Re: Putting characters in an element

This is a FAQ for both xslt 1 and 2, string oerations need strings as
input and get a string by taking the string value of any nodes supplied,
so all markup is lost on input to teh function, so clearly can't be
there on output.
li
You don't want to apply your regexp handler to the entire al node, just
its first child (if that is a text node)

so
<xsl:template match="al">
<xsl:variable name="first-string"
select="string(node()[1][self::text()]"/>
<xsl:variable name="rest" select="
 node()[1][not(self::text())]|node()[position()&gt;1]"/>

  <xsl:choose>
   <xsl:when test="matches($first-string,'\d.*')">
<li>
           <xsl:analyze-string select="." regex="^\d+\. ">
             <xsl:matching-substring>
               <nr><xsl:value-of select="."/></nr>
             </xsl:matching-substring>
             <xsl:non-matching-substring>
               <al><xsl:copy-of select="."/><xsl:copy-of select="$rest"/>
               </al>
             </xsl:non-matching-substring>
           </xsl:analyze-string>
       </li>
   </xsl:when>
   <xsl:otherwise>
<!-- you hardly _ever_ want to copy descendant::node() as you will get
   an exponention explosion in the size of the output, you just want
   child nodes, or as here the current node -->
       <xsl:copy-of select="."/>
   </xsl:otherwise>
   </xsl:choose>
</xsl:template>

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