Re: Identifing links in text

I need some way to identify a link like statement in a tagged piece
of text.

I know Joerg has already given you a solution, but I thought I would
offer a slightly smaller and simpler template that will do trick:

<xsl:template match="text()">
  <xsl:choose>
  <xsl:when test="contains(.,'http://')">
    <xsl:variable name="theURL"
select="concat('http://',substring-before(substring-after(.,'http://'),'
'))"/>
    <xsl:value-of select="substring-before(.,$theURL)"/>
    <a href="{$theURL}"><xsl:value-of select="$theURL"/></a>
    <xsl:value-of select="substring-after(.,$theURL)"/>
  </xsl:when>
  <xsl:otherwise>
    <xsl:value-of select="."/>
  </xsl:otherwise>
  </xsl:choose>
</xsl:template>

This checks to see if the text() content of the node contains 'http://'.
If it doesnt it just outputs the text as usual, but if it does then it
separates the string into three bits (before url, url, after url) and
outputs them with the url marked up into a link.

text manipulation is always hard with xslt but it can be good to mess
around with the string handling functions to get what you need

cheers
andrew

-----Original Message-----
From: Charles Knell [mailto:cknell@xxxxxxxxxx]
Sent: 04 June 2002 18:37
To: xsl-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re:  Identifing links in text

---- Raimund Kammering <Raimund.Kammering@xxxxxxx> wrote:

Hallo Everybody,

I need some way to identify a link like statement in a tagged piece
of
text. To make it more clear
here is a small sample the XML code migth look like:

<entry>
<keyword>Info</keyword>
<text>Some amount of plain text. But inside may appear a
statement like this: http://www.some-server.com and this shall
be shown as a usual (blue) link in a browser.</text>
<entry>

You've identified one of XSLT's weaknesses. You will most likely have
to write an extension function incorporating regular expression
processing
so you will be able to find and wrap the links with the <a href=""></a>
tags.

I believe that most processors provide a means of extending xsl's
built-in
functions. I know that you can write JavaScript extensions for MSXML
(because I've done it) and that Oracle's processor supports extension
functions written in Java (because I've researched, but not written
any).

It is only with the most recent version of Java (J2SE 1.4 ?) that a
standard
API for regular expression processing has been included. JavaScript has
very good regular expression capabilities, so if you are using MSXML,
you will probably not have too much trouble in writing the function.

If you're willing to "think outside the box" for this, you could easily
write a Perl script to pre-process this file before it gets sent to the
XSL processor.