[xsl] RE: br elements to root

["Aron Bock" <aronbock@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Jon, you're welcome FWIW, but in XSL's defense it *is* useful for a variety 
of declarative transforms that would be much, much harder to do in 
imperative fashion.  People more experienced than I may comment on this and, 
perhaps, provide an XSL solution where I could not, offhand.

However, I have a question: your original post had this input:

<p>
 <strong>
   strong:text(top) <br/>prefix
     <span style="a style">
       span a
       <span style="rgb();">
         span b<br/> text
       </span>
       text
      </span>
   strong:text(btm) <br/>suffix<br/>
 </strong>
 Root level text with<br/> tag.
</p>

To be transformed to this output:

<p>
 <strong>
   strong:text(top)
 </strong>
 <br/>
 <strong>
   prefix
   <span style="a style">
     span a
     <span style="rgb();">
       span b
     </span>
   </span>
 </strong>
 <br/>
 <strong>
   <span>
     <span>
      text
     </span>
     text
   </span>
   strong:text(btm)
 </strong>
 <br/>
 <strong>
   suffix
 </strong>
 <br/>
 <strong>
 </strong>
 Root level text with
 <br/>
  tag.
</p>

My question is, how did you derive the

>  <strong>
>  </strong>

near the end?

If going through this mentally I would expect to close </strong> after the 
penultimate <br/>, and then not open-close a <strong> because it's not 
readily apparent that it's needed.  Except, of course, if you were creating 
the output (above) in lexical fashion -- closing opening tags and opening 
closing tags.  (In which case you were already at the procedural solution, 
of course).


Regards,

--A

> From: jpk <jopaki@xxxxxxxxx>
> Sir,
>
> I want to thank you for your very helpful input.  I
> ended up doing just this - but in Java.  I don't think
> XSL has the "easy" ability to do such a task since its
> notion of an "element" is not the element itself
> rather itself AND its children along with its matching
> end tag.  I don't really find XSL very useful and am
> dismayed by it.
>
> Jon

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