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Comment by mrcode007 | Hacker News Reader

Why would you write code for that? It’s just a few lines of XSLT!

XSLT is the perfect example of a technology that I might consider using today if I can get an LLM to do all of the work for me - see also jq and AppleScript which I use frequently now after avoiding them both for years.

I think you missed the point. People attempt to solve problems with LLMs that are problems only to them because they are unaware of existing solutions that have solved the these “problems” a long time ago. If you don’t know something exists, you can’t ask an LLM about it.

Asking "give me options for" is one of my go-to prompts for this kind of thing.

I just tried "Give me options for converting XML to JSON" and XSLT was 5th out of the 6 it gave me:

https://chat.openai.com/share/85aa3e93-f557-426c-b0ce-f3bce7...

possibly because it's easier to ask gpt-4 to write code to do it than to ask saxon to do it, because you can ask in english rather than xslt?

Does it do escaping in a reasonable way?

I played around with it a bit and it looks like you have to do some pretty gnarly things to get JSON string escaping to work in XSLT output - at least for the XSLT 1.0 version supported by most web browsers: https://chat.openai.com/share/4bc7922b-b1c2-411c-aef9-b41b0f...

Really? I don't know a lot about XML's advanced features so I thought XSLT was just a way to convert one XML document into another.

XSLT 3.0 defines an XML representation for JSON documents: https://www.w3.org/TR/xslt-30/#json

I'm not sure how fun it is to work with in practice, given that the XML representation is quite verbose.

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