CDATA and XPATH XSLT v1

poliver1350 · November 8th, 2010, 09:49 AM

Hi all, I am in need of help and any help greatly received and appreciated.

I have a XML document

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<root>
<header>sometext</header>
<letter><![CDATA[<?xml version="1.0"?><root><book title="1234"</root>]]></letter>
</root>

I wish to read the CDATA book element into a node set using XSLT so I can then continue to use normal XPATH queries but I can not find a solution either through trial and error or by researching online.

Thank you all in advance for any help and suggestions

Martin Honnen · November 8th, 2010, 09:52 AM

Well whether it is XSLT/XPath 1.0 or 2.0, the CDATA section results in a text node with plain text and there is no function to parse such text as XML, unless your XSLT processor provides an extension function to do that (or someone has written a parser in pure XSLT where David Carlisle has done that in XSLT 2.0)).
So which XSLT processor do you use?

Note also that "<root><book title="1234"</root>" is not well-formed (as the book tag is not closed) so even with an extension function parsing as XML is not possible.

poliver1350 · November 8th, 2010, 12:24 PM

HI Martin, thank you for your quick reply, this is as I suspected and feared, I am using the Java Xalan processor

Martin Honnen · November 8th, 2010, 01:02 PM

I don't see anything suitable on http://xml.apache.org/xalan-j/extensionslib.html. As you use Java you could switch to XSLT 2.0 with Saxon 9 and then either use the built-in extension function http://www.saxonica.com/documentatio...ions/parse.xml (only available in the open source 9.1 release or in the commercial 9.2/9.3 releases) or you could try http://code.google.com/p/web-xslt/so...runk/htmlparse which is a pure XSLT 2.0 implementation of an HTML parser but should be able to deal with XML as well.
If you want to stick with Xalan then consider to ask on the Xalan user mailing list for help in writing an extension function that takes a string of XML and returns a data type suitable to be used by Xalan as a node-set.