RE: Dumping a variable

--- Michael Kay <mike@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> > 
> > I have a variable, I'd like to dump the XML contained in that variable
> > without applying any parsing (debugging purposes).
> 
> I assume "dump" means "display" rather than "delete"?
> 
> What do you mean by saying that the variable contains XML? In XSLT 1.0 a
> variable can contain a node-set, or it can contain a string. In both cases
> you can display the value of the variable using 
> 
> <xsl:message><xsl:copy-of select="$var"/></xsl:message>
> 
> and no parsing will be involved. In fact, there is no way to invoke XML
> parsing from standard XSLT, so I don't understand your concern.
> 
> Michael Kay
> http://www.saxonica.com/
> 
Note that the result of xsl:message differs from implementation to implementation. For example,
MSXML silently discards your xsl:message that has no terminate="yes", so this solution would work
only if you use it like: 
<xsl:message terminate="yes"><xsl:copy-of select="$var"/></xsl:message>
This thing is stated at
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/xmlsdk/html/xmrefxslmessageelement.asp
:
<<Attributes
terminate 
Specifies whether the transformation should terminate upon executing this instruction. This
attribute can have one of two string values: "yes" or "no". When the terminate attribute is set to
"yes", the content of the element is displayed as the part of the system-level error message, and
the transformation terminates. When it is set to "no", the transformation proceeds, ignoring the
error message. The default value is "no". >>

Another solution: dump your variable in the output file (if you output XML, not text):
<variable-dump name="$var1"><xsl:copy-of select="$var1"/></variable-dump>
...
<variable-dump name="$var2"><xsl:copy-of select="$var2"/></variable-dump>

so later you can look into the output file and look for variable-dump elements.
I recomend you to use this method conditionally: set a parameter of your XSLT file (i.e.: debug)
and use like this:
<xsl:if test="$debug">
  <variable-dump name="$var1"><xsl:copy-of select="$var1"/></variable-dump>
</xsl:if>
This way, you can switch easily between debug mode and production mode.



=====
Marian
http://www.utdallas.edu/~mgo031000/


	
		
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