Why the pseudo-code?

My best guess is that he/she wants to do the Perl coding his/her self. If you just tell this person:

if ( you get escape sequence 'xyz' ) {
  then turn that into CRLF
}
[download]

Then he/she probably feels better about doing the hard work alone.

By data abstraction, he/she means to take the data from the latex file and munge it into HTML ( i assume )

Something like taking data from one form to another.

In essence, I think we've been asked to do the hard work by the poster, but the poster doen't think so :-)

--
Casey