I am trying to denormalize formatting tags to transform:

<p>Here is some <bold>funky bold text with <italic>some of it also italic and perhaps <underline>underlined</underline>as well.</italic></bold></p>

to:

<p>Here is some <bold>funky bold text with </bold><bold><italic>some of it also italic and perhaps </italic></bold><bold><italic><underline>underlined</underline></italic></bold><bold><italic> well.</italic></bold></p>

The developer I'm working with wants to use string manipulation in .NET, but I'm thinking that XSL would be a more elegant solution.

Can anyone point me to a snippet of code that I could modify to get the desired effect?

I imagine someone has at some time needed to do something similar.

<xsl:template match="p">
  <xsl:copy>
    <!--handle all descendent text nodes individually-->
    <xsl:for-each select=".//text()">
      <xsl:call-template name="nest-ancestors">
        <xsl:with-param name="ancestors"
                        select="ancestor::*[ancestor::p]"/>
      </xsl:call-template>
    </xsl:for-each>
  </xsl:copy>
</xsl:template>

<!--reconstitute all of the ancestors in order-->
<xsl:template name="nest-ancestors">
  <xsl:param name="ancestors"/>
  <xsl:choose>
    <xsl:when test="$ancestors">
      <!--reconstitute the furthest of the ancestors-->
      <xsl:element name="{name($ancestors[1])}"
                   namespace="{namespace-uri($ancestors[1])}">
        <!--handle the rest of the ancstors-->
        <xsl:call-template name="nest-ancestors">
          <xsl:with-param name="ancestors" select="$ancestors[position()>1]"/>
        </xsl:call-template>
      </xsl:element>
    </xsl:when>
    <xsl:otherwise>
      <!--no more ancestors, so just copy the text node-->
      <xsl:copy/>
    </xsl:otherwise>
  </xsl:choose>
</xsl:template>

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