Tim Koschuetzki has a new tutorial posted today for CakePHP users out there - it's a method for transforming HTML content into Textile markup via the TextileHelper CakePHP helper.

For a current project of mine I had to find a way to decode html into textile markup. Why? Because we are using tinyMCE to process our textareas as wyciwyg editors, which generate HTML. However, we want all output controlled via textile to allow only the textile tags. Yes, we could do it with strip_tags(), but textile is much more elegant. Plus, it was a requirement by the client. Come on and find out how to detextile html.

Code is included to work on the transformation: detextile, processTag, detextile_process_glyphs and detextile_process_lists. An example is included as well, showing how to input a block of HTML content to be "textile-ized". The full code is available for cutting and pasting at the bottom of the post.

In this new post on Raphael Stolt's blog, he shows a way that you can take XML that holds SQL information (in his example INSERTs and DELETEs) and transforms them into SQL statements via XSL stylesheets.

A canny data import technique that emerged from praxis, while working on the import of data-centered XML resources, is utilitizing the abilities of Xslt. The generation of the required SQL statements actually only needs a simple Xsl stylesheet which might import for an PHP XSLTProcessor object or pass to the xsltproc command line tool. Both further described approaches are based upon the libxslt library and are assuming the use of XSLT 1.0.

He starts with an example bit of XML that has the XSL stylesheet at the top that will be used to transform the data and the information to perform inserts on several "partner" values in the XML below. Following this, he creates a PHP class to load the file and apply the stylesheet.

He also mentions a few different approaches to the same problem - XSLTProcessor class approach returning a single SQL string , xsltproc approach and the XSLTProcessor class approach using the ability to use PHP functions as XSLT functions.

Via a post over on digg.com today, there's an interesting little tool called HTML2PHP that could be useful in some certain situations.

The tool takes in whatever text input you have and performs operations on it. For example, paste in some HTML and hit the button to submit it and out the other side pops HTML formatted to echo in PHP (using print). There are other options on the tool - the ability to use printf and echo along with print, to add in newlines, and to add parenthesis (depending on your preference).

It's nothing overly impressive, but if you have a large block of HTML that you need to work with, you might check into it...