[xsl] Re: Creating a padded sort key: easier from elt sequence or string?

[Yves Forkl <Y.Forkl@xxxxxx>]

Florent Georges <darkman_spam@xxxxxxxx> wrote:

>  Yves Forkl wrote:
>
>  >> - As my dotted sequence [like "3.11.A.9"] can be of variable
>  >>   length, I need to determine the number of sort statements
>  >>   dynamically.
>
>
>  As you said the numbers are < 1000, you can easily create a
>  normalized sort string:
>
>      ~/xslt/tests> cat sort-keys.xsl
>      <xsl:transform xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform";
>                     xmlns:xs="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema";
>                     xmlns:my="my:sort-keys.xsl"
>                     version="2.0">
>
>        <xsl:output method="text"/>
>
>        <xsl:function name="my:normalise-sort-keys" as="xs:string">
>          <xsl:param name="keys" as="element()+"/>
>          <xsl:value-of separator="." select="
>              for $s in $keys/string(.) return
>                if ( matches($s, '[0-9]+') ) then
>                  format-number(number($s), '000')
>                else
>                  $s
>            "/>
>        </xsl:function>
>
>        <xsl:template match="/">
>          <xsl:for-each select="root/elt">
>            <xsl:sort select="my:normalise-sort-keys(sort_key_elt)"/>
>            <xsl:value-of select="@id"/>
>            <xsl:text>&#10;</xsl:text>
>          </xsl:for-each>
>        </xsl:template>
>
>      </xsl:transform>
>
>  [...]
>
>  If you choose a string instead of several elements as your keys, you
>  can adapt this with tokenize().

Thank you very much for this, the solution looks really neat in XSLT
2.0. How to achieve the same result in XSLT 1.1 where user-defined
functions are not generally available? (Not speaking of
processor-specific capabilities.)

My XSLT 1.1 approach would probably consist of generating the same
normalised sort key strings by first constructing a RTF from my sort
key components, then padding their string interpretations as above by 
means of format-number before concatenating them and passing the result 
to the sort statement via its select attribute.

Does that make sense to you?

One thing I'm not sure about is which "idiom" could help to implement
this idea. Can you give me a hint on this? (You don't need to bother
writing the full code.)

  Yves