Subject: [xsl] dates, databases, and multiple file outputs From: Zack Brown <zbrown@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> Date: Tue, 2 Jan 2001 21:03:04 -0800 (PST) |
Hi, Thanks for all the help on my previous questions. Now I'm back with more... I'm using the XML::XSLT perl module under Linux, reading the XSL, XSLT, and XPath specs, and it looks as though I'll be able to accomplish almost everything I want to, with a couple exceptions. I'm hoping someone will show me how I'm wrong. 1) Dates. I have many input files, written by many different people across the world, with <tag date=""> information using many different date formats. More files are coming in, and it is not likely that these files will ever standardize on one particular date format for these attributes, just because of the way the files are created. I would like to translate these dates with the parser, so that the output always uses one particular standard form if the date is from the current year, and another particular standard form if the date is from any other year. There already exists a perl module to do those translations. As far as I can see, the way to do this in XSLT is to extend XSLT by adding a function to the parser, to perform the necessary parsing and translating of date formats. Is there any other way to do this without extending the parser? 2) Databases. I have many input files with tags containing text that includes names of people. These names are not wrapped in any tags, but sit within blocks of text. Many of these people are included in a Postgres database. What I want to do is to wrap all the names of people included in the database, with an <a href=""></a> tag to link them to index files containing more information about each of those people, but to do this I need to (a) access the database to get the list of names, (b) search for each of those names in the blocks of text, and (c) perform the transformation using the data from the database. Again, it looks to me like the only way to do this is to extend XSLT in the parser, by adding a function according to the rules of extending XSLT. 3) multiple file output. This is actually less important, because I can work around it by processing files twice. But multiple file output would be the most natural solution to the problem. The problem is that, given a news file in XML - i.e. a file containing news items dating back to some point in time - I want to create one output file for recent items, and one output file for older items. I don't see a way to do this without another XSLT function extension. So, if I'm not wrong about needing these function extensions, it seems like XML::XSLT may not be the best tool, and I should be looking for something that enables me to add those new functions as easily as possible. Have I missed something? Zack -- Zack Brown, Linuxcare, Inc. tel: 1-415-354-4878x284, fax: 1-415-701-7457 zbrown@xxxxxxxxxxxxx, http://www.linuxcare.com/ Linuxcare. Support for the revolution. XSL-List info and archive: http://www.mulberrytech.com/xsl/xsl-list
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