xslt / xpath question

[Brian Schroeder]

Hello Group,

I'm quite new to xml, xpath and xslt so I hope I've not overlooked a resource where the answer to my question is.

I'll try to give a short example, but in XML everything gets bloated really fast.

I've got the following situation:

=== a.xml ===
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
<n categorie="A">
<n categorie="B">
<n categorie="C"/>
</n>
<n categorie="D"/>
</n>
===

I want to transform this via xslt to the following

A
A->B
A->B->C
A->D

I came up with the following stylesheet

=== test.xsl ===
<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"> <xsl:template match="n"> <xsl:value-of select="ancestor::*[@categorie]/attribute::categorie"/>
-&gt; <xsl:value-of select="@categorie"/><xsl:text>
</xsl:text>
<xsl:apply-templates select="n"/>
</xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>
===

I guess, that "ancestor::*[@categorie]/attribute::categorie" should select all ancestor, having an attribute categorie, and from those nodes the attribute. My problem is, that only the first attribute "A" will result from this question. It seems, that I have to concatenate the values, but concat did not help.

I would really appreciate help and even more pointers to some online resource where I can learn about this kind of things. (So far, the best I found were the w3 recommendations. Most of the other stuff seemed quite useless.)

Thanks a lot,

Brian

 

[=?ISO-8859-15?Q?R=E9mi_Peyronnet?=]

-&gt; <xsl:value-of select="@categorie"/><xsl:text>

You should try this instead :

<xsl:for-each select="ancestor::*[@categorie]">
<xsl:value-of select="@categorie" /><xsl:text>-&gt;</xsl:text> </xsl:for-each>

Hth

 

[Brian Schroeder]

<xsl:value-of
select="ancestor::*[@categorie]/attribute::categorie"/> -&gt; <xsl:value-of select="@categorie"/><xsl:text>

You should try this instead :

<xsl:for-each select="ancestor::*[@categorie]">
<xsl:value-of select="@categorie" /><xsl:text>-&gt;</xsl:text> </xsl:for-each>

Hth

Indeed, you helped a lot. Seems like I have been searching in the wrong direction. Quite interesting that xslt needs a looping construct for joining a list of results. I would have thought something more data-centric more in the spirit of a data transformation language.

Thank you a lot,

Brian

 

[Ben Edgington]

I've got the following situation:

=== a.xml ===
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
<n categorie="A">
<n categorie="B">
<n categorie="C"/>
</n>
<n categorie="D"/>
</n>
===

I want to transform this via xslt to the following

A
A->B
A->B->C
A->D

Further to your other replies, rather than use the ancestor axis this kind of thing is generally done more naturally in XSLT with recursion.

This stylesheet (I know it doesn't look more elegant at first sight, but recursion is much nicer, honestly) produces the output you desire:

<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">

<xslutput method="text"/>

<xsl:template match="/">
<xsl:apply-templates select="n"/>
</xsl:template>

<xsl:template match="n">

<xslaram name="prefix"/>

<!-- update the prefix -->
<xsl:variable name="current">
<xsl:choose>
<xsl:when test="$prefix">
<xsl:value-of select="concat($prefix,'->',@categorie)"/> </xsl:when> <xsltherwise> <xsl:value-of select="@categorie"/> </xsltherwise> </xsl:choose> </xsl:variable>

<!-- output the new prefix -->
<xsl:value-of disable-output-escaping="yes" select="$current"/> <xsl:text> </xsl:text> <!-- a newline -->

<!-- recursively treat my child-nodes -->
<xsl:apply-templates select="n">
<xsl:with-param name="prefix">
<xsl:value-of select="$current"/>
</xsl:with-param>
</xsl:apply-templates>

</xsl:template>

</xsl:stylesheet>