My, there have been a lot of questions about XSLT in the past 24 hrs...
admittedly most of them coming from me. In addition to my first
question (repeated below for clarity), I have a second one -- how do I
perform an XSLT transformation on multiple XML documents? Do I need to
perform a separate XSLT transformation on each one? The reason I ask is
b/c I am pulling my XML from a DB, so there may be more than one based
on the results from the query. If anyone can answer this, that'd be
great.
If not, perhaps you can help with this situation, which I believe will
probably plague just about any PHP programmer who will ever use XSLT
with PHP (or possibly any other language):
I am still unsure of the best way to mix PHP & [X]HTML together in an
XSLT stylesheet, because regardless of whether you specify the output
method as "text" or "xml", if you are using HTML tags they must be
well-formed, because Sablotron or expat (not sure which) will want the
XSLT stylesheet to be a well-formed document. Only, we often interrupt
our HTML code when using PHP, like this:
$output_to_browser = "<a href='index.php'>Go";
$output_to_browser .= "home</a>";
(of course, the output to the browser will by a hyperlink to index.php
that says "Go home".)
The above looks fine as PHP code, but if you try to manipulate the data
from an XSLT process in this fashion, you won't be able to use HTML
tags -- the greater-than and less-than symbols can't be used, since an
XSLT sheet is technically an XML document and these are not well-formed
tags. In the XSLT sheet, the above might look like:
<xsl:template match="location">
<a href="<xsl:value-of select="php_document" />">Go Home</a>
</xsl:template>
I thought that perhaps if I specified text as the output method, then
the greater-than and less-than signs wouldn't be parsed, so I could use
them as such:
<xsl:output method="text" />
<xsl:template match="location">
<xsl:text>
<a href="
</xsl:text>
<xsl:value-of select="php_document" />
<xsl:text>
">Go Home</a>
</xsl:text>
</xsl:template match="location">
See what's happening in the above? I thought I had "escaped" my <a>
tags by placing them within the <xsl:text> tags, but this is not so --
they are parsed, and the document is then interpreted as not being
well-formed.
So unless you want to do a straight XML-to-XML or XML-to-XHTML
transformation, OR you don't want to use ANY XML or XHTML tags in your
output document, you're kind of up a river. Unless someone on this list
can help me find a way to "escape" the HTML tags when creating PHP code.
And the only way I can think of doing it (which I still haven't tested,
but might have to use) is to use variables to represent the HTML tags so
that instead of
<a href=" and ">Go Home</a>
I could use
$astartag = "<a href='";
$aendtag = "'>Go Home</a>";
and then make the style sheet like this:
<xsl:output method="text" />
<xsl:template match="location">
<xsl:text>
$astartag
</xsl:text>
<xsl:value-of select="php_document" />
<xsl:text>
$aendtag
</xsl:text>
</xsl:template match="location">
That should work in theory. But it's incredibly crude.
What do you all think?
Erik
----
Erik Price
Web Developer Temp
Media Lab, H.H. Brown
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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