Re: [xsl] problem with transforming mixed content

["Wolfhart Totschnig wolfhart.totschnig@xxxxxxxxxxx" <xsl-list-service@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Thank you, Martin, for the explanation of the unwanted namespace 
declaration. I now know how to get rid of it.

And thank you, Michael, for the detailed explanation of possible 
approaches to the problem. Graydon's solution will work very well in my 
case, I think, since I can test for most error-producing conditions 
before applying the code and the probability of further errors seems 
sufficiently low in my context and for my purposes. But I am still 
curious: What would an approach of type (a) look like in my case? It 
seems to me that implementing this approach would again face the 
original problem: "turning the punctuation into markup" sounds like a 
description of the original problem.

Best,
Wolfhart


On 15.08.20 05:16, Michael Kay mike@xxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
> This problem comes up from time to time, and it's not easy.
>
> There seem to be three general approaches:
>
> (a) turn the punctuation into markup (e.g. turn ":" into <colon/>), 
> then do the manipulation on a tree of nodes
>
> (b) turn the markup into punctuation, then do the manipulation on the 
> resulting text.
>
> (c) do it all in one pass
>
> I see that Graydon's solution uses serialize() and parse-xml(), so 
> that's a modern approach to doing (b); while Dimitre's solution does 
> (c). In general I think the one-pass solution is often more 
> complicated and runs the risk of not being extensible when the problem 
> "evolves".
>
> One of the things that can cause the problem to "evolve" is error 
> handling: dealing with situations where the input isn't quite as 
> simple as in your example. For example, multiple colons, no colons, 
> colons that are there for a different purpose, etc,. You haven't 
> included any such cases in your requirements statement.
>
> If we ignore error handling, this example of the problem is simpler 
> than some because the ":" is always going to be in an immediate child 
> text node; we've seen other examples (like splitting a table) where we 
> need to look for conditions much deeper in the structure. This is 
> probably what makes a one-pass solution feasible in this case.
>
> Intuitively, my feeling is that (a) is the most rigorous approach, the 
> one that is least likely to fail because of unanticipated input 
> conditions. For example, Graydon's solution fails if the input 
> contains tags with upper-case names, or if it contains comments with a 
> colon in the text.
>
> Michael Kay
> Saxonica
>
>> On 15 Aug 2020, at 03:16, Wolfhart Totschnig 
>> wolfhart.totschnig@xxxxxxxxxxx 
>> <mailto:wolfhart.totschnig@xxxxxxxxxxx> 
>> <xsl-list-service@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx 
>> <mailto:xsl-list-service@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>> wrote:
>>
>> Dear list,
>>
>> I would like to ask for your help with the following mixed-content 
>> problem. I am receiving, from an external source, data in the 
>> following form:
>>
>> <title>THE TITLE OF THE BOOK WITH SOME <i>ITALICS</i> AND SOME MORE 
>> WORDS: THE SUBTITLE OF THE BOOK WITH SOME <i>ITALICS</i></title>
>>
>> What I would like to do is
>> 1) separate the title from the subtitle (i.e., divide the data at the 
>> colon) and put each in a separate element node;
>> 2) all the while maintaining the <i> markup;
>> 3) and perform certain string manipulations on all of the text nodes; 
>> for the purposes of this post, I will use the example of converting 
>> upper-case to lower-case.
>>
>> So the desired output is the following:
>>
>> <title>the title of the book with some <i>italics</i> and some more 
>> words</title>
>> <subtitle>the subtitle of the book with some <i>italics</i></subtitle>
>>
>> How can this be done?
>>
>> I know that I can perform string manipulations while maintaining the 
>> <i> markup with templates, i.e., <xsl:template match="text()"/> and 
>> <xsl:template match="i"/>. But in this case I do not know how to 
>> divide the data at the colon. And I know that I can divide the data 
>> at the colon with <xsl:value-of select="substring-before(.,': ')"/>, 
>> but then I loose the <i> markup. So I am at a loss.
>>
>> Thanks in advance for your help!
>> Wolfhart
>>
>
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