RE: [xsl] variable outside a for-each loop

[cknell@xxxxxxxxxx]

I'm having a hard time mapping your input to your output, but that being said, you are certainly not "stuck with" your proposed solution. What you appear to be stuck with is a hard time in giving up the procedural programming model mind-set and letting yourself operate in the XSLT functional programming model.

Your input contains a <informaltable> with two <row> child elements. Each row has two <entry> child elements. 

Your output has a <table> root element with two <entry> child elements.

That's a total of four <entry> elements in the input that somehow map to two <entry> elements in the output.

Please explain your production rule a little more clearly and you will surely get a solution.

-- 
Charles Knell
cknell@xxxxxxxxxx - email



-----Original Message-----
From:     Mathieu Malaterre <mathieu.malaterre@xxxxxxxxx>
Sent:     Thu, 20 Sep 2007 14:52:27 +0200
To:       xsl-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject:  [xsl] variable outside a for-each loop

Hello,

  this is clearly a question that has been asked many times on this
mailing list. But I simply cannot find anything smart to do for my
issue:

I have the following XML (docbook):

<informaltable>
  <row>
    <entry>
      <para>ABC</para>
    </entry>
    <entry>
      <para>DEF</para>
    </entry>
  </row>
  <row>
    <entry>
      <para/>
    </entry>
    <entry>
      <para>DEF 2</para>
    </entry>
  </row>
</informaltable>

My goal is to produce:

  <table>
    <entry one="ABC" two="DEF"/>
    <entry one="ABC" two="DEF 2"/>
  </table>


In C/C++ this is trivial at each step whenever row/entry is empty I
would use some local variable instead. But in XSL I am stuck with:

                <xsl:for-each select="row">
                  <xsl:variable name="one"
select="normalize-space(string-join(entry[1]/para,' '))"/>
                  <xsl:variable name="two"
select="normalize-space(string-join(entry[2]/para,' '))"/>
                  <entry one="{$one}" two="{$two}"/>
                </xsl:for-each>

Could someone please let me know what the correct solution is when using XSL ?

Thanks so much;

-- 
Mathieu