Re: [xsl] Running XSLT from Python

["Martin Honnen martin.honnen@xxxxxx" <xsl-list-service@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 18/01/2025 00:15, dvint@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
> First off, is anyone aware of a good way to merge a bunch of HTML
> techdoc pages into a single HTML so a PDF file can be generated with
> something like Prince or Weasyprint? I didn't find anything so I went
> down this the following path.
>
> For this effort I decided to see what coPilot would come up with for
> this task. It has been an interesting experiment for the proof of
> concept effort but now I need to get this production ready. I was also
> initially trying to avoid using XSLT as I'm the only one on the team
> that likes XLST and I was processing HTML that isn't well-formed.
>
> CoPilot created some Python using BeautifulSoup initially. My forst
> discovery is that Beautiful soup seems to be good for extracting
> content from the HTML, but I haven't found a way to process it like
> XSLT - maybe my mind has been warpped by XSL and tools like Omnimark
> and I just don't see the path. Anyway after trying to do the job with
> BeautifulSoup, I started looking for a way to integrate XSLT and
> coPilot took me to lxml/etree.
>
> With etree I was able to start developing the core part of the
> processing. Here is the flow of the geenral program:
> 1) Extract the navigation/TOC from one of the HTML files. I did this
> with BeautifulSoup because the HTML is not well-formed and I just
> needed to extract a single element.
> 2) I processed all the HTML and made a new copy in a subfolder. Using
> BeautifulSoup again, I extracted the body of the HTML pages. The body
> content is well-formed, the head content isn't.
> 3) Using the extracted TOC/navigation from step 1 to drive the
> processing, I created an XSLT that took that information and then
> started processing the extracted content. I've been able to get a
> single HTML file with all of the content. I haed to create unique IDs
> for all the sections and modify the cross references to change them
> from file references to links to anchors in the new file.
>
> All of that is working great until there are errors in the HTML. This
> HTML is generated with asciidoc. Occasionally, a writer will put
> quotes in an alt text for an image. This results in mangled image
> references that doesn't affect the visual rendering of the HTML, but
> XSLT trips up on this. Other bad asciidoc has created some other other
> mangled HTML which again isn't reported and doesn't affect the visual
> result. When the XSLT hits this I get reasoanble error messages that
> tell me what the problem is when I run in oXygen. I will get a message
> from Python that just tells me it failed with the filename.
>
> Can you confirm my understanding and that there isn't a way to get the
> XSLT error and xsl:message strings I've created? Maybe Saxon in oXygen
> is providing better information than lxml can?

Perhaps post minimal but complete samples of XML and XSLT and the
"reasonable error messages" that you get. I am afraid it is not clear
what you are doing in XSLT and how that fails in Python to produce a
reasonable error message. Currently it sounds like your input is not
well-formed and the XML parser fails, although that doesn't explain why
you would be able to output an xsl:message, unless you are using xsl:try
on fn:parse-xml and use xsl:message in xsl:catch.