On 18/03/2008, Justin Johansson <procode(_at_)adam(_dot_)com(_dot_)au> wrote:
As yet I haven't explored the facility afforded by the XSLT/XPath 2
collection function but the question posed by this thread spurs asking the
list:
Can the collection function be used as a general (file system) directory
scanner for non XML files given that XSLT 2 allows the loading of non XML
documents via the unparsed-text function?
Yes it can. Of course, you first need an implementation that supports
a URI scheme that can scan directories. Arguably, file is legitimate
for this, as browsers usually give you a directory listing if you
supply a file URI that ends with a directory name.
What Gestalt does it return a sequence of documents each containing a
single element, which has various information about that directory
entry. You could then call unparsed-text on the document-uri for that
particular entry.
It's not unexpected but my investigation found that the (Saxon) XSLT
processor complained about the text file (containing 'the quick brown fox')
was not well-formed.
<xsl:for-each select="collection( '?select=fox.txt')">
<xsl:value-of select="document-uri(.)"/>
</xsl:for-each>
Note that that URI is not a legitimate file URI (they may not take
query parameters). Saxon is not compliant in this respect (but even if
it were, there is no particular reason that this should work - the
collection() function is very loosely define.
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