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Re: [xsl] Matching string values across element boundaries

2013-04-08 13:58:16
David,

Can you give a more complex example, how "variable in structure" those 
citations may be. This may also shed some light on the kind of processing you 
want to do. Changing tags to characters (why are you using ASCII instead of 
some high Unicode character from the private use area?) and then back to tags 
seems not a very interesting thing…

- Michael

Am 08.04.2013 um 20:15 schrieb David Sewell <dsewell(_at_)virginia(_dot_)edu>:

I expect this has been discussed here before, but I can't locate any relevant 
discussion, so here goes.

We have input data with many unmarked short-title citations that look like 
this:

  Sprague, <hi rend="italic">Braintree Families</hi>

We want to wrap them inside another element, in our case a <ref> to the 
bibliographic expansion. We have a venerable chain of XSLT 2.0 transforms 
that 
does this, and pretty well, by preprocessing the data to convert all those 
<hi> 
tags into a pair of unique ASCII characters, so that we can do 
string-matching 
operations within a single text node that now includes something like

  Sprague, ¢Braintree Families¥

which is easy to handle with xsl:analyze-string. then once we've wrapped all 
the 
strings we need to, we post-process with xsl:analyze-string to put the <hi> 
elements back in.

In practice, given the proper regexes, this works quite well and provides the 
desired output, but I always feel a bit guilty about the hackishness of the 
approach. Given that the citations are quite variable in structure (usually 
but 
not always containing <hi> elements, with various combinations of text nodes 
at 
start and end), I've never come up with a good general-purpose way to operate 
purely on elements and text nodes without the convert-tags-to-characters 
step. 
Is there one (or more)?

David S.




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