RE: [xsl] How to extract data from an element and not from its children

[Wendell Piez <wapiez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

At 11:42 AM 12/6/2006, it was written:
> Would you be better off by re-designing your xml as:
> <text>
> <content>This text is some test </content>
> <content><emph>text</emph></content>
> <content>.</content>
> </text>
>
> Somehow that text within the xml doesn't seem correct - it looks
> orphaned, but I guess the experts can answer that..

Would one really want to have

<p><content>I have a paragraph, which contains 
</content><inline>inline markup</inline><content> inside it.</content></p>

On the contrary, XML's capability of modeling mixed content (the 
technical term for this sort of thing) is one of its greatest strengths.

As for the question, in XSLT terms, the XML markup:

<text>This text is some test <emph>text</emph>.</text>

is parsed into a model that looks like this:

element 'text'
  text node (value: 'This text is some test ')
  element 'emph'
    text node (value: 'text')
  text node (value: '.')

These XML document structures are traversed and queried in XSLT using 
not functions, but XPath expressions (XPath includes a function 
library, but also more).

In this case, given the 'text' element as context, the XPath 
expression "text()", short for "child::text()", will return both the 
text node children of the element (its first and third children). If 
you want the value of only the first of these, you can write 
"text()[1]". In XPath 1.0, simply "text()" will often get you that 
result, but since the rules have changed in XPath 2.0 it's perhaps 
best to learn not to rely on that.

How you use that depends on why you need the expression, which wasn't 
given in the question.

Cheers,
Wendell



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Wendell Piez                            mailto:wapiez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Mulberry Technologies, Inc.                http://www.mulberrytech.com
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