Re: [xsl] Perplexing Problem in Embedding Stylesheet

[Mike Brown <mike@xxxxxxxx>]

Sean Kelly wrote:
> This worked to some degree, however when I place the <xsl:value-of select>
> tags in seperate (and correctly nested) <p></p> tags, the data gets
> displayed as one line, and the <b></b> gets ignored so does <i></i> and
> linebreaks <br />. !!!!!!!

I might be assuming too much, but it appears that what you are thinking of
as "the data" is wrong, you aren't understanding what xsl:value-of really
does, and as David Carlisle stated, you need to realize that your XPath
expressions are relative to the node currently being processed, which
changes inside an xsl:for-each vs what it was elsewhere in the template.
I'll address the other 2 points.

Take this example:

<someData><p><i>hello</i> <b>world</b></p></someData>

The content of the "someData" element is not a string of character data
consisting of "<p><i>hello</i> <b>world</b></p>". Rather, the XML was
first parsed into this logical tree:

   element 'someData'
    |__element 'p'
        |__element 'i'
        |    |__Unicode character data 'hello'
        |__Unicode character data ' '
        |__element 'b'
             |__Unicode character data 'world'

Note that the markup - the tags - disappeared.

The info was fed to the XSLT processing application, probably as a series
of SAX events. The XSLT processor then exposed this info to you using the
XPath/XSLT data model, in which everything is addressable as a more useful
tree of nodes:

   element 'someData' w/string-value ('hello'+' '+'world')
    |
    |__element 'p' w/string-value ('hello'+' '+'world')
        |
        |__element node 'i' w/string-value ('hello')
        |    |
        |    |__text node w/string-value ('hello')
        |
        |__text node w/string-value ' '
        |
        |__element node 'b' w/string-value ('world')
             |
             |__text node w/string-value ('world')

All your XPath and XSLT operations use this tree. In your stylesheet when
you say <xsl:value-of select="someData"/> you are essentially directing
the XSLT processor to create in the result tree (which will hopefully be
serialized when it's finished) a text node with a string-value that is the
same as the string-value of all the "someData" element children of the
node currently being processed. If you're currently processing the parent
node of 'someData', then the value-of will effectively produce the
concatenation of the string-values of someData's descendant text nodes
(the definition of an element's string-value) -- 'hello world'.

If you use xsl:copy-of instead of xsl:value-of, the entire branch(es)
of nodes you select will be copied verbatim to the result tree. I
believe that's what you really want.

   - Mike
____________________________________________________________________________
  mike j. brown, fourthought.com  |  xml/xslt: http://skew.org/xml/
  denver/boulder, colorado, usa   |  personal: http://hyperreal.org/~mike/

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