This class of problems is quite tricky. The most general approach is
to flatten the first hierarchy, so everything is reduced to milestones,
and then use positional grouping to construct the new hierarchy from the
flat structure.
If you have access to a good library, try looking for Michael Jackson's
1970s books on Jackson Structured Programming, where he tackles this
class of problem under the heading of "boundary conflict". The
vocabulary is different - it's all about sequential processing of
hierarchic files on magnetic tape - but the logic is the same, and it's
the most systematic treatment I've seen. Essentially he shows that if
the hierarchic structure of the input and output are in some sense
congruent, then a single tree walk over the input can handle the
problem, but if they aren't then you can devise a new intermediate
hierarchy - perhaps very flat - that is congruent with both the input
and the output, so one tree walk will get you from the input to the
intermediate tree, and a second tree walk will get you from the
intermediate tree to the output. (This is assuming of course that you
don't have an ordering conflict, which is true in your case).
Your example doesn't need the full generality of this approach, because
the start/end milestones are always siblings and are always matched in
the same paragraph, but your discussion indicates that you might want to
tackle things that go beyond this example.
Michael Kay
Saxonica
On 14/10/2010 8:05 AM, Josef Schneeberger wrote:
Hi everybody,
I am new to this list and apologize, if my question is an FAQ. I scanned
the archives, but did not find a solution. The question arises in a TEI
project where we have to switch from a chapter hierarchy to a page
oriented form. The XSLT is done in multiple steps (a cocoon pipeline)
and I use Saxon9.
Here is a simplified example of an infile:
<root>
<p>text<span order="start"/>text<span order="end"/> text</p>
<p>text<span order="start"/>text<span order="end"/> text
text<span order="start"/>text<span order="end"/> text</p>
<p>text text text<span order="start"/>text<span order="end"/></p>
<p><span order="start"/>text<span order="end"/> text text text</p>
</root>
which should result in the following output:
<root>
<p>text<span>text</span> text</p>
<p>text<span>text</span> text
text<span>text</span> text</p>
<p>text text text<span>text</span></p>
<p><span>text</span> text text text</p>
</root>
There my be an arbitrary number of<span order="begin"/> (and
corresponding end milestone tags) in a p element. Furthermore, any
"text" node may again contain markup which should be preserved in the
output. I tried various approaches but I failed. Here is one of my
attempts using sibling recursion ...
<xsl:stylesheet version="2.0"
xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
<xsl:template match="/">
<xsl:apply-templates/>
</xsl:template>
<xsl:template match="root">
<root><xsl:apply-templates/></root>
</xsl:template>
<xsl:template match="p">
<p>
<xsl:apply-templates select="child::node()" mode="procp"/>
</p>
</xsl:template>
<xsl:template match="span[(_at_)order='start']" mode="procp">
<span>
<xsl:apply-templates
select="following-sibling::node()[1][not(self::span)]"
mode="procp"/>
</span>
<xsl:apply-templates select="following-sibling::node()[1]"/>
</xsl:template>
<xsl:template match="node()" mode="procp">
<xsl:copy-of select="."/>
<xsl:apply-templates
select="following-sibling::node()[1][not(self::span)]"
mode="procp"/>
</xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>
Any help would be greatly appreciated. Josef
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