[xsl] debugging source line numbers

Subject: [xsl] debugging source line numbers
From: S Woodside <sbwoodside@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: Wed, 22 Jan 2003 00:25:59 -0500
The FAQ is pretty thin on debugging tips, so I thought I'd share this that I came up with. the gurus on the list can probably improve it ;-)

I wanted to include a line number in the output that would take me to the line in the source XML that is being processed. It's tricky because the processor doesn't count close tags in the various number/count functions, but I came up with this xslt. In order to make it work you have to "pretty-print" your source document (like in BBEdit, format as "hierarchical") to have one node / tag text per line. This trick puts me within about +/- 20 lines of the right line, in my 2000 line source file.

<xsl:text>{{{</xsl:text>
<xsl:value-of select="(count(preceding::* | ancestor::*) * 2 * 9 div 10 + 1" />
<xsl:text>}}}</xsl:text>


I multiply the result of the count by 2 because every node has a close tag, thus doubling the number of lines. Except for the nodes that don't have close tags, so I multiply by a "constant" that should be roughly the ratio of nodes with close tags to nodes w/o close tags, 9/10 seemed to work after fiddling. I can't remember what the +1 does ;-)

simon
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www.simonwoodside.com


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