instructions to contain the string >?, but requires that applications handle the escapes.
• empty
      Use the <e/> syntax for element types e declared as EMPTY.
• attlist
      Output a ATTLIST declaration for every element specifying the type of all attributes. The default will always be #IMPLIED.

Multiple -x options are allowed.

James Clark <>

Conversion to DocBook and man page from original HTML documention by Steve Cheng <>.

nsgmls(1) /usr/share/doc/sp/sx.htm