Way back in Legato Developers Corner #6, we used the WordParse function to pull apart simple strings, and parse through some simple HTML data. While WordParse is a great tool for doing simple things like that, what happens if you want to parse through an entire file, and extract information from it? To do that, you’ll need to use a more powerful SGML parser. This blog post is intended to be an introduction to our SGML parsing and support object using a real-world example.

One of the most obvious statements you can make is you cannot open or modify a file if you cannot get it’s location. If the location of a file cannot be defined, then you can’t do anything to it. Legato provides several very useful functions to break down a file path, add paths together, and just generally improve how you deal with paths.