I'm a newb.... I think I'm doing something wrong..

aaronmuslim · March 18th, 2008, 11:41 AM

I'm trying to use an XSL stylesheet to transform some XML data that came from a form. The application that exported the form data to xml has set up its elements with a character that I can't identify or a line break. Either way I can't seem to reference any of the elements through XPath because of this.

The document basically looks like this:

Code:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<form1
><elementNumber1
/><elementNumber2
>choose</elementNumber2
><element3
/>
</form1
>

can someone help! tell me what I'm not getting here... lol

Martin Honnen · March 18th, 2008, 11:46 AM

What you have posted is not well-formed XML as the root element name in the start tag is 'form1' but the end tag has just 'form'.
You can't process mal-formed XML.

aaronmuslim · March 18th, 2008, 11:50 AM

ooops! you are correct buddy. thanks for pointing out the obvious. I just typed that in 2 seconds without care. But its fixed now and maybe you can focus on the problem at hand ....thanks...

mhkay · March 18th, 2008, 11:52 AM

There's nothing wrong with having a newline in a start or end tag after the element name - it might seem badly formatted, but it's legal.

If it's some character that the XML parser is rejecting then you need to find out what character it is - look at the document in a hex editor.

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

aaronmuslim · March 18th, 2008, 11:55 AM

I know that its legal, I'm not questioning the legality of the document or the fact that its well formed. I think your idea of a hex editor has helped me ...The xml parser isn't rejecting it, I just can't reference any of the element names directly in my XSL and I don't know if thats due to a unknown character or a line break in the element names. I was kind of hoping someone on here would have seen this exact style of xml formatting in thier previous experiences and would be able to identify it.

Martin Honnen · March 18th, 2008, 11:59 AM

I am not sure how we can help further, the posted snippet is now well-formed after the correction. The web forum however does not allow us the check the characters in your file, you would need to upload that file somewhere to a web server and post the URL to allow others to check the XML.
You could also load the XML document in a browser like Internet Explorer or Firefox, they will parse the XML and should give you an indication about wrong characters.

mhkay · March 18th, 2008, 12:01 PM

If the document is being parsed OK then the odd formatting isn't the source of your problems. Show us the XPath expression that's giving unexpected results.

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

aaronmuslim · March 18th, 2008, 12:13 PM

<xsl:template match="/form1">

- doesn't recognize it.

so I guess now I am supposed to think that there is a character after the 1 thats is being displayed in the xml code as a line break? I'm going to put the file up and post a url in my next posting as sugguested....

aaronmuslim · March 18th, 2008, 12:34 PM

Here is the actual document I'm trying to transform....

http://www.geocities.com/aem80211/jss.xml

I really appreciate everyone1 here taking the time to help a newb....

Martin Honnen · March 18th, 2008, 12:48 PM

I can process that XML document just fine, here is an XSLT 1.0 stylesheet that I run with Saxon 6.5:

Code:

<xsl:stylesheet
  xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"
  version="1.0">

  <xsl:output method="text"/>

  <xsl:template match="/form1">
    <xsl:for-each select="*[normalize-space()]">
      <xsl:value-of select="concat('&quot;', name(), '&quot;: ', ., '#10;')"/>
    </xsl:for-each>
  </xsl:template>

</xsl:stylesheet>

Result:

Code:

"SchoolState": CO
"P1Grade": ?
"P1Shirt": ?
"P1Gender": ?
"P1Ethnicity": Choose
"P2Grade": ?
"P2Shirt": ?
"P2Gender": ?
"P2Ethnicity": Choose
"P3Grade": ?
"P3Shirt": ?
"P3Gender": ?
"P3Ethnicity": Choose
"P4Grade": ?
"P4Shirt": ?
"P4Gender": ?
"P4Ethnicity": Choose
"CoachShirt": ?
"CoachGender": ?
"CoachEthnicity": Choose

So those element names do not have any strange characters in them.