Re: Rephrasing the problem [was Re: [xsl] Second try: Search and replace many strings that may not be present in target

[Wendell Piez <wapiez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

At 03:19 PM 5/20/2002, Greg wrote:
>   I figured it out just after sending...  I was calling 
> substring-before() and substring-after(), both of which convert a node to 
> a string.  An alternate (and more successful) way of doing what you want 
> is to use d-o-e and CDATA sections, though it makes many XSLT'ers blood 
> boil.  Remember that d-o-e is not a mandatory option for an XSLT engine.

It's not that it makes our blood boil (why should you care about the state 
of my cardiovascular system? :-) or even that it's not universally 
supported ... it's that it locks the application into one processing model, 
namely one in which the output is written to a file. If you ever use XSLT 
another way -- maybe pipelining transforms or browsing client-side in 
Mozilla -- it'll break.

Personally I find d-o-e far less troublesome when I can be assured that 
writing to a file will Always Always happen. But that's a big thing to 
assume, especially when helping a friendly stranger who may not yet have 
become perfectly familiar with all the ins-and-outs of XSLT minutiae, and 
why one needs to ask such obscure questions about the operational scenario.

I agree with Stuart that this is only an XSLTish problem at a stretch. 
Partly because it's designed to be side-effect-free and not depend on a 
particular processing order, XSLT has trouble with such notions as "the 
first time a string occurs in the document, in any <p> element". It can be 
done but it involves some pretty creative twisting-and-turning. As Greg is 
kindly showing. :->

Regards,
Wendell



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Wendell Piez                            mailto:wapiez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
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