Re: types of input...

Hi Sam,

> I know that xslt can output XML, HTML, or TEXT.  I also
> thought that I read somewhere that it can take TEXT as input.
> Is that correct or am I mistaken?

It depends how you look at it. Technically, XSLT takes a node tree as
input. That node tree is most commonly and most easily generated by
parsing an XML document, so we'd normally say that XSLT takes an XML
document as input.

However a node tree *can* be generated in other ways, for example from
a comma-delimited file. You usually have to write something special to
get a non-XML document to be seen as a node tree, but there's nothing
to stop you from doing that.

As far as accessing documents from within a stylesheet is concerned,
in XSLT 1.0, the document() function accesses an XML document and
creates a node tree from it. In XSLT 2.0, the unparsed-text() function
opens any text file and creates a string from it; you could use this
to create a stylesheet that processes a text file, and with XSLT 2.0's
regular expression support you could do quite a lot with that.

Cheers,

Jeni

---
Jeni Tennison
http://www.jenitennison.com/


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