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[XSL-LIST Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] XSLT is not an editor [ was: retaining entity d
 I had a similar problem, and while searching thru the archives ( since I was sure it must be a FAQ ) I found a thread with a good explanation by Ken Holman of why XSLT is NOT an EDITOR that helped me to think about these problems: http://www.stylusstudio.com/xmldev/200905/post60080.html http://www.stylusstudio.com/xmldev/200905/post60090.html The short version: * XSLT constructs a new output (write-only) document from an input (read-only) document. * XSLT does not process XML syntax -- it processes XML infoset trees. I suggest anyone who is confused about why you can't do this sort of thing in XSLT read that thread. See also: Amelia Lewis: http://www.stylusstudio.com/xmldev/200905/post10080.html Michael Kay: http://www.stylusstudio.com/xmldev/200905/post30080.html However, despite the fact that XSLT was not designed for this sort of job, it does get used as an editor or filter of xml documents, for lack of a better solution. ( Is XQuery with update intended to fill this gap ? ) [1] We have tried using a perl script that: grabs and saves everything before the root element, translates '&' character into some other character that doesn't occur in the document. ( settable on the command line ) calls out to do an xslt transform ( with Saxon or xsltproc ) pastes the saved prefix onto the output and does the reverse character translation back to '&' ( There may be some document cases where those steps would fail, but it works for our selection. ) [2] It's probably possible to do something similar to the above strictly in XSLT by reading the document as both XML and unparsed text. See Michesl Saxon's article on "Up-conversion using XSLT" : http://www.saxonica.com/papers/ideadb-1.1/mhk-paper.xml for input tips. Pasting the two output streams back together may also require some tricks. [ This is probably more complex that the perl solution above, but doing it all in XSLT may have workflow advantages in some cases. ] [3] Other have mentioned Andrew Welch's LexEv, which is an XMLReader that converts lexical events (syntax) into markup: http://ajwelch.blogspot.com/2008/08/lexev-xmlreader-converts-lexical-events.html This seems like a much cleaner way to handle the pass thru of syntax elements, but it requires explicitly encoding the inverse operation in the stylesheet. Some examples in: http://ajwelch.blogspot.com/2008/08/some-sample-templates-for-use-with.html [4] Before finding the simpler solution (#1 above) I considered writing a tool that would pass thru all of the xml unchanged except for fragments that matched an xpath expression -- those fragments would be processed thru an xslt stylesheet. Does anyone have any other tips on how to handle this sort of problem ? Are there any XML editors that can work in batch mode using XPath expressions ? Is XQuery with update intended to solve this problem ? ( and are there any good implementations for this use ? ) [ This may be a bit off topic for xsl-list, but it does seem to be a FAQ. ] -- Steve Majewski / UVA Alderman Library 
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