Re: Joining sibling tags

 ent-Length: 1089

   I'm using a very bad XML producer (*cough*Frame*cough*) that splits tags 
   when it finds one of its internal markers, resuling in stuff like this:

   <note>No</note><note>te:</note>


Well the tags aren't spilt (just duplicated) the element is split.
Especially when using xslt, it's good to preserve the distinction
between tags and elements (there's roughly twice as many tags, but xslt
has no access to them at all)

   How do I fix this globally for all tags in XSLT (ie combine contents of 
   neighbor tags that have the same name() )?. Can I do it as a first step 
   in a larger stylesheet or do I need to do it as a separate transformation?

You can do one of at least three methods:

1) use a separate stylesheet producing a normalised doc used as input to
   your main stylesheet
2) use the same templates as above but do it into a variable then use
   your processors node-set() extension function to apply your main
   templates to this normalised data, so you do it in one stylesheet but as
   two passes.
3) merge the merging process in with your transform, modifying teh
   templates for all affected elements to pull in siblings.


The templates for the merge in plan 1 or 2 would look something like (untested)

<xsl:template match="*">
<xsl:copy>
<xsl:copy-of select="@*"/>
<xsl:copy-of select="node()"/>
<xsl:call-template name="merge"/>
</xsl:copy>
</xsl:template>

<xsl:template name="merge"/>
 <xsl:param name="start" select="."/>
 <xsl:variable name="next" select="following-sibling::node()[1]"/>
 <xsl:if test="name($next)=name($start)">
 <xsl:for-each select="$next">
   <xsl:copy-of select="node()"/>
   <xsl:call-template name="merge"/>
 </xsl:for-each>
</xsl:template>

<xsl:template match="*[name()=name(preceding-sibling::node())"/>


Plan 3 would be similar but instead of doing this on * you'd do it in
each template and you'd replace the copy-of with applying
templates of some kind to do your main transformation.

David

-- 
http://www.dcarlisle.demon.co.uk/matthew

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