Slightly modified xsl:copy-of

arcuza · November 15th, 2005, 07:17 AM

Hi!

I have a poor formatted html-file, which includes xml-nodes:

<DATADOCUMENT>
<body>
Hi there!<br>
My name is <b>Brad</b><br>
Here is a photo of me:<br>

<IMGOBJECT>
<FILENAME>photo.gif</FILENAME>
<STYLE>
<PARAM attribute="border">1px solid black</PARAM>
</STYLE>
</IMGOBJECT>

I am interested in XSLT programming!
</body>
</DATADOCUMENT>

Today, I'm using <xsl:copy-of select="DATADOCUMENT" /> to generate the HTML and manually rewrite the IMGOBJECT node to:

<img src="photo.gif" style="border: 1px solid black" />

So that the output becomes:

<body>
Hi there!<br>
My name is <b>Brad</b><br>
Here is a photo of me:<br>

<img src="photo.gif" style="border: 1px solid black" />

I am interested in XSLT programming!
</body>

I have no permission to rewrite the data provider, so I'm wodering how I can rewrite the XSLT to produce such output.

Please help me with this one.

Thanx in advance!

mhkay · November 15th, 2005, 08:03 AM

I'm slightly surprised that you can process this input using XSLT at all, because it seems not to be well-formed XML - the <br> tags are not closed. Let's assume that's a red herring and it is well-formed.

Then the answer to your question, how to do a "slightly modified copy", is a classic XSLT design pattern. First you write an identity template that copies everything unchanged:

<xsl:template match="*">
  <xsl:copy><xsl:copy-of select="@*"/><xsl:apply-templates/></xsl:copy>
</xsl:template>

then you override this with a template that modifies the elements you want to modify:

<xsl:template match="IMGOBJECT">
  <img src="{FILENAME}">
    <xsl:attribute name="style">
    <xsl:for-each select="STYLE/PARAM">
      <xsl:value-of select="concat(@attribute, ': ', .)"/>
    </xsl:for-each>
  </img>
</xsl:template>

(You may have to refine that but it illustrates the idea)

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

arcuza · November 15th, 2005, 08:38 AM

Thank you for your response.

I've tried to implement the code, but the data provided is much larger that I wrote in the example. And the transform is larger too.

However, this is a small piece of it:

<xsl:template match="ARTICLE">
<h1><xsl:apply-templates select="SUMMARY/TITLE/text()" mode="TAG_TEXT"/></h1>
<xsl:copy-of select="ELEMENTS/EDITORELEMENT/CONTENT/body"/>

</xsl:template>

If I use your <xsl:template match="ELEMENTS/EDITORELEMENT/CONTENT/*"> instead of the copy-of, I get an error (don't know which error though)

As you can see, they've used apply-templates for the title. Should I use that element?

arcuza · November 29th, 2005, 11:05 AM

I still haven't solved this problem, so I would really appreciate some help.

samuelhotson · April 10th, 2006, 04:21 AM

Sir,
I want to copy of one paragraph in another xml document.
how to get it.

i don't know whether using copy-of element or another element.

please help me.

thank you

samuel

mhkay · April 10th, 2006, 04:50 AM

If you want an exact copy, use xsl:copy-of

If you want a slightly modified copy, use the "modified identity transform" coding pattern. Write an identity template rule, and then override it with a template rule for the node you want to modify: see http://www.dpawson.co.uk/xsl/sect2/identity.html

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

mhkay · April 10th, 2006, 04:53 AM

P.S. You should have started a new thread. It's not a good idea to piggyback your question on an existing thread. It confuses readers, and it probably confused me, because I thought the subject line was relevant to your post and it seems it might not have been.

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