Re: Converting XML to Fixed Length Text Data

aChild
anotherChild
yetAnotherChild

Solution: ( David's response )
<xsl:variable name="pad1" select="'       '"/>

<xsl:template match="child1">
<xsl:value-of select="."/>
<xsl:value-of select="substring($child1,string-length(.))"/>
</xsl:template>

and similarly the other children. (This doesn't do any error checking
for over-run, although that could be added.)

<<<<<Problem >>>>>>>>>>>>>
Problem:
Ladies and Gents, I need some guidance .  I searched the archives and found
some info but it was not sufficient. Basically I want to convert an xml file
to a fixed length data file.  The following is a sample of what I am trying
to do

Position of data for output file:
field: child1     start 1    length 7
field: att1       start 12   length 5
field: child2     start 27   length 12
field: child3     start 39   length 15
field: att2       start 56   length 3

Input:
<parent att1="foo">
<child1>aChild</child1>
<child2>anotherChild</child2>
<child3 att2="bar">yetAnotherChild</child3>
</parent>

Output:
aChild     foo            anotherChildyetAnotherChild  bar

Garvin Franco
garvin_franco@xxxxxxxxxxx

From: David Carlisle <davidc@xxxxxxxxx>
Reply-To: xsl-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
To: xsl-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re:  Converting XML to Fixed Length Text Data
Date: Mon, 25 Mar 2002 21:28:28 GMT

  David thanks for the response, but I am not quite clear on the solution.
  1) How does the attribute "att1" vs the element "child1" know where to
  position themselves on the output file? Shouldn't positional info be
  declared somewhere?
it is "declared" by the length of the string variable declared for each
field. If $child2 starts off as a string of 20 spaces and
you do
<xsl:value-of select="."/>
<xsl:value-of select="substring($child2,string-length(.))"/>
in the template for child2, then you will get the character data
of the element followed by enough spaces to pad the total to 20
characters (as long as the element had less than 20 characters)

   2) What about the element <xsl:text>, is this not required?
xsl:text is in favt never required, but here you don't need it as you
are not adding any literal text, only some spaces, which you can enter
with xsl:value-of.

So apart from the template I showed, you just need the settings of the
original strings to give the widths of each field, plus the template for
teh parent element needs to give a line break after each row, which you
can do with xsl:text (<xsl:text>

(<xsl:value-of select="'

David

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