Overview

There are many reasons one might wish to convert TAP files to an XML format: conversion to an ASCII format for easy review (even from a text console), editing in ASCII and converting back to TAP (through XML2TAP), etc.

Online demo

XML format

• The first node after the root node (TAP3File) is DataInterChange.
• members of CHOICEs and SEQUENCEs are stored in nodes named after the variable names that provide access to them
• members of SEQUENCE_OFs are stored in nodes named after the contained type names
• INTEGERs and OCTET_STRINGs are stored as character data (BCDStrings are first converted to simple ASCII representation).

Usage

Usage: TAP2XML <options>

where options must include:
        -i   inputTapFileName
and optionally, any of:
        -V
                output version number
        -o
                outputXML (if missing, report goes to stdout)
        -h
                this help message

There is only one mandatory option, the input TAP file to process.
Here is how a sample 3.10 TAP file begins in its XML form:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<TAP3File mjVersion="3" mnVersion="10" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance">
    <DataInterChange>
        <transferBatch>
            <batchControlInfo>
                <sender>DEUD2</sender>
                <recipient>GRCPF</recipient>
                <fileSequenceNumber>10000</fileSequenceNumber>
                <fileCreationTimeStamp>
                    <localTimeStamp>20050907120940</localTimeStamp>
                    ...

The main node (TAP3File) stores the TAP version in the "mjVersion" and "mnVersion" attributes.