Retrieving text

brettz9 · August 31st, 2005, 12:50 AM

Hello,

I am fairly new to XSLT, so please bear with me.

I would like to be able to access the different portions of text, split up by other elements, within an element, in order to process the whole set of code sequentially.

For example, for

Code:

<par>The first part <embedded>comes before</embedded> the second part</par>

I would like to be able to retrieve "The first part" separately from "The second part" in order to be able to process the whole set sequentally (i.e., with "comes before" displayed in between the two strings). Any idea how I might do this?

thanks very much,
Brett

mhkay · August 31st, 2005, 03:19 AM

Sure, this is what the standard <xsl:apply-templates/> mechanism is designed to achieve:

<xsl:template match="par">
  <xsl:apply-templates/>
</xsl:template>

<xsl:template match="embedded">
  .. process the "embedded" element ..
</xsl:template>

<xsl:template match="text()">
  .. process a single text node ..
</xsl:template>

Usually you can use the default (built-in) template for text nodes, which just copies the text to the result tree; but you could do your own processing here if you prefer. You can also make the match condition more selective, e.g. match="par/text()" if you want a special rule to handle text nodes appearing directly within a par element.

Michael Kay
http://www.saxonica.com/
Author, XSLT Programmer's Reference and XPath 2.0 Programmer's Reference

brettz9 · August 31st, 2005, 10:16 AM

Dear Michael,

Thanks very much for your help...Just to clarify then...

Once the templates are applied (for the <par> element), it will first match the text preceding the <embedded> element, then process the <embedded> element, and then the text following the <embedded> element? If that is the case, then I am confused though why this XSLT book I have says:

Quote:

quote:"Be aware that the text of an element is the concatenation of all of its text nodes...if you want to provide spacing, line breaks, or other formatting, you need to use the text() node test against all the child nodes individually."

My question is then in what circumstances is text() applied individually, and when is it applied as a concatenation (whether of the text split up within a single element as the situation I originally described, or of concatenating together the text of multiple elements)?

On a related question, I am puzzled by why one even needs <xsl:for-each> since it seems that templates themselves iterate for a series of nodes sequentially as well...

thanks very, very much,
Brett