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[XSL-LIST Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: creating tags around a string
 Listen to Jon. (Except when he says listen to me. Everything I say should be taken with salt. I have been known to crack jokes.) Since INX is an XML-based format, you can and should consider your handling of it to fall well within the range of garden-variety XML processing. Thus no "tag-writing" techniques are needed. You can and should go with the straight stuff. However, as Jon says that doesn't really solve your problem. That's because you are dealing with what we call an "upconversion", namely a transformation that goes "up hill", adding information to the source that was not there to begin with. That is, in order to go from <AUTHOR>Al Stick, Tom She, Dick Burg, and Harry Ward</AUTHOR> to something richer and more useful like <AUTHOR> <name><fname>Al</fname> <lname>Stick</lname></name>, <name><fname>Tom</fname> <lname>She</lname></name>, <name><fname>Dick</fname> <lname>Burg</lname></name>, and <name><fname>Harry</fname> <lname>Ward</lname></name> </AUTHOR> or even to something intermediate like <AUTHOR> <fname>Al</fname> <lname>Stick</lname>, <fname>Tom</fname> <lname>She</lname>, <fname>Dick</fname> <lname>Burg</lname>, and <fname>Harry</fname> <lname>Ward</lname> </AUTHOR> your process has to be able to do more than split up strings and wrap the substrings in tags (or more properly, insert them in elements). Ultimately, it has to be able to recognize what's a name, what's an "fname" and what's an "lname". These are non-trivial operations, which is why thinking up the realistic and all-too-common complex cases is an important part of this task. Jon suggested "Anne Marie Scott", which takes a form you'll see in almost any list of names. Then there's "Mishima Yukio" (Japanese like many other languages places the family name first) or "George Noel Gordon, Lord Byron" (not two names but one, and you'll have to specify how it should be tagged). XSLT 1.0 was not designed for upconversion, so you'll find even straightforward string-wrapping operations (which I see now was the essence of your original question) to be rather gnarly and difficult, albeit a common problem, which can therefore be handled using publicly-available code. XSLT 2.0 is much better at this, and since you already appear to be using XPath 2.0 constructs, I'd recommend you look further into the tokenize() function along with XSLT 2.0 regular expressions. But due to the deeper issues, which have to do not with the mechanics of string-wrapping but with semantic inferencing (getting the processor to discriminate between the parts of your complex cases and label them correctly), my feeling is that this is not wise even to attempt without a clear-eyed assessment of the difficulties and limitations. This is one of those cases where half a solution is often worse than none, since it creates expectations that are then bound to be disappointed. This is probably why Jon also urges that you push the problem back upstream. The people creating this data are in a much better position to tag it fully and correctly to begin with. Short of that, you may find a manual or semi-automated method is less painful than a broken automated process that only creates bad code, which must then be corrected by hand. Good luck, Wendell At 11:53 AM 4/18/2006, Jon wrote: On 4/18/06, TGolshan@xxxxxxxxxxxx <TGolshan@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Wendell, > > Thanks for the insight. Perhaps I need to explain myself a little more. ====================================================================== Wendell Piez mailto:wapiez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Mulberry Technologies, Inc. http://www.mulberrytech.com 17 West Jefferson Street Direct Phone: 301/315-9635 Suite 207 Phone: 301/315-9631 Rockville, MD 20850 Fax: 301/315-8285 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Mulberry Technologies: A Consultancy Specializing in SGML and XML ====================================================================== 
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