HTML code from XML to display using XSL

koenige · October 24th, 2008, 12:28 PM

Code:

<folder name="meta_information">
            <entry name="name">kings</entry>
            <entry name="description">&lt;!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/strict.dtd"&gt;
&lt;html&gt;&lt;head&gt;&lt;meta name="qrichtext" content="1" /&gt;&lt;style type="text/css"&gt;
p, li { white-space: pre-wrap; }
&lt;/style&gt;&lt;/head&gt;&lt;body style=" font-family:'MS Shell Dlg 2'; font-size:8.25pt; font-weight:400; font-style:normal;"&gt;
&lt;p style=" margin-top:0px; margin-bottom:0px; margin-left:0px; margin-right:0px; -qt-block-indent:0; text-indent:0px;"&gt;i want to know something abt this &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/body&gt;&lt;/html&gt;</entry>
        </folder>

description has the html code - which has the data (" I want to know something abt this").
when I get the <xsl:value-of> writes complete Html code.

Is there any way to do display only the data?

mhkay · October 24th, 2008, 12:46 PM

Unfortunately, by escaping all the markup, you've made the data very inaccessible. It's a shame to use XML this way - the whole point of the markup is to create useful structure which adds value to your information, and escaping it to hide the structure seems a really bad idea because it removes all this added value.

What you need to do here is to double-parse the content of the <entry> element. The first parse gives you the content of the <entry> element as text; you then need to feed this back into an XML (or HTML) parser to turn it into a tree, which you can navigate using XPath. At first sight it looks as if the content is well-formed XML, which means you can parse it in Saxon using the saxon:parse() extension function, or in another processor you could write your own extension function to take a string as input and return the parsed document tree.

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

koenige · October 24th, 2008, 12:58 PM

Thanks michael...

Its old xml document(different extension) which I renamed to xml .. which gets written from a software.

I will try to work on it .. this weekend .. and let u know ..

Have a great weekend.

cheers

koenige · October 27th, 2008, 04:38 AM

Hi, when I retrieve the Entry tag value, It gives a complete HTML file.

Code:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/strict.dtd"> <html><head><meta name="qrichtext" content="1" />
<style type="text/css"> p, li { white-space: pre-wrap; }
</style>
</head>

<body style=" font-family:'MS Shell Dlg 2'; font-size:8.25pt; font-weight:400; font-style:normal;">

<p style=" margin-top:0px; margin-bottom:0px; margin-left:0px; margin-right:0px; -qt-block-indent:0; text-indent:0px;">i want to know something abt this 
</p>

<p style=" margin-top:0px; margin-bottom:0px; margin-left:0px; margin-right:0px; -qt-block-indent:0; text-indent:0px;">lets see how this works .. 
</p>

<p style=" margin-top:0px; margin-bottom:0px; margin-left:0px; margin-right:0px; -qt-block-indent:0; text-indent:0px;">hopefully before monday
</p>
</body>
</html>

Now I have this complete text(HTML code) in a variable.

But I don't know how to use XPATH on this variable or HTML parser on this variable. I tried using for each on $variable but failed.

mhkay · October 27th, 2008, 04:44 AM

You haven't made clear whether the content of the <Entry> element contains this HTML as a tree of nodes, or as a string containing lexical HTML markup. If it contains lexical HTML markup then you will need to parse it before you can address into it using XPath.

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

mhkay · October 27th, 2008, 04:46 AM

Oh, sorry, I didn't realize your latest post was a follow-on to an existing thread. I think I answered the question in my previous response: because you have carefully escaped all the markup, you will need to parse the HTML a second time.

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

koenige · October 27th, 2008, 08:11 AM

Thank you michael for your reply and suggestion.

I made a workaround to get the string out of the htmlcode(string)
using substring(after & before). It works for my purpose as I need to get it from a <p> tag only.

Thanks.