RE: [xsl] Efficently transposing tokenized data

["Michael Kay" <mike@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I can suggest several approaches, but I don't guarantee that any of them
will perform better than doing the repeated (wasteful) tokenization.

(1) Do a preprocessing pass in which you split the data attribute into
multiple elements, then proceed "as normal".

(2) Do a preprocessing pass to compute a sequence of NxM strings in one big
sequence, then operate by indexing into this big sequence.

(3) Write a user-defined function that calls tokenize() but with
saxon:memo-function="yes", so that the results of tokenizing a node are
remembered when you tokenize the same node again.

I think I would probably go for (2) as it's simplest:

<xsl:variable name="bigArray" select="for $x in Line return
tokenize($x/@data, '\s')"/>
<xsl:variable name="columns" select="count(Line)"/>

<xsl:for-each select="1 to xs:integer(@samples)">
  <xsl:variable name="row" select="."/>
  <tr>
    <xsl:for-each select="1 to $columns">
      <xsl:variable name="col" select="."/>
      <td><xsl:value-of select="$bigArray[(:some function of $row and
$column, an exercise for the reader:)]

Michael Kay
http://www.saxonica.com/
  

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Beldaz Jalfrezi [mailto:beldazj@xxxxxxxxxxxx] 
> Sent: 04 November 2008 23:13
> To: xsl-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Subject: [xsl] Efficently transposing tokenized data
> 
> Hi XSL-List members,
> 
> I have been learning my way around XSLT (2.0) over the past 
> couple of weeks, principally using Saxon-B 9.1. I have an 
> immediate need to transform existing XML data, initially to 
> HTML. The XML contains, similar to SVG, space-tokenized 
> numerical data held within attributes. What I am having 
> trouble understanding is how to transform several nodes with 
> such data into individual columns of data.
> 
> The XML is like this:
> <MultiLine samples="5">
> <Line title="Line 1" data="0.1 0.4 0.6 0.4 0..8" /> <Line 
> title="Line 2" data="0.4 0.2 0.5 1.4 3.8" /> </MultiLine>
> 
> There can be any number of <Line> nodes (typically 3 or 4) 
> and the number of values (samples) in each data attribute for 
> each <Line> must match the samples attribute of the parent 
> <MultiLine> node. The number of samples can be very long, 
> typically several thousand. At present this is the data that 
> I am being supplied, so regardless of any shortcomings of the 
> structure (although suggestions for improvement are welcome) 
> I am stuck with it.
> 
> I want to transform such data into, e.g., HTML columns, like:
> <TABLE>
> <TR>
> <TH>Line 1</TH><TH>Line 2</TH>
> </TR>
> <TR>
> <TD>0.1</TD><TD>0.4</TD>
> </TR>
> <TR>
> <TD>0.4</TD><TD>0.2</TD>
> </TR>
> <TR>
> <TD>0.6</TD><TD>0.5</TD>
> </TR>
> ...
> </TABLE>
> 
> I have seen similar questions where people have wanted to 
> transpose HTML table data, but the problem here is that the 
> input data has to be tokenized. I can output the data 
> sequentially for each Line with a template such as:
>   <xsl:template match="Line">
> <TR><TH><xsl:value-of select="@title" /></TH><TR>
>       <xsl:for-each select="tokenize(@data,' ')">
>         <TR><TD>
>             <xsl:value-of select="position()" />
>           </TD></TR>
>             <xsl:value-of select="." />
>       </xsl:for-each>
>   </xsl:template>
> 
> To format the data as adjacent columns the only approach I 
> can think of is a for-each loop over the number of samples, 
> and in each case call index-at(tokenize(../Line[n]/@data, ' 
> '), position()) for each Line. But this looks horribly 
> inefficient, since I appear to be tokenizing every @data 
> attribute repeatedly, presumably giving complexity 
> O(count(Line)*samples^2). What would be far more preferable 
> is to tokenize all the lines, and then at each index obtain 
> the appropriate value from each sequence. But I have no idea 
> how to do that in XSLT.
> 
> I have spent at least a day trying to solve this conumdrum, 
> so if anyone has any suggestions I would be very grateful.
> 
> Kind regards,
> 
> Beldaz
> 
> 
> 
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