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Re: read/write in the same xml file

2003-06-10 12:17:12
At 06:11 AM 6/10/2003, you wrote:
what i need is to know how much characters i have write in the output file
each time, because i want to make a table of contents like this:
paragraph1  begining  end
---------     ------    ----
paragraph i  ------     ----

the begining and the end  position are exprimed in characters.

so for this reason i want to use an extern file named compte.xml
which i will use in my stylesheet every time for knowing the position.

Ah, well you could pass your external filename in as a parameter at runtime, instead of hardcoding it.

As far as knowing how many characters precede a given position (say, the start of a paragraph), are you speaking of characters irrespective of markup, or characters including markup? That is, given

<text>
 <p>Here's paragraph one.</p>
 <p>Here's paragraph two.</p>
</text>

Do you want the first p to yield 0 (or perhaps 2 if you count the whitespace after the <text> start tag) and the second, 21 (the length of the first p)? Or do you want an absolute character offset including the characters that appear in the start tags "<text>", "<p>" and so on?

If the first, it can be done in XSLT, although it's not necessarily the best tool for the job. If you mean the second, XSLT is certainly *not* the tool for the job since the XSLT source tree (created by parsing the file) does not keep track of tags.

Please clarify.

Cheers,
Wendell


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Wendell Piez                            
mailto:wapiez(_at_)mulberrytech(_dot_)com
Mulberry Technologies, Inc.                http://www.mulberrytech.com
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Suite 207                                          Phone: 301/315-9631
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