I often work with tabular record data, either ascii or binary, in varying formats. Usually it's pretty simple to manage, but a bit tedious. I've been thinking of writing some code as a nice compromise between using XML for data interchange and interoperating with repetitive table formats. Once you have an XML descriptor for how the tabular data is laid out per record (row), you can write code generators to handle reading, writing, and manipulating that data. You could even have a XML header plus body data type setup to inline the data in a single file, and get to omit some of the XML verbosity. Does anyone know of any existing Open Source projects along these lines?