RE: [xsl] Random indexing into a comma seperated list

[Dan Diebolt <dandiebolt@xxxxxxxxx>]

Thanks. I will take a look at the solution.

>Doesn't embedding comma-separated lists into your elements defeat the
>purpose of ML?

I don't control the format of the incoming XML. BTW, this problem 
occurs in abundance with SVG.

>If I had to do it, I would define a template that could "return" a specified
>element in the list and call that template each time I needed to "randomly"
>access an element. This is hardly efficient. 

It is the inefficiency and verbosity I was hoping to avoid while staying
portable. I was hoping someone might have a breakthrough thought
like the Muenchian technique for grouping. But you nailed the problem
on its head - I have islands of non-XML data I need to address/index
into and I may be forced to recurse for each item. If anyone
else has a thought, I would appreciate it because my application has
a fair amount of these comma separated lists. Before closing out this
inquiry I would like to get a few opinions.

One thought I am considering is doing the tranformation in two steps.
First step would be to roll all of the csv items into <i> tags and in
the second pass perform my custom processing on purified XML:

<tag>1,2,$19.95,4,five</tag>

<tag><i>1</i><i>2</i><i>$19.95</i><i>4</i><i>five</i></tag>

The only hitch here is that there is no DTD or schema and I don't
know all of the tag names a priori without a pretty substantial 
analysis of the instance documents. What do the experts say?

Regards,

Dan

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