[xsl] Implementation Advice: Grouping Strings by Character Range in XSLT 2

Subject: [xsl] Implementation Advice: Grouping Strings by Character Range in XSLT 2
From: "Eliot Kimber ekimber@xxxxxxxxxxxx" <xsl-list-service@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Fri, 29 Apr 2016 15:03:54 -0000
Using XSLT 2, I have a requirement to take text and group contiguous
sequences of characters in markup according to a given character range the
characters are in. This is to support the application of range-specific
fonts to text in HTML.

I have a static definition of the character ranges for a given national
language and there shouldn't be any overlap between ranges. Given this
static definition, I'm generating XSLT code to operate on text nodes in
order to apply the range markup. The

For example, given the text string "abcdefg" where range "R1" is "cde" and
R2 is "g", the marked up result should be: abc<span
class="R1">cde</span>f<span class="R2">g</span>

My initial approach is to generate a template that takes the current
language and the text node and then applies templates in a
language-specific mode.

For each language I'm then generating a template to do the range matching.

My question, once I'm in a language-specific template for a text node,
what is the most efficient and/or easiest to code way to map the string to
ranges? Since I'm generating the code it doesn't have to be concise.

I'm thinking along the lines of using analyze-string to match on any of
the groups and then within the matching-substring clause have a choice
group to determine which range actually matched. But it feels like I'm
missing a more elegant way to determine the actual range.

Or maybe there's a clearer/simpler/more efficient way using tail recursion?

Thanks,

Eliot
----
Eliot Kimber, Owner
Contrext, LLC
http://contrext.com

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