It helps to get the terminology right (it means people are more likely to
understand your question). You're using the terms "entity" and "tag" when
you mean "element".
You're dealing with dirty data, and data cleansing is always a rather
pragmatic affair. I don't think there's enough information in your source to
decide whether, in a case like
There is too much white<A></A>
space in this document
the author intended "whitespace" to be one word or two.
The only way you're going to be able to automate the data recovery is with
the help of a dictionary lookup, and even that will leave some ambiguities
like the one above.
How long is the text? My instinct would be to fix it by hand.
Michael Kay
http://www.saxonica.com/
-----Original Message-----
From: Trevor Nicholls [mailto:trevor(_at_)castingthevoid(_dot_)com]
Sent: 13 September 2005 03:51
To: xsl-list(_at_)lists(_dot_)mulberrytech(_dot_)com
Subject: [xsl] broken text surrounding an entity I want to drop?
Hi
My source XML file contains a myriad of <A id=something></A>
entities which
for the most part I wish to drop. I am using an identity
template plus the
following to do this:
-----
<!-- drop A tags which have no content -->
<xsl:template match="A">
<xsl:if test="* or text() or string(.)">
<xsl:copy>
<xsl:apply-templates select="@*|node()"/>
</xsl:copy>
</xsl:if>
</xsl:template>
-----
Unfortunately and unsurprisingly this is too naïve; it drops
the <a> tags OK
but leaves me with broken text. If I look at the input source
in a text
editor I can see that these tags are placed (arbitrarily so
far as I can
tell):
a. between newlines
b. after a newline and before text
c. after text and before a newline
d. between text strings
In cases a and b my output preserves the newlines and my
later transforms
which normalize whitespace are fine.
In cases c and d the tag may be in the middle of a word or at
either end of
a word. When at either end it is again not a problem as the output XML
contains a newline which is normalized acceptably. My
difficulty comes with
this kind of input:
-----
<Body>
<A ID="something"></A>
To delete a n<A ID="something"></A>
ode:</Body>
-----
Note that there are several thousand node types which can
potentially hold
this kind of text content, so writing a "Body" template to
manage it isn't
really feasible.
Ideally this input should become
-----
<Body>To delete a node:</Body>
-----
But of course the transform I'm using isn't doing this, I'm getting
-----
<Body>To delete a n
ode:</Body>
-----
My ham-fisted attempts to come up with templates which
(a) *reliably* identify this situation, and
(b) *don't* lead to my dropping huge screeds of wanted XML
are failing miserably. This doesn't seem like a terribly unusual
requirement, but I can't find an answer in the FAQ or my
current set of
books. I've also read the (otherwise helpful) "controlling whitespace"
articles by Bob DuCharme on xml.com.
Could somebody please point me towards the right technique to
use here?
Thanks
Trevor
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