Re: Dumping a variable

Hi Michael,

Dump has certain connotations to a programmer, forgive me for not
explaining it better.

Dump is a term we use, mainly for debugging, where the raw contents of
something are "dumped" or displayed to the screen.

My variable contains a nodeset. I want to view the nodeset it contains
as if it were XML, I don't want the nodeset to be transformed (this is
what I meant by parsed, sorry).

I tried using message and copy-of, however only the text and not the
nodeset were displayed.

Hi Marian,

Thanks for your invaluable advice, however variable-dump doesn't seem
to do anything!

Kind Regards,
Aidan



On Sun, 5 Dec 2004 18:49:48 -0800 (PST), Marian Olteanu
<mou_softwin@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> --- 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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