I have an xml file that is organized like a book. The root tag is <book> and it has multiple <chapter> tags with multiple <section> tags, some nested, within each chapter. Each section has multiple tables, lists, paragraphs, etc.

What I'm trying to do is use xslt to parse this xml file and output it as html and eventually pdf, keeping basically the same structure that exists within the xml source file. The problem I'm having is that I don't know how to match a single chapter, section, table, etc. without also matching all of the others. For example, if I want to match on the first table in the xml source file, I also end up matching all of the others and they get merged all together in the output. I want to keep them separate from each other.

So my question is, how do you keep the xml elements separate when their match is exactly the same: <xsl:template match="book/chapter/section">, <xsl:template match="book/chapter/section/table">, etc.?

I know that this must be a trivial issue for experienced coders, but I'm not finding the answer. If anyone can point me in the right direction I would appreciate it.

Thank you,
Josh

You should use position value.

For example:

to get the first <section> under <chapter>, use <xsl:template match="book/chapter/section[1]">
and to get the second <table> under <section>, use <xsl:template match="book/chapter/section/table[2]">

Try this.

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Rummy

Please note that "tag" and "element" are not synonyms - an element usually has two tags, a start tag and an end tag. Getting the terminology right avoids misunderstandings.

I'm not sure exactly what your problem is. If you want to apply different processing to different chapters, you can distinguish them by a predicate, for example match="chapter[1]" or match="chapter[title='Introduction']". If that's not your issue, it might help if you show some of your code so we can see where you've gone wrong.

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

Thanks to both of you for your answers. I think I'm on the right track now. In a few hours this afternoon I wrote an xslt style sheet converting my xml document to xhtml. It just took me a few days to wrap my head around how to put all of the xslt together. Now I need to write xslt to transform it to PDF output. So far so good.

By the way, the XSLT Programmer's Reference was helpful. The example of how the XML specification was transformed was particularly useful.

Thanks again,
Josh