XSLT - apply one template to children and another to childern of children

Question

I've following structure of xml-file:

<root-element>
    <child1>
        Some text
    </child1>
    <child2>
        <grandchild>
            Some text
        </grandchild>
    </child2>
</root-element>

My aim is to generate html-output with the aid of a xslt-file. In doing so I want to apply a template to direct children of root element, which outputs the name of the tag as heading 1 and it contents enclosed in <p></p>. As to grandchildern, i want to use almost the same template, but to output their names as heading 2.

To make easier to understand what I want here is sample how HTML-Output would look like:

<html>
    <head>
        <title>Sample</title>
    </head>
    <body>
        <h1>Child1</h1>
        <p>Some text</p>

        <h1>Child2</h1>
        <h2>Grandchild</h2>
        <p>Some text</p>
    </body>
</html>

Now my attempt looks like this: http://pastebin.com/wKgSLbcE

But it doesn't work with <xsl:for-each select="./*"> and <xsl:for-each select="././*"> so I want to ask you for help.

Please edit your markup sample to show well-formed XML. Currently you have a start tag <child1> that is not closed at all so it is hard to tell how your input looks and is nested. Then consider to provide a sample of the corresponding HTML you want to create. — Martin Honnen

Tim C Tim C · Accepted Answer · 2013-01-09T11:10:22

It might be better to use template matching to achieve your aim, as this is much more in the spirit of XSLT.

For example, to match your 'child' elements, which I guess can be named anything, you could do something like this to match the child elements of the top level element

<xsl:template match="/*/*">
   <h1>
      <!-- Output name here -->
   </h1>
   <xsl:apply-templates />
</xsl:template>

Similarly to match grandchildren elements, use this

<xsl:template match="/*/*/*">

As for paragraphs, you would have a template matching the text nodes

<xsl:template match="text()">
   <p>
      <xsl:value-of select="normalize-space(.)" />
   </p>
</xsl:template>

Here is the full XSLT

<xsl:stylesheet version="2.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
   <xsl:output version="4.0" method="html" indent="no" encoding="UTF-8" use-character-maps="spaces" doctype-public="-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" doctype-system="http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd"/>

   <xsl:template match="/*">
      <html>
         <head>
            <title>Abschlussarbeit</title>
         </head>
         <body>
            <xsl:apply-templates />
         </body>
      </html>
   </xsl:template>

   <xsl:template match="/*/*">
      <h1>
         <xsl:value-of select="concat(translate(substring(name(), 1, 1), abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz, ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ), substring(name(), 2))"/>
      </h1>
      <xsl:apply-templates />
   </xsl:template>

   <xsl:template match="/*/*/*">
      <h2>
         <xsl:value-of select="concat(translate(substring(name(), 1, 1), abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz, ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ), substring(name(), 2))"/>
      </h2>
      <xsl:apply-templates />
   </xsl:template>

   <xsl:template match="text()">
      <p>
         <xsl:value-of select="normalize-space(.)" />
      </p>
   </xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>

When applied to your XML, the following is output

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
<html>
   <head>
      <META http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html">
      <title>Abschlussarbeit</title>
   </head>
   <body>
      <h1>child1</h1>
      <p>Some text</p>
      <h1>child2</h1>
      <h2>grandchild1</h2>
      <p>Some text</p>
   </body>
</html>

Note, if you are using XSLT 2.0, there is the xpath function "upper-case" you can use to convert the first character of your element name to upper case, rather than using the "translate" method which is used in XSLT 1.0

XSLT - apply one template to children and another to childern of children

1 Answers